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MortenK, these are great pieces of feedback. It's disappointing that job marketplaces like oDesk/elance don't incorporate these heuristics into their process in attempt to raise the quality bar. In terms of better developers, there are a few companies like toptal (high quality temp placement) grouptalent, and ooomf, etc. My experience (co-managing ~$300k on oDesk) is communication / expectation alignment is one of the biggest reasons a project fails. Project managers, for example, don't know how to vet computer vision experts. Screen sharing is good for seeing that someone is typing something or "appearing" to do work, but most PMs have no idea if the researcher is programming a canny line detector versus AAM. More importantly, just because they know what they want to build doesn't mean they have experience or knowledge to manage an application lifecycle. Really, the PM should be able to tap into a software pipeline which compliments/augments the expert's natural workflow. Source code management should be a requirement, enforced by the platform, not something one has to vet for. Roadmapping and proposals should be a paid deliverable and a discrete step within the process. And I don't think continuous integration + test cases should be the exception, they should be the norm. Using such a pipeline is self-selecting as programmers who don't understand these concepts will easily be discovered. Sorry if this is a shameless plug, this is something we've been addressing for a while at Hackerlist.net (we're in private beta). We've open sourced a good potion of our stack in case others want to use these tools to manage their own software development projects. To support to your list of tips, MortenK, we've also found github to be a reasonable selector. If a SWE has a github account with several projects, this at least demonstrates rudimentary source code management understanding and an interest in open source. It's also an opportunity to review code. We ended up designing an internal search engine for handling discovery / evaluation as vetting great hackers at scale is a big challenge. |