You know that recently Facebook has introduced the post planner tool right from the Facebook page. All applications that provided this ability are now seriously endangered and their owners have a hard time…Yet, even Facebook is not bugless. Be careful when you set the date before you upload the image to the post. Your date and time selection will then clear up and the post will be published immediately.

“Facebook Pages” you can access from your PC also love bugs. For example, many people (and me) noticed that sometimes posts disappear from the page and then appear only after you log out and log in again, or refresh the page. Sometimes posts are even duplicated. You post something once, and then you see that posted twice. What a surprise! However, this illusion will go away after you refresh the page.

What bugs did you experience?

Those idea makers who have got programmers in their team, have proved to be extremely effective – during 54 hours (with some hours devoted to sleeping) they created some simple but eye-catchy web solutions from scratch.

Winners of this year Startup Weekend were:

1) Instant Feedback - with the help of this application you can let people instantly provide feedback with their smartphones on your presentation. They scan the QR code and add comments.

2) TimeZoner - for those who often have to convert different timezones into their own – it would be a perfect browser plugin. With it, you can just click on the time, say, 4:00 EEST and the plugin will show your time that corresponds to it, e.g. 3:00 CET, in a pop up window.

3) Blame it on the Fish  -the craziest but most creative startup ever. It deals with a popular problem that people don’t like to take responsibility for their own actions. There is a golden fish in a round aquarium and a webcam that records all its movements. All that is plugged to the system that based on the fish movements decides “Yes”or “No”. If you are not sure whether you have to go to work today or not, just ask the Fish – it will tell you the answer plus issue a certificate which confirms the decision.

4) PartySmasher - startup that definitely has a great perspective and is very promising in terms of earning money in the future.  It’s an application/mobile website that is created for bars/restaurants/night clubs. It allows them to show the leaderboard of visitors who drank the most, also tracking the kinds of beverages, right on the wall as a projection. Because of its competitive component, people who love drinking would use it eagerly and therefore bars would be striving to purchase it to motivate customers to drink even more. If I were a judge there I would definitely let them win!

Having a great idea contributes only minimally to the general success of the project. Without great implementation, programming-wise, or sales-wise, startup won’t happen.

What should entrepreneurs do if they have an idea but don’t have a team? Startup weekends don’t happen too often to start working tomorrow. Entrepreneurship skills include an important ability to find professionals who love doing their work.

So, finally, what are the Three Huge Reasons to Hire an Outsource Developer for Your Startup?

If you’d like something to be done perfect, ask a professional to do it.

Startupers are usually people who are great entrepreneurs. They possess managerial skills rather than any other. A real programmer is a geek who thinks only about programming, solving, implementing. Programmers don’t think business-wise in general.

The fewer people you have in your initial team, the better.

You won’t have problem later when you would need to share property or income with a person who left business. You will have less discussions on a meaningless topics with a person who just have a different view on things than you. Those who have entrepreneurship experience already, know what I am talking about. It’s very difficult to find a partner who would complement your skills.

It will save you time.

Any person who you hire, in contrast to your partner, will be much more responsible and manageable. It’s just a client-customer relationship. If a programmer is your partner and you’ve received a funding from investor, they won’t be not quarter as fast and as effective as a programmer for hire.

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Basically you can use the approach I’ve developed whenever you need to dig into the field you are not familiar with. Some people I know are not satisfied with what they are doing and would like to change the occupation but they don’t know how. Some people don’t know how to get acquainted with people in other social layer. I’ve written these 5 tips below for all of you ;-)

But I’d like to tell at the beginning that this article is not for experienced Twitter users, it’s rather for Twitter beginners.

Okay, let’s imagine that you are an HR specialist but would like to dig into IT. You don’t know any people in this field. So what you do is:

Set up a twitter account. If you don’t have any, of course. Fill out the description about yourself. You can write IT enthusiast or any other description that would connect you to IT area. Important! Use hashtag # before words to convert them into keywords. So, instead of IT enthusiast you will write #IT enthusiast. Or better, #IT enthusiast living in #Bratislava (or your city). When Twitter users will search somebody to follow on Twitter in IT area, they will most likely find you. Don’t forget that mentioning your location is important.

Search specific keywords. Just like any other user interested in a specific topic will search it on Twitter, do the same. Write down several keywords that interest you. They may be for example IT, web development, web design, programming and Bratislava (e.g. your location). Write as many of them as you can think of. Then read the description of profiles and follow interesting people.

Install TweetDeck. It’s a program which consolidates your Twitter, Facebook and also some other social accounts and shows you notifications in pop up windows in real time. I am not promoting it, but I use it every day and it’s so convenient that I sincerely recommend it to everyone. One thing that is bad that it doesn’t recognize Cyrillic and can’t post to a Facebook page for example. If it could, it would be AWESOME! What it does now is sending you notifications about every tweet of the user you follow. Twitter is about quick reaction, and that’s what is really cool about it. If I follow news portals I am first to know about important news and events. If there is sweepstakes or a promo with a limited number of participants, I will be first to react. Doesn’t it sound great?

