Outsourcing... Any experiences?

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by trevord92

Thanks Dien!

On iWriter my instructions are usually a variant of these:

Please don't write in the third person ("one" etc.)

Please make the style several bullet points/tips (5 or 7 works well).

Please make sure your work is split into paragraphs, not just one long article.

Please don't over-do the keyword density - just write naturally.

Writing is relatively straightforward and is probably the easiest thing to outsource.

Graphics you need to check it's not infringing copyright - not always easy but Google's image search has helped. Or one project the designer sourced the images & I bought them from the recommended stock site.

Coding can be anything from a simple fix to a really big project.

Spaghetti code is always a problem - difficult to specifiy as most programmers have their own style.

Bug testing is the part I really hate as you can't assume that whatever got corrected last time has stayed corrected or something else hasn't got broken in the next iteration.

Microsoft don't get all the bugs fixed and they've got stricter procedures and bigger budgets.

There are so many variables to test and check for.

Even Google "broke" the internet a while back when something they hadn't trapped for happened.

Testing takes longer than you ever plan!

Thanks Trevor for these tips... Excellent ones!

Also, a great list of "do's" and "don'ts" for writers, too...

On graphics, that's good advice. I haven't actually checked to make sure that the graphics I've had made up weren't "stolen" from a copyrighted source. I'll make sure to find out the source in future (to make sure it's legal)! You don't want to have legal headaches down the track!

I know from my brother's experiences that hiring programmers can sometimes be difficult. I think his experience was more or less that you get what you pay for - and he did find that the more expensive programmers were better "quality" - they wrote better code, which was easier to modify or fix up later...

The thing which I didn't realize for a long time is that, hiring is a skill. I naively thought, if you want something done, you just hire someone, and it gets done! Of course, it's rarely that straightforward... However, the more you do, the better at it you get!

Best wishes,

Dien