How to work with freelancers?

Question

Distant work

The problem is this: when working with freelancers, we spent so much time and money until a small web development task was solved (a little bit of design, layout and graphics), which could have been done 10 times by employees in the state.
And they didn’t seem to save on price tags, and they seemed to set adequate tasks (in more detail than their own, in the office), and in development I seem to understand something (more than 15 years of experience), one fig - the efficiency of freelancers is almost zero, and nerves were spent immeasurably.
I regularly try to attract freelancers / remote workers to work and regularly refuse to do so.
Question: how to learn how to work effectively with remote workers?
Maybe read-watch-listen to something to understand how to work and what we are doing wrong?
A Google search gives only all sorts of husks: either SEO articles on the topic of freelancing, or some thread of "coaches" with motivational guides.
Maybe there are some thread variations of project management tailored for freelancing and really working?
Maybe someone you can learn to go to, or maybe someone will teach or take patronage for a pie (denyushka / salary)?

Answer 1

Let's talk about my experience with freelancers.
On free-lance.ru I have 160 projects in a year and a half + I hire on a weblancer, through acquaintances and freelansim
1) Non-Russian developers are more responsible, take the same Vietnamese, Filipinos, Chinese, a few Indians, they are simply more responsible and disappear less than Russians, although it would seem the same Indians.
2) Never pay in advance, in almost 95 percent I launder only after the tasks have been completed. As my practice has shown, neither the presence of transactions without risk, nor the most excellent profiles guarantee against scammers. Payment is always after.
3) Work only directly, I can say I resell tasks, but I work only with those who exactly code and design and will not resell my tasks. Usually in a conversation I ask this question directly and get a direct answer.
4) Ask if a person has time to start now and when there will be a result, sometimes a person is busy, you push him, he gets stressed and goes out of his comfort zone, and in order to make his life easier, it’s easiest for him to fall.
5) Beat tasks as small as possible and stipulate deadlines for each and every time when the deadline comes up, ask what has been done if nothing, then this is already a bell.
6)Use git and continues integration to keep track of what the person is doing and see the result immediately.
7) Always give out your environment for work, sometimes it is not so easy to deploy some kind of site and there is no reason for a programmer to spend time on it.
8) Back up everything, database and files, if you don't use git then you can backup files at least once an hour, often when programmers broke everything it saved a lot of time.
9) Try to work with non-studios, these are studios that usually do not have an office, but there are programmers, if they are not busy with work, you can buy work from them for quite a normal price tag.
10) Try to work at an hourly rate and always set the price depending on the hours so that it is clear to you and the freelancer where the legs grow from, otherwise sometimes there are two jobs for an hour, one costs 1500, and the second 3000. Although they should cost the same.
11) Recruit a pool of proven freelancers, and the longer you work, the more often the same people will do the work for you.
12) Hire a person who works a lot with freelancers, I am sometimes hired like this when the office is not willing to bother with freelancers.
13) use a project management system, I use redmine, and in general, the more production your infrastructure is, the more it will impress a freelancer.
14) Hire several people to do the same job, this is completely normal. One of them can be and will do, sometimes I hire as many as four. Freelancers scream like that, and what will you do if all four do it, I always answer simply, my main rule for a freelancer is I always pay, even if my client does not pay me. And here I will also pay four, but sprinkling ashes on the head of freelancers, there has never been such a thing in my practice that at least two did. That is, with this approach, I have never been able to overpay, with all my desire.
Probably a lot more I could write, but it doesn’t immediately fit into my head anymore,
I myself work as a freelancer on Odessa
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Answer 2

You think you're hiring a freelancer. In fact, often you get:
0) scam - this is the best option for a file, if you don’t pay an advance payment right away,
1) a “freelancer” who passes your order on to his friends,
2) a “freelancer” who starts looking for an artist for your order and finds a student,
3) a “freelancer”, who actually works 8 hours in the office, then comes home and tries to do something with a tired head.
4) a "freelancer" who suddenly gets a permanent job - since pure freelancing does not bring money.
5) a "freelancer" who really works by himself, with super-work capacity and super-responsibility. I know several of these.
In general, the advice is simple - see who you are dealing with, how and where they work, and so on. You will most likely get direct answers to direct questions, you just need to ask these questions. You don’t have to look at freelancer.ru reviews - positive ones are bought, negative ones are biased. Well, control is questionable.
And about prices - it won't be cheaper than full-time, it will be more expensive. It is better to pay little by little, and not to pay for a month much more than the market value of a month of work of an office programmer - it acts corrupting.

Answer 3

If possible, take it on full time, make sure that it appears online on time, make sure that the code is in the version control system and is updated there daily. In addition to this, we have added a tracker that monitors the activity of an employee, takes screenshots, etc (I spied on oDesk). What is characteristic of the tracker has not been in battle. The fact of its existence was enough to impose a digestible discipline, no one wants to get into a collar. All the same, the efficiency is very low due to extended communication chains, but the price / quality balance has been evened out.

Answer 4

I've been a freelancer for 2 years, looking for clients on oDesk. It was always a problem to determine the cost of the work, so I work hourly. oDesk has a tracker that records the time spent at work, it creates an assessment of actions - the number of keys pressed during this time and at the same time takes a screenshot every 10 minutes, gives each screen this assessment. Further in the diary, you can see how your freelancer worked, especially if you carefully click through the pictures at once everything is clear =). Of course, you can only check the real quality by looking at the work itself.
And you can only find a good freelancer by brute force, they tried him, the second, the third, and over time you will find the person you need.
And the freelancer himself is actually spoken about by his profile on oDesk. The number of works, hours in work and you can read what living people write about a person.
In no way am I advertising odesk, it's just the only resource that I use and which I know well, which I share.

Answer 5

Do not blame yourself, the problem is not so much with you as with freelancers.
When you hire a person, all this potential crowd is filtered by the hiring office, then by the personnel department, then by the interview, then by the month of work.
Working with a freelancer, you do not have this whole chain, but simply, figuratively speaking, you take anyone who comes.
It is useless to control the odescom. A person who needs such control will most likely screw up somewhere else, his hamster will suddenly die or something. And a person who does not need such control can refuse to work for you.
Just look for performers using the brute-force method and keep a whip handy in the form of fines. Sooner or later you will stumble upon a fairly obligatory and professional person. It will be enough for about 1-3 years, then you will have to look for another one :)
ps: freelancers themselves, sometimes you have to look for second hands - that's why they are also already "full" of this situation.

Answer 6

Not as an advertisement, or a panacea, but perhaps a rate for hours of work + www.yaware.com.ua/ how to improve the result

Answer 7

Don't be stingy. Add 20% to the average Moscow prices. This is in the region of 30-35 dollars per hour IMHO.
Don't give third chances. You need to be prepared for the fact that only the tenth (or even twentieth) performer will suit you. And the other nine will have to pay for what they have done, have to spend time on them. It's kind of like a trial period.

Answer 8

I don't know if anyone has noticed another feature of freelancers, they sometimes disappear or stop working with you. It is necessary to foresee this and be ready at any time to transfer the project to a new contractor.
By the way, there is such a Mauser on weblancer - he wrote interesting things about his method of working with freelancers.