How to organize the work of remote programmers?

Question

Freelance

Good afternoon. There was a need to expand the development department in our company and for this we want to try remote cooperation with programmers. We are engaged in the development of medium / large sites. We mainly work on PHP (Yii2, Laravel) and all related technologies.
Actually questions:
- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
- How should employees be supervised? Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?
- How to calculate the RFP? Use fix. Salary / pay by task / hourly?
- Where to find applicants? Freelance sites / bulletin boards (hh.ru, etc.)?
- How much on average to pay a remote PHP-programmer of average qualification (junior / middle)?
Thank you for your attention!

Answer 1

- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?

Yes
how do you do it in the office?
No
depends on how it is accepted in your company
the same as normal

Answer 2

From personal experience - I worked a lot myself remotely, I hired people myself. Most of all I liked the way the Americans work.
1. All projects on github or bitbucket. Bug tracker in the same
place 2. Each task is given an estimate and only the estimate is paid for. Those. you said that you will do it in 4 hours - they will pay only for 4 hours and no one cares how much you were transported.
3. Tasks are crushed to the smallest level. For each task, all discussions through comments to the task. No skype.
4. Every hour or two ping "how are you? at what stage?". Missing for more than 2 days - fired.
Total:
- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
yes
- How should employees be supervised?
Ping regularly. Require tasks to be completed on time. If it disappeared for more than two days, it’s easier to get rid of it and find a new one (I ran after one for a long time). Log the task in the comments to this task.
Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?
meaningless
- How to calculate the RFP? Use fix. Salary / pay by task / hourly?
Let's evaluate the task, estimate for yourself how many hours to do it. Agree that there are so many hours for this task. Pay only for hours. You're not a big company that can pay for smoke breaks and chatter over coffee.
- How much on average to pay a remote PHP-programmer of average qualification (junior / middle)?
I have a friend - a very good PHP developer (more than 5 years of experience only remotely) - takes from 750 rubles per hour. Look at freelance sites - how many guys are asking for an hour.

Answer 3

Difficult
Same as in the office Same as in the office
Why
don't you get salaries in the office?
Do you not have a single developer that you pay?
A remote worker is no different for me from an employee in the office, why you want to distinguish him so much is not clear to me

Answer 4

- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
There are plenty of those. Freelancing generally means more on your own.
Finding responsible is not so easy, but yes, it is possible.
However, if you want to earn BETTER, then they need to be controlled, they should not be too independent. And if you control them, then they may not be pathologically responsible, all the same your control.
- How should employees be supervised? Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?
Only for hourly pay. Then yes, definitely. With a fixed payment for the project / stage - no need to annoy. Some of these people do not work in companies because they do not really like such pressure from superiors, and for no other reason (many freelancers earn less than offline jobs they could).
It strongly depends on the specific person, specific specialization, on how well he suits you, on what your financial strength is, etc. A fixed salary will allow you to save money if you have a continuous flow of orders for the required qualification.
Freelance sites with strict rating control are more preferable (UpWork),
Boards are your risks, hemorrhoids in determining qualifications / responsibilities for the first time. But they are cheaper.
Unpretentious freelance sites (almost all Russian) are in the middle on this scale.
What is AVERAGE?
If he has not yet reached Western customers, then less.
If he has already reached Western customers, then more.
I consider myself a little above average. Lure me only from 400,000 rubles. per month. But I think I'm more of an exception.

Answer 5

gadfi replied all to the topic. I will only add that if you are trying to force the use of time trackers and control, then you are deliberately setting yourself up to look for an unreliable person whom you will not trust. It is better to find a person who will give you the result you need, and he does it in an hour or eight - his own business.

Answer 6

Slack.com + Trello.com

Answer 7

- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?

As mentioned above, you can. But you still have to control them. As well as employees in the state.
Better commits and solved specific problems have not yet been invented. time trackers are relevant if you are paid by the hour. Hourly pay benefits the employee, not the employer. All the same, solving specific problems and paying for solving them gives +10 to discipline and motivation (so to speak, piecework wages, solved the problem, get paid, otherwise they will start feeding breakfast and figure out why you need more X-hours to solve this problem, and yourself will work for 2 hours, and the rest of the time it is not clear what to take).
See above. a remote employee is no different from what is sitting in your office. he performs the same functions and tasks as an employee in your office. Only saves your expenses (fewer jobs->less rent and number of PCs->less costs for technical support of PC developers (including software licenses)-> less costs for electricity, utilities, coffee / tea, etc. )
Both on regular sites with vacancies, and on specialized ones, you can also ask your own employees who from their environment would like to work for you.
As much as the one who works in your office. He does the same job, and can work many times more efficiently than employees from the state. The fact that he is not physically in your office does not mean that he needs to pay less.

