Hiring Oversea's FreeLancers

[DeluxeNames]

Hiring oversea's freelance programmers and designers brings out strong reactions in people, both negative and positive. I want to hear what your opinions are of this practice?

Have you ever hired an oversea's freelancer and how good a job did they do? Any language barriers?

If you did hire one, what site did you hire them from? I'm told that eLance.com is a good place to hire them. I've used a freelance designer from China to make logos for me and I'll be honest that they didn't turn out that well. I came close to hiring www.wickedinnovations.com out of the Philipines to do some work for me but thankfully heard from a friend that he had used them and got really ripped off.

Here's the advice I'm told: Indian Freelancers, while charging a little more than the Chinese counterparts, do a better job. The big problem is, if they rip you off there is often no recourse.

What are your thoughts and opinions?

[danielneri]

ey! don't be so fresh there buddy im indian!

and i can tell you a ****ing long story about them alright

my dad hired a few, www.hiddenbrains.com, i took over the project after a year, the site still being in development. pathetic coding, all cheap ways out. completely dependent on the config files and everything. cheap ****, he was SOOO unhappy.

but thats just these people. remember as far as im concerned people in america and more developed countries(even vietnam, thailand) will do a really good job, but you're gonna pay.

low budget, need a site, dont care about specifics = third world country programmer (no i'm not insulting my own country!!!)

want a good programmer = america, thailand, vietnam from my experience, don't know about britain

[DeluxeNames]

ey! don't be so fresh there buddy im indian!

LOL Daniel! Thanks for posting

Are Russian Freelancers any less expensive than the UK or US?

[Nuvo]

I once got roped into doing a design for a friend who lives in Puerto Rico, so technically, I was the oversea's guy.
I must have done something right as I ended up with a years hosting on Powweb for nothing and he bought me a domain name for my birthday.
That was in about 2003 I think, and since then I've been getting more into web development as well as coding HTML (he's a developer as well, but he's not overly great with graphics, so I built the basic HTML and graphics and he added his own scripts).

Python, CBG, Moddy and I are all British (well, technically, I'm only English as I'm of dual nationality as my dad is Australian), so yeah, there's some pretty capable people in the U.K. too, but because of exchange rates, it's cheaper to get sites built and hosted in America (the $20 you'd need to get decent hosting through ASmallOrange would be about £10.63 to me as 1 GBP is nearly double the value of 1 USD).
Tim Berners-Lee is from London as well, and he's the best web nerd ever (he did create the modern internet by inventing HTML and the HTTP protocol and now he heads the W3C and CBG can be happy as he did it on the grandaddy to all modern Mac's, a NeXT Cube ).

Also, while India isn't as big as Japan or China when it comes to GDP scores, it's far from the bottom end of the list and is getting better.
Japan is only at the top of the list because of it's technology companies like Sony and LG while China has many factories for producing goods for other countries (such as mice for Microsoft to sell in England... yes I did just look at my mouse for that one).
India has also been popular with companies looking to set up call centers and other things as it's generally less costly to do so, though this has suffered a good number of blows as companies are reviving local centers in order to win customers.

My parents have been to Goa twice (I'm wearing a T-shirt and a bracelet bought out there right now) and we were going to go as a family next year, but we're going to Spain in March (:[) and possibly Australia in 2008 (because we've got family over there).

[danielneri]

Nuvo, Goa sweet man!

Goa is an awesome place, driven down there a few times when i used to live there, but it really is nothing like India. It's more of a vacation place

[Nuvo]

Yeah, I know.
Goa often tries to make it look like it's it's own place rather than just another state in India, which is probably partly due to the fact that unlike the rest of India, they weren't always part of the British Empire, if I remember rightly.
It was Protugal who moved in on them, so the architecture and such are different from the mix of Indian and British or Dutch you might see in other parts of India (if the buildings have been protected).

Still, I'm pretty sure that India is getting better, even if it's not going to be a rival to Japan any time soon.
I wouldn't want to rival Japan anyway as their growth and technology has lead to them causing their own natural disasters as the country is too small and produces a lot of heat, which can cause twisters o_o