Sick of people telling you what you should or shouldn’t do? No? Good, because here are my say:

You need to visit your developer – Seriously?  With video chat, GoToMyMeeting, Email, IM, Skype and every other tool under the sun which helps you communicate, there is really no difference from actually sitting in front of the person.

You Can’t hire College Students – They don’t have as much experience and its like hiring half a developer.  Bull.  I know many amazing college students who, because they are still young, haven’t lost their creative edge.  Who the hell built Google?  College students are just as well read and versed in modern development practices.   In fact if anything I have an unfair bias against older developers.

You need to hire someone in the U.S - This idea is just silly.  Sure there are many amazing U.S based freelance developers but the same can be said for Europe and and the Sub Continent.  You may just need to develop better communication skills, but don’t be afraid to look outside your own backyard.  btw.  As I’m Australian, I have trouble working with U.S developers because of the timezones.

You Need to Hire a Firm – Be brave, hire a bunch of individual freelancers and become a rockstar project manager.  Individuals are cheaper (no admin fees) and you can use your rockstar project management skills to delegate to the best individuals.  Its also easier to fire and hire a new freelancer than an entire firm.

You need a Webmaster – um what does that even mean.  Don’t hire a webmaster as you’ll be getting the self professed “computer guy” who knows how to hyperlink things in Frontpage.  Instead hire a php programmer or a Ruby on Rails developer.   A webmaster won’t build you a website, rather an eyesore.

You can’t find decent coders on eLance, GetAFreelancer, Guru etc. – Do you remember a little site called Digg.com?  Kevin Rose found a programmer on a ite like these.  If you’ve had bad experiences on these sites its because you don’t know what to look for in a programmer.  Its your fault not the sites.

You Shouldn’t Pay a Fixed Price – If you’ve taken the time to clearly wireframe and produce the proper mockups then a good developer will be able to offer a fixed price rather than by the hour.  If a developer has no idea how long a project will take then, thats a really bad sign.

What do you think?

P.S check out yesterdays post on How to Hire a Good Developer

Photo by: MarcelGermain