Answer 8

# Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
If a person is interested in work, responsibly treats his duties, then he will work even remotely without any problems. Many acquaintances work this way (programmers, layout designers).
# How should employees be supervised? Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?
It is better to control the execution and quality of a certain part of the project. Instead of time trackers, it is better to use bug trackers and version control systems so that people, no matter where they are, can conduct distributed development. Well, the means of communication - it goes without saying.
# How to calculate RFP? Use fix. Salary / pay by task / hourly?
This is how you agree. How to agree contractor works. But a fixed payment or payment by tasks will probably be more optimal.
# Where to find applicants? Freelance sites / bulletin boards (hh.ru, etc.)?
Freelance sites, social networks, and any ad services, even avito.ru...
# How much to pay on average to a remote PHP-programmer of average qualification (junior / middle)?
It already depends on the programmer's competencies, the complexity of the tasks performed by him, the execution time, the quality of the code, the amount of improvements, the number of errors in the code, the possibility of using the code by other programmers...

Answer 9

- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
Yes. But there is a special demand for such. Expensive.
- How should employees be supervised? Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?

Git. Interim releases.
In general, read about CI technologies.
How do you agree.
Yes
, and by acquaintance.
From 25 to 300 thousand rubles per month.

Answer 10

- How much on average to pay a remote PHP-programmer of average qualification (junior / middle)?

Highly qualified people are more willing to hire remotely, it costs time and effort to raise the junior level, and a grown expert does not feel loyalty to a remote company. Junior remotely - redundant vacancy, there will be many applicants.

Answer 11

To paraphrase the question: "How do the answers of real people differ from the answers on the Toaster?"

Answer 12

- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?

Quite if a person has been working remotely for many years, then the necessary self-discipline is already there.
Simplest. Any auto-screenshots, mouse and keyboard tracking are more likely to cause dislike than desire to work.
In fact, you need a tracker to understand key indicators for projects and tasks, and you need it not only for remote employees. With remote ones it’s just easier, he can’t wander around rallies all day and do nothing in a day, you will evaluate his result by the work done, and not because he sat from breakfast to dinner in the office.
From a person. I would pay a fixed salary + a good performance bonus to get away from the direct connection time tracker = money. A person must understand that if he solves a problem that was originally estimated at 20 hours in 4 hours, then he will receive recognition and a bonus, and not receive less money.
Where and ordinary performers.
I won’t say in numbers, but objectively it can be 15-20% lower than for people with similar skills and abilities that you have in your office.

Answer 13

Everything is real. Just need to separate freelancers and employees. If you have one task / project, then there is not much difference.
But if you have a lot of tasks and not all of them are for the development of new functionality on interesting technologies .. Here you need a person for a salary. As practice shows, it is difficult to work with freelancers because they turn their noses a lot. I don't want it, I won't, it's not interesting, it's difficult.
It is easy to find a freelancer for a specific project, but a person of a different warehouse is needed for a permanent job. And then you have to pay a fixed salary.
But there is another problem here, that a person relaxes over time. And here there is no evil boss nearby who will come up and give lyuli. And you can excuse yourself for a long time and quite plausibly. And the performance drops...

Answer 14

Add your vacancy, deleted, to the standard job search site. Find people and work with them.
As an employee, I felt that it is better to conduct planning meetings by voice in Skype, and not in chats, more of a sense of belonging to a team. I really liked the hourly pay. Right now I'm writing this and I'm at work. I have a pause in the tracker, because before that I had lunch. When I finish writing, I turn on the tracker to continue counting the time and start doing the task. I'm generally paid enough so that I don't want to deceive anyone and count empty time for myself.
I get tasks in Jira, I add the hours worked there.
(Please note that I turn the time tracker on and off myself - just for the convenience of calculating the time spent on the task. No one can track me and does not want to)

Answer 15

I am writing from experience
- Is it possible to find responsible and independent people?
one out of seven - something like this
- How should employees be supervised? Does it make sense to use time trackers on employees' PCs?
if you are paranoid for good - you can put a tracking system like Yaware
We keep track of time through the timers of our Worksection system - plus we use hourly rates
- How to calculate wages? Use fix. Salary / pay by task / hourly?
Based on the task,
if the approximate amount of work is clear - it's cheaper to agree on the result
if the amount is not obvious - hourly
- Where to find job seekers? Freelance sites / bulletin boards (hh.ru, etc.)?
we use djinni.co
- How much on average to pay a remote PHP-programmer of average qualification (junior / middle)?
our fork $1500-2500

Answer 16

Slack, Gitlab + team lead, architect, devops, etc.