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We've (Virtualmin) outsourced two tasks so far: Translations. We met a great guy in China via Elance for the Mandarin work. We've also worked with people in France. Artwork. The new Webmin logo was done by a guy in Romania, I think. Met him on SitePoint via a logo contest. I considered outsourcing some of the JavaScript work, since it's not our core competency (we build system administration tools in Perl/C/Java), but given that UI is so important I opted to learn JavaScript myself. Our first hire will probably be someone very strong on UI and web technology, though I'm getting pretty comfortable with it lately. My previous company frequently outsourced, but never to China. I regularly hired my current co-founder (an Australian), and I worked with folks in Germany, Romania, Pakistan, Ukraine, Tunisia, and the US. Some experiences were positive, others were very negative. I wouldn't suggest outsourcing without some solid in-house expertise to judge the resulting code. I had a lot of trouble with really bad security practices in many outsourced projects. If I weren't a developer myself, I would have merely have had to trust that since it looked like it was working it actually was--when in the case of a couple of projects all of the "login" work was being done client-side. I even had a Firefox toolbar project come back with SQL being generated on the untrusted, unauthenticated, client-side in JavaScript (inserts, deletes, the whole shebang). In short, if you aren't a developer, or don't have one on board, outsourcing is potentially rife with pain. That said, Digg and MySpace were developed by outsourced labor, and Mark Fletcher is a big fan of Elance. I dunno that any Chinese developers were involved, though. |