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Where to find all the US programmers?

Topics relating to managing people and relationships

Testament

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Hey guys! Hope the grind is going well for all of my fellow fastlaners. :)

I've been trying to hire a programmer based out of the US for about a month now. I've been posting on Odesk and Craigslist. To say the applicants I've been getting so far have been horrible would be the understatement of the century. So far I've been getting either:

A) A foreign candidate who can barely write in English and clearly didn't read a word of my short job posting

B) A completely socially inept moron who messages me his application containing profanity, or is outwardly rude. Here's an excerpt from a nice little gem I just got from Craigslist:

"I do not work under deadlines. There is never a reason to do such a thing unless you are a punk a$$ employee."

And he sent in his resume and was asking questions about the job. I seriously couldn't believe someone who was trying to land a job would send this to their potential new employer. And I keep getting stuff that's similar to that. :-\

At this point, I've given up hope that anyone applying to my job ads is actually going to take 10 seconds to read it.

I'm wondering where everyone goes when they want to hire competent US employees? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!
 
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Dutchy

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I think we have both had the pleasure to speak to the same guys...received a very similar bid on a job on elance just this weekend with nearly the same message. And all the other ones clearly ignoring location requirements of North America or Eastern/Western Europe.

I even posted a job once stating I would come back with the specifics (just a placeholder with minimal details) and received bids stating "we have gone through all of your requirements in detail and can do this job in 21 days for $500" - WTF?
 

healthstatus

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Elance, guru, and rentacoder, all allow you to only request bids from individuals in certain geographic areas. I have no idea why you want to pay 4x-10x the amount of money and exclude the talent all around the world.
 

Stanley Mala

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Elance, guru, and rentacoder, all allow you to only request bids from individuals in certain geographic areas. I have no idea why you want to pay 4x-10x the amount of money and exclude the talent all around the world.
I second that. I've had a really good experience with outsourcing some parts dirt cheap to Indian developers from oDesk.
 
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Dad2Four

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You are trying to hire a programmer in San Francisco and can't find one? There are coffee shops filled with them from what I understand. Hit a few and see.

Are you going to pay them well? Go through a head hunter. I've landed all but one of my jobs over the last 20 years as a programmer by being contacted by head hunters. Rarely do I ever even go looking. There is a steady supply of "opportunities" sent via email every day.

How about LinkedIn? There are various methods of using LinkedIn to find your coder.

What kind of coder do you seek and what's your salary range? I guarantee you'll find piles of them right here. Dudes like me that know how to produce all kinds of awesome stuff but have no idea how to turn it into money and are out looking for ways to make it happen and land here. Was that a run-on sentence or what?
 

codo3500

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Try me :)

Check out my signature, it has my marketplace thread. I'm not US, I'm Australian, but I typically end up working on US-time anyway these days :)
 
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forchunet

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It's not hard to find a US programmer if you have the money most US programmers demand. Now if you're working with a sub $100/hr budget and or want to do a mostly equity type of arrangement - then you'll have a hard time.

To be honest, if you're looking for a good US programmer, the decision rests mostly on the programmer, not you. As a programmer, I get a bunch of opportunities everyday. Some of those opportunities offer decent pay but are simply not interesting to me. Start looking at the process in reverse. The decent programmers are vetting you and what you have to offer just as much as you are vetting them.
 

tafy

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My guy wouldn't have works for me I he thought the project was boring. Luckily he thought it was cool and varied and had a lot to gain from the project.
 

Lex DeVille

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Hey guys! Hope the grind is going well for all of my fellow fastlaners. :)

I've been trying to hire a programmer based out of the US for about a month now. I've been posting on Odesk and Craigslist. To say the applicants I've been getting so far have been horrible would be the understatement of the century. So far I've been getting either:

A) A foreign candidate who can barely write in English and clearly didn't read a word of my short job posting

B) A completely socially inept moron who messages me his application containing profanity, or is outwardly rude. Here's an excerpt from a nice little gem I just got from Craigslist:

"I do not work under deadlines. There is never a reason to do such a thing unless you are a punk a$$ employee."

And he sent in his resume and was asking questions about the job. I seriously couldn't believe someone who was trying to land a job would send this to their potential new employer. And I keep getting stuff that's similar to that. :-\

At this point, I've given up hope that anyone applying to my job ads is actually going to take 10 seconds to read it.

I'm wondering where everyone goes when they want to hire competent US employees? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!


Why don't you go through their profiles on the freelance site and invite U.S. developers to apply to your job posting?

On Odesk you can narrow your search by geographic area so you only receive results listing U.S. developers.

This gives you time to review their past history instead of making a decision on a whim.

Go through their feedback and jobs and see what they're like, and how they worked with others.

I've never had a U.S. developer apply to an ad, except for when I invited them to do so.
 
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Testament

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Thanks for all the great replies everyone. :)

My mentor is the one who's offering the job, but he's tasked me with finding the programmer for him. So far, we've had some pretty bad experiences with hiring foreign coders. So far, either the good ones aren't as well-versed in English as would be preferable and it gets frustrating/difficult to convey what's needed, or they speak/write English well enough and just aren't very good at coding.

I'll make postings on all of the sites you've all listed - thanks so much for offering them all up! I think I'll spend the rest of the day messaging coders myself and see how that goes.

Also, I've gotten a few messages so far from fastlaners interested in the job offered. If anyone's interested, before you message me the prerequisites my mentor wants are that the coder:

1)Live in or around the San Francisco Bay Area,
2)Knows flask/ruby/php/html5/css
 

sitemaster

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the prerequisites my mentor wants are that the coder:

1)Live in or around the San Francisco Bay Area,
2)Knows flask/ruby/php/html5/css

Flask is a microframework for building applications using the python programming language. PHP is another web programming language. Ruby is a third programming language. You'll do better looking for someone who specializes in 1 of the 3, instead of requiring that programmer be "experienced" in all of the above. Although many programmers likely have experience working with html5 and css, you'll find that it's usually "designers" that are the experts in css layout (themes) for web applications.
 

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