picandnix:
My humble and personal recommendation, and in one word... Lat9.
picandnix:
Yeah that's not cool is it.
Well as I say, my choice is Lat9, she was impeccable.
Nods in agreement.. Lat9 rocks!!! She is all that and a BIG OLD bag o' chips!!!:laugh: Plus I have a real soft spot for chick developers.. :smile: In my day job, there are SO FEW of us chicks in IT, let alone developers.. So she gets EXTRA gravy in my book!!
To answer the OP, while I know that oDesk and Freelancer (formerly vWorker) do have some very talented and honorable developers (some even from this forum), my experience with both has been hit and miss.
I had ONE dev on vWorker who created two small custom forms for me without a hitch, and I would hire him again for SMALL jobs, but IMHO he doesn't have the kind of skill at the level that Lat9 has so I could never use him for anything more than small jobs.
However, I also had a terrible experience with a developer on vWorker who DID NOT read my spec in full and when he realized the full scope of the project, he tried to deliver sub-standard code and claimed that everything else was out of scope. When I rejected his half-a$$ed code, and insisted that he deliver code to match my spec, he tried to back out of the work because he felt that he underbid the job. This all ended in a very NASTY and protracted vWorker mediation.. (fortunately vWorker escrows funds so devs do not get paid until the dev manager approves the work and releases the funds) He tried to extricate himself from the job first by saying that I failed to provide the full scope of the work, then later he claimed that I didn't fill out the vWorker scope form correctly.. vWorker's mediator rejected both of his claims, and he was forced to finish the work or forfeit the escrowed funds. He finished the work, but it took some teeth pulling, and in the end I ended up saving his a$$ when the mediator decided to reject his effort to finish the work.. I got the code, but it was the LAST time I used vWorker, and that developer has since been suspended..
I have had WORSE experiences at oDesk.. Including developers who CLEARLY did not read the spec, and delivered one piece of buggy code after another that did NOT follow the spec.. Then there was the developer who loaded the code to my dev server for testing, but REFUSED to deliver a properly packaged add-on when the development/testing was done.. After some teeth pulling he finally at least gave me a list of new and modified files along with the DB changes.. Leaving ME to have to extract/create the module package myself. (and YES he expected that he should be paid in FULL for this..)
The ONLY good thing that came out of oDesk for me was a cool freelance graphics guy named Sam.. (he re-designed my logo and did a bunch of graphics work for a few of my clients).
As a Business Analyst/Project Manager I have worked with many outside developers before, but by experience with these freelancer sites has left a very BAD taste in my mouth.. It has not been ANYTHING like working with the developers I deal with in my day job. IMHO, there are integrity issues with LOTS of these developers.. Hard to weed out the bad from the good IMHO because there is such a proliferation of BAD on many of these sites..
My other advice is this.. BEWARE of cheap development work.. GOOD developers are NOT going to be CHEAP.. that's just a fact, and one I know WELL from my day job.. A QUALITY module that requires 8-12 hours of development is NOT going to cost $200.. So beware when someone offers to develop something that requires some serious level of effort for next to nothing..