Retweet and reply to tweets of people you are following. It’s really important in terms of getting known and noticed. Be smart, give advices, help people, share their information.

Tweeting Kitty

They will notice that. Though some people will start following you after you follow them in return, some other will do that after you reply to them or retweet them.

Start tweeting. As a newbie, you probably don’t know what to tweet about. You’ve heard that some people tweet about how they ate or how they enjoyed a walk somewhere. Unless you are working in HoReCa industry or tourism, this kind of tweets would rather make your new Twitter friends unfollow you. Instead, post short useful piece of information for your audience. Every time you read an article about IT, or will have a thought after reading this article, tweet it. Question can also be a good start. Many middle sized companies first tweet about new position they have, and then, if they didn’t find anybody, will post it at job banks. Once you have a wide audience, you’ll surely find an answer to your question on Twitter. In the meantime, reply to questions of others:)

Watch for tweets about targeted meetings in your area. People who are interested in a specific topic, sooner or later get to know each other. They attend similar meetings, workshops, conferences, informal parties. Twitter is your chance to become one of them! With its help you not only will know about almost all events in the area that interests you, but also will be quicker than others.

If you have any useful tips that you’d like to share with us, please do:) And follow me on Twitter: @aiflai

Enjoy!

What are the benefits of external developers versus internal ones?

- you save costs on housing the developer. This includes electricity, water, gas, office furniture, costly computer, other equipment, etc.

- you save money. External developers are usually cheaper. Sometimes you pay for their unreliability though;) But if you find a good team of developers in a company that provides such services and cares about its goodwill, you are lucky:)

- you don’t have to plan how to use all the developer’s time. Sometimes businesses, mainly small and medium ones, don’t have that much work to give. Or they need just one-time project. Or occasional projects. So the problem for the employer is, if they hire anyone to do the job in-house, then what will they do when the website will be completed or a product developed? The only way out is to hire one on a per-project basis. Here appears the question – how to find developers?

How to find developers for a remote job?

Once you’ve decided that you need an external programmer, what do you usually do? Right,

- ask friends and acquaintances whether they can recommend one. The result can be great but also can be poor. Then, if you haven’t found any, you start googling. You’ll find a lot of remote job banks like

- Elance, Odesk, Freelancer. What are the advantages and disadvantages of those? Check out my another article about experience in working with IT freelancers on freelance websites. Then, if you are not satisfied with the Indian and Pakistani dominance which doesn’t imply any quality of work , you start thinking where else can you find developers. You can

- google for specific IT companies in Ukraine, Russia and Slovakia, for example. The phrase “hire programmers full time Russia”, or “hire remote programmers Ukraine” can bring you some results. Those companies specifically take care about their SEO so that they could be first ones in search results.

Companies like us which offer hiring a programmer or a team of programmers remotely full time, are usually responsible enough to make client happy and willing to continue cooperation. Freelance websites are created more for those who focus on short-time projects for different customers. If you deal with a proven customer and they are happy with you, there is no to go to freelance portals where you have to pay 10% and higher commission for using safe Escrow services, etc.

To sum up, if you need to find a developer for a little piece of job or a really small project – ask a friend or register on freelance portals. If you need a full-time remote developer or a team of developers, better find someone more responsible who wants to build long-term business relationships. These could be IT outsourcing companies like us:)

I registered there and started to search for graphic designers with good reviews. First of all, there were 80,000 of results for a keyword “graphic design”. I’ve dropped a message to several of a first-page IT freelancers. But as I didn’t want to wait for their answer, I’ve posted a project with a short description.

It was completely free of charge. Elance takes its fee later, when the parts start talking about money. Within several minutes I started receiving various responses to my job. They were mainly from Indian companies, about 90% of all of them.

What was really unpleasant is that some of their account managers or sales managers started adding my Skype and calling right after I’ve approved them. I am not an unfriendly person, but I’ve got other things to do and weren’t prepared for such a pushy behavior. The second thing which I didn’t like was that almost each person that contacted me possessed a very bad command of English. They were writing a proposals without punctuation marks so that I couldn’t understand if they were asking or claiming.

One more thing is that only some of them asked something about my project! The rest was copying and pasting their company proposal and claiming they could do it for $50. My project required deeper investigation, I posted just a blurry description. How could one estimate it so fast and precisely? When I looked at these companies reviews I was double surprised. Those who have already estimated the project, had hundreds or thousands of excellent reviews! That looked really unbelievable.

I thought ok, this really should mean something. I’ve chosen the person who replied to me quicker of all and have selected him as a winner. The project was urgent so I was happy when he sent me first samples of graphics in two days. But when I opened them I was speechless. Such a design work can be done by a kid starting to learn Photoshop, not by a professional!

Despite all the good reviews this company was not suitable for my client’s level of requirements. I don’t know who their customers were, maybe they had small programming projects which were OK for their price. But obviously the job they’ve done was not normal in terms of skills and taste a graphic designer should have.

Since then I didn’t try IT freelance sites anymore.

As a brief summary, I can say that freelance websites are good for finding an IT freelancer for a quick and easy job. If you need something more sophisticated and reliable, it’s not a place to search.

