On Contractors
This past month has been the first time that I’ve been in a position to use contractors to help with projects. It has been an illuminating experience. First and most blindsided-by-hindsight, it’s harder than I thought it would be. It’s hard to give up control. It’s hard to write good specifications. It’s hard to align the output with the end goal of the project.
Most of all, it’s just yet another task we can perform that takes practice and patience. There are a few things I would do differently next time.
- Get 10x as much capacity lined up as you think you’ll need, especially if they have full time jobs. Some will flake out, some will get busy at work, some will go on vacation, some will suck, and the remaining fraction will be great, but too few to get you a healthy amount of sleep once the shit hits the fan.
- If you’re acting as architect, and paying others to do comparative grunt work – building forms in a framework, applying CSS styles, etc – do a complete proof of concept up front. Develop one instance of everything you’ll need, even if it seems trivial. That way you can rest easy when you give someone the output of a code scaffolding script that you won’t need them to re-do it all next week.
- Come on, you can write better documentation than that. Make sure the documentation you send out has everything: SVN credentials, instructions for logging in, direct links to development tools – e.g. the exact Eclipse update site you found rather than asking them to google for it – everything you can think of. Put it in a Wiki and make links from your tickets to the wiki so you don’t end up having to update a bunch of tickets with the same change.
One other handy tip is that Craigslist posts hang around for a while, and a lot of developers have figured out how to efficiently trawl them. So, if you think you’re going to have a reasonable amount of outsourceable work, but don’t know what it is yet, post anyway looking for general skillsets. Is that misleading? I think as long as you don’t promise immediate work, or misrepresent the state of your projects, it’s not misleading. It’s a way to network with contractors passively while planning for the next big project.
