Ask HN: hiring coders from developing countries

If you are not an experienced developer yourself, I recommend against it. It is too easy to get dragged down by someone who is not good. Just like here, some are very good and a lot more are terrible. I have worked with programmers from the Ukraine, India, and China. The Ukrainians were the best and the Chinese the worst. The Ukrainians had the best education, practices, and experience. All were employees of moderately large companies. Even so when I asked a colleague about hiring Ukrainians he said use an intermediary you trust.

Be aware of a culture that seems to have rapid turnaround. With both China and India, I've seen 5-6 developers quit within 6 months to a year; whereas, in the U.S., there are several people still with me after 10 years.

You can get work done, just make sure it's something relatively quick that can be done in isolation. Never spend time training people overseas; it may take several weeks for them to learn some big system before they can be productive, and if they leave a few months later then most of that time will have been wasted.

I've outsourced to programmers from india, egypt, pakistan, ukraine, and right now I'm working with a Romanian. Its a great experience, the one thing I would consider to be the most important is to ensure their communication skills are good, and also, that they have a good rating/reputation.

I use scriptlance.com to find programmers.