Outsourcing Perl programming

Nicholas Clark nick at ccl4.org
Thu Jun 7 12:26:29 BST 2007


On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 11:57:06AM +0100, Pete Sergeant wrote:
> In the interest of automating my life as far as possible, I'm trying to
> find a freelance Perl programmer to do some of my side project
> programming for me.

> Anyone have any recommendations/ideas/etc on finding a Polish or Indian
> or other person who's likely to be highly technically competent, and
> happy to work for 10 UKP/hour?

If you want decent documentation, do you want a non-native speaker?

> I've heard that a problem (and this might be massive stereotyping,
> but...) with outsourcing to the far east is that you'll often find
> yourself with a programmer who's not got much initiative. Not a problem.
> I'm looking for someone to do drudge work.

How are you planning to assess how much they're skimping on the levels you'd
like? For example, how do you automate measuring the quality of the tests they
write? After all, they can easily write a large volume of unimaginative tests
that go nowhere near the corners of your code, and that will fulfil the letter
of any contract.

Nicholas Clark


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