Posts from — August 2008

Our latest experience with oversees contractors comes from some testing that we recently ran, where we needed lots of people to click test a website that we are developing. We put an ad on some of the freelance websites and come up with 20 people who can click buttons for half an hour. We have this set just right, you show up on a particular website at 7pm Pacific time and along with a group of 20 others, you click buttons continuously for 30 minutes.

We specifically state that we need US, UK, and Russian people only. That’s simply the demographic of the site we are testing.  Instead we get India and Pakistan “programmers” mascarading as US and UK citizens.

So what’s the big deal? Well first of all none of them showed up on time or understood the directions. None of them could read english well enough to figure out what we wanted. They had their canned response to our ad to get in the door and then they were unable to understand directions. Their timing was off, needing coddling for us to email several times to tell them when the testing would begin.

This behaviour is typical of India programmers that we have, per chance, worked with before. We simply don’t hire outside the United States for this reason. Not only will the work be cheap, but none of it ever hit a single deadline established, none of the work was spell checked, and none of the work was what we had planned. Basically you can not hire from India unless you have lots of time to hand hold. So what is your time worth?

If you do hire from India, remember that they do not speak English very well. Remember that India programmers are not going to work with you like an English speaker. Throw your timetable out the window. In our case hiring India workers for a beta test event at a particular time, failed miserably. We won’t do it again.

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