[tptacek]

Angie's List --- which actually kinda sucks --- works with the grain of supply & demand in its market, not against it: homeowners always have multiple qualified choices for contractors or plumbers or electricians (along with many not- so- qualified choices).

Supply & demand for vendors and clients are flipped in software development. The best freelancers have no reason to participate in a tech "Angie's List", so the ones you do get will be selected adversely.

The problem you had wasn't technological, it was that you were hiring (temporarily) for a role that is simply very difficult to hire for in 2013.

[cdolan92]

Great points - but check my comments on other posts. Perhaps it doesn't need to be a developer opt-in service? You're right, good devs would not need to sign up, and bad devs would avoid it... but really, we're only trying to protect from someone who has a bad record, no?

[mechanical_fish]

There's no guarantee that "bad" devs would avoid getting listed. They'd probably sign right up, and promptly collect lots of glowing reviews from their extensive network of sock-puppet clients.

There will also be some bad reviews. The "bad" dev will respond to those, claiming that the client had vague, expansive, and ultimately impossible deliverables and, perhaps, a tendency to avoid paying bills. And then it's one person's word versus another, because it's not as if the "bad" dev's story is particularly difficult to believe.

Meanwhile, the problem with the "blacklist" model is that it doesn't help you, but it does hurt you. Yes, there is some probability that you'll help the next poor sap that tries to hire the Voldemort Development Corporation, but that's overbalanced by the near-certainty that you'll drive away a lot of competent talent who will see your "blacklist" as a gigantic warning sign about you. No contractor wants the risk of working for a customer who is prone to publicly badmouthing the contractors when a project goes wrong. Because software projects do go wrong. For reasons that are often outside a contractor's control.