My experience in working or just chatting with Russian and Ukrainian IT market representatives shows that the difference in IT outsourcing cost is pretty huge.  I am talking about web projects, not software. It depends on several factors such as:

- whether it’s a company or an individual. Individual specialist takes less than a company, which is quite obvious. Yet, it’s not always so. Sometimes, when I needed a good graphic designer when mine were busy, I was quite shocked by their cost. Some freelance designers requested $50 and more per hour while I had no chance to figure out whether they were working fast or slow, good or not. I think this is related to the fact that an individual designer doesn’t want to bury themselves in tasks working for a competitive price, but rather takes one-two expensive orders per month. Another question is who is eager to pay twice more than needed for the job? To my mind, it’s all marketing. Sometimes we are victims of an extremely bold self-presentation that makes us think a person is a rockstar.

You may think – why should I pay more for working with company versus an individual? There is a list of important pro and contra that i’d like to share with you in one of my next articles.

- location is one more factor of the IT outsourcing cost. Moscow programmers cost more than Kharkov ones. But it doesn’t mean they are better. It’s just a question of price level in the region. Quality depends on the education level, and born programmers usually do a lot of self-study and self-education. It’s all free, just requires time.

- confident self-PR. As I said, sometimes you get mystified by a really confident way a contractor presents themselves. On Russian IT market it’s not so common, but western specialists are very well educated in terms of marketing and know how to boost their cost. Another question is whether this cost really corresponds to the work quality. But, surprisingly, I met such people in Russia and Ukraine as well, never in Slovakia. It’s another phenomenon. Such people organize outsourcing and offshoring companies not because it’s their real interest or vocation, but simply for money. They hire students and present them as middle and senior programmers, compiling fake resumes. Can you meet such an individual? Of course, in this case it doesn’t matter if they work alone or in a team.

- consumer chain. If the cost seems too high for you, there is a chance that you are not working with the end professional. From my experience, when we’ve created the Facebook application for one of the world-known companies, the end client was far from knowing who we are and where their software is created. There was a long chain of companies providing services to company X. They contacted their dedicated PR agency in the US, the agency found some company in Europe, this company found us. If the company X would knew who developed their application it would have been a scandal.

But what is the average IT outsourcing cost on Russian IT market?

If you manage to find a good and promising student (who can already program simple websites and applications), you will be lucky to pay $5-$10. Yes, these are the prices. The question is how can  you find such a guy from abroad? And will they be manageable enough from afar?

If you manage to find a company, a team of developers, you’ll have to pay $15 – $40. Guys can also be students, but working together. Why is the range so big? The reason is not necessarily quality, but good marketing and PR. Even if you really suck in programming you can set high prices.  But it doesn’t mean the clients will get back to you.

What IT outsourcing cost did you find on the web, if any? And how much are you willing to pay the web outsourcing that matches your needs?

In the US and Western Europe the number of programmers among other specializations is not so big, people are more into economics, culture, social work and business rather than into programming. Number of businessmen in the US who prefer to manage rather than to create a product directly are way bigger than of specialists.

Plus, this makes good programmers feel exceptional. They are needed and they can be as geeky and nerdy as they want, they will be in demand anyway. Even if an average businessman finds a programmer, it’s still doubtful that this person will be a good specialist, communicative and disciplined. Programmers are creative personalities, they sometimes don’t bother themselves with neatness or other social conventions.

I even found an article on the web where an author bravely raises the question “Are programmers people?” To my relief, the conclusion is yes, programmers are people:) Yet, you have to be really savvy to make a  programmer work when you need them to, even if they are a really great coder.

Why Russian Programming?

Can there be any way out? Can one find a good and reliable programmer who is a really good specialist in their area and doesn’t cost too much? OK, so just imagine that more than approximately 50-70k programming specialists graduate from Russian universities annually. Number of high education establishments in Ukraine is 854 (2012) while in France – just 41! So, if we count that every university releases 150 diplomas per year, and IT technology specialists constitute 1/7 of all diplomas, in Ukraine you have a chance to find 10-15 k programmers.  Slovak programmers are less numerous, but they are as good as Russian and Ukrainian ones. And remember, quality of a post-Soviet education is still considered one of the best in the world.

For simplicity, I call a post-soviet and nearby countries programming the Russian Programming. It’s a common stereotype in Western world that everything that lies to the East of the European Union and to the West of China and India is Russia:) Even all Slavic peoples such as Slovak, Slovenian, Polish are sometimes attributed to Russians.

If a Russian programming is so attractive, how can one use it?

1. Find a remote team of Russian programmers on the net. Why not an individual? The article about that will be published soon! Plus, you will learn how to find a really good team.

2. Do a small pilot project with them. Check how they communicate, whether they respect deadlines and whether the end result they present works good:)

3. Hire Russian programmers on a full-time basis. Why? It will be much cheaper than working with a programmer on a per-project basis. Programmer will be dedicated to you and will feel financially secured. You will be confident that programmer’s team lead doesn’t dedicate them to any other client right when you need their help so badly.

If you are already looking for a team of Russian programmers, we will be glad to help – contact@mosaicmedia.eu.

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