This post isn’t entirely about outsourcing but it could very well be with your comments. And before you start I have some very good information and statistics that outsourcing hasn’t affected us one bit. So don’t mess with me, unless you really want to.
Anyways, my real post is about SoftCE and my ScatteredMedia site. You probably didn’t know but the ScatteredMedia site that I normally have up has been offline, mainly because of server updates and issues. But other reasons are: The font set was broken and it looked like shi’it (thats she-eye-t), and the contact form was broke. When I first bought the template for the flash site I spent hours trying to get that contact form to work, thinking that it was good for me because I would learn something in the process, I hadn’t. The form sort of worked and was implemented poorly since the send button only half worked. So what I really learned: I can’t learn flash, yesterday I went to update the site from the ground up and I forgot everything. It just seems so complicated at this point and I rather learn more about Final Cut then Flash. So I went and outsourced the little project, to a romanian guy again. I payed him $12US (he bid that much) and after a half days worth of work he was finished. You can see the site at FreeSpeek.com, I still need to update it but the contact form works and he is going to update the fonts again tomorrow morning. Wonderful, took a half an hour of work of contacting back and forth.
Anyways, $12. Average salary for a romanian is $120 a month so I feel good about the cost, so much that I almost feel I am helping out a impoverished country. For me it would have taken me 5+ hours to figure it out and get it to work 100%, and this was something I couldn’t do before after spending 5+.
I am really glad with the projects that I have hired people to do. SoftCE was done by another Romanian and the software is pretty extraordinary for the cost. And this new guy is so good I am going to have him do the online version of SoftCE. The reason I dropped the other guy is he has to move on since the windows version took so long and he got a new job.
After today I think I will be using outsourcing more. It gives jobs to knowledgeable people who need it and most importantly it helps the me; since I am such a capitalist (joking).
Notice how I didn’t say the service I used? I don’t want a certain person to get any “great” ideas.
