Freelancer Accountability Service?

5 points by cdolan92 13 years ago | 7 comments

My startup is approaching our second birthday. Its been a wild ride, and I've certainly learned a lot, but something has always bothered me about the path we took...

We've worked with a good amount of technical contractors over the life of this company. These days we have a solid core of full time and part time workers, and we're doing well enough that we can start to hire some of our best. Times are good, and the world is looking up.

But I remember the 'dark days' that we were in only a dozen months ago. We were three young guys with a solid business idea, hunting for reliable, capable, and honest technical ability that would help us create the company of our dreams. We struck out with a few of our contractors - they simply ran away with the first one or two payments, or were completely incapable of accomplishing the task, and slowed us down because of their obvious incompetence.

Sure, in hindsight it might seem so obvious that you're going to get 'played', but the fact is I'm sure its happened to more companies than my own. I diligently researched our contractors as best as possible, and it just seems like a fact of life that there are wolves (or simply dumb-dumbs with a heavy dosage of confidence) out there.

Last week I was consulting a friend of mine who is looking for his own technical resources, and it really started to irk me - I wish I would have `known` about these guys, or had somewhere to go out to and ask about their character and reliability (aside from the always positive references they provide).

Is there a database for this stuff? An Angie's List for developers? If not, who wants to make one with me?

tptacek 13 years ago |

Angie's List --- which actually kinda sucks --- works with the grain of supply & demand in its market, not against it: homeowners always have multiple qualified choices for contractors or plumbers or electricians (along with many not- so- qualified choices).

Supply & demand for vendors and clients are flipped in software development. The best freelancers have no reason to participate in a tech "Angie's List", so the ones you do get will be selected adversely.

The problem you had wasn't technological, it was that you were hiring (temporarily) for a role that is simply very difficult to hire for in 2013.

cdolan92 13 years ago | |

Great points - but check my comments on other posts. Perhaps it doesn't need to be a developer opt-in service? You're right, good devs would not need to sign up, and bad devs would avoid it... but really, we're only trying to protect from someone who has a bad record, no?

mechanical_fish 13 years ago | | |

There's no guarantee that "bad" devs would avoid getting listed. They'd probably sign right up, and promptly collect lots of glowing reviews from their extensive network of sock-puppet clients.

There will also be some bad reviews. The "bad" dev will respond to those, claiming that the client had vague, expansive, and ultimately impossible deliverables and, perhaps, a tendency to avoid paying bills. And then it's one person's word versus another, because it's not as if the "bad" dev's story is particularly difficult to believe.

Meanwhile, the problem with the "blacklist" model is that it doesn't help you, but it does hurt you. Yes, there is some probability that you'll help the next poor sap that tries to hire the Voldemort Development Corporation, but that's overbalanced by the near-certainty that you'll drive away a lot of competent talent who will see your "blacklist" as a gigantic warning sign about you. No contractor wants the risk of working for a customer who is prone to publicly badmouthing the contractors when a project goes wrong. Because software projects do go wrong. For reasons that are often outside a contractor's control.

ianpri 13 years ago |

I don't think this is a problem that can be solved via a technical solution to be honest. Personal recommendation can go a some way, but being able to vet developers for a specific role is something only the prospective employer can do.

Someone may be good at bashing out CRUD rails apps day and night and so anyone who uses them for this task is going to highly rate them, but that doesn't mean they're a good fit for your company, especially if you don't actually know what you need them for at the point of hire (especially true for non-technical founders).

Couple that with the fact that there's no motivation for 'better' developers to sign up to these services (as good devs are normally stacked up with work and have an existing network to hook into) and all you're left with is something similar to an odesk clone.

cdolan92 13 years ago | |

Good point on the oDesk clone. Its interesting to think that the main drive behind this would have to be the developers themselves - and if they are good enough on their own they won't need the service, or if they're the real 'problem,'they will avoid being in the system at all costs. Any idea on how to build an accountability system without it becoming just a 'Black list'?

... On second thought, a 'Black List' might not be the worst idea - two of these guys were total snakes. Without going into too much detail, they they boldly lied for a couple of months, until they stopped responding to calls altogether. This is what makes me think this could be a decently large issue for startups/small businesses. My company wasn't overly aggressive or pushy - the project was a simple signup wizard with very good compensation in a contract-to-hire relationship, so I'm not convinced these types of people don't do this more often.

That being said, most HN freelancers are probably more reputable, but there are other mediums out there that people are getting tech jobs through, and all you have to look back on is their own LinkedIn, GitHub, etc.

+1 for the employer being the end judge on these things. Unfortunately we just didn't know enough at the time to pull that off, nor did we really know where to ask for a consultant.

shiftpgdn 13 years ago |

How would you prevent would be developers from simply 'playing' the rating system on your hypothetical Angie's list for developers?

cdolan92 13 years ago | |

I presume you mean self-promotion/self-upVoting when you say 'playing'?

I think the solution is somewhat similar to how google became a success - build off of reputable links. Employers must link to their personal LinkedIn pages, company websites, an online record that they are who they say they are (either a D-U-N-S repository, or an incorporation document, etc etc). Yes, it can be spoofed - but if someone leaves either a glowing or awful review, you at least can look them up.

Likewise for freelancers. Many have profiles around the web, but it can be a struggle to find enough for a third party 'character check' - for instance, Salesforce Developers are in the AppExchange network, or the Force.com boards... I'm sure a ruby developer is in a completely different space!

In a certain sense, this needs to be a yelp for developers - reviews are valued and sought after. Bad reviews are feared, and its a somewhat ubiquitous place to find information on developers in a variety of spaces (Ruby,PHP,Salesforce,Obj-C,Java...)