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Bad Developers

I started my company 5 years, self funded, non technical founder, with a great idea. Because of financial constraints I hired freelance developers in Eastern Europe and other places. At the beginning things worked smoothly and we made fast progress.

After growing quickly in 2016 I increased the team size and hoped that with more resources we would be able to solve the existing problems and eventually move part of the time to an onsite office.

As we grew we hit more and more bottlenecks, bugs, communication issues etc, server downtime and more. I got in a regular argument with the developers over stability, features etc. One of them even tried to blackmail me with Server downtime.

We failed at really basic things like a CSV import which they said I would not understand because I am not a developer and its bad if I interfere in how they do the tech.

Fast forward 6 months I met a lot of developers locally, having analyze the code and architecture and we have seen a horrible mess on the freelancer side. I now replaced the whole tech team with on site team members.

I can only warn startup founders of bad freelance developers that always say its impossible, or you don’t understand the tech. etc. Business should never be built around tech skills limitations of engineers (as long as its realistic of course).

As soon as you can afford it have an experienced developer look into your project or you pay a high price later.

Good luck!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • You should be happy that the freelance developers got your business this far. It stands to reason that as you want to increase the quality of your product you need better developers, developers you wouldn’t have been able to afford in the beginning.

    Of course the code is going to be a mess. Take the things you have learned from the first version of your product and use that experience to build a better version. As a founder you should never blame your employees/contractors for the consequences of the decisions you’ve made. You made a price-quality trade-off, one that was probably correct. If you had to start over today you’d probably make the same choices, because good developers are in such high demand no self-funded startup can afford them.

    Reply

  • Sounds to me like a lack of respect from both sides.

    E.g. if you refer to your people as ‘resources’, you risk they’ll call you ‘overhead’.

    Which, in developer speak, is often phrased as “you wouldn’t understand, it’s tech”…

    Disclaimer: I’m a non-non-technical founder.

    Reply

  • Thank you for sharing this. I very much related to this as I am similarly in an early stage of building my product and my single biggest piece of frustration is working with developers. Although I am not writing the code, I have a semi-technical background as I was a product manager at a large tech company in the Bay area. The biggest issue I am having is hiring good Python back-end developers.. so far, I have come across many who fail to deliver the job or are just plain jerks. As we speak, I have a developer that has take 90 hours to do one FTP CSV import (40K rows) into our database. Each day I ask how many more hours, he keeps saying 5-6 … It is hard to trust anyone. But I know that I could not be building this myself… just wished that I had better luck with my hires.

    Reply

  • Hello,

    it helps to have a technical founder.

    I see it as a general issue with freelancers. Fast Software development means you are either very good ( not too often) or just develop dirty code. Why should a freelancer, who never sees this project again care? Would you have paired a higher price and took more time from the beginning for (more) clean code without this experience?

    To make Software adaptable to future cases takes more time, effort and knowledge. In general a freelancer who asks you about the future of a product tips you off, that this person would think about a more future save solution. People who just do what you ask, without a proper requirements analysis plan a temporary solution for you, which may not be adapted at all.

    Best regards

    Reply

  • Sounds like you pushed for features when maintenance should have been done. Sounds like you micromanaged the hell out of the devs, too.

    Technical debt comes this exact way. I really wasn’t surprised that it turned out the way it did for you after reading your post.

    The worst thing is that there’s apparently no learning effect going on with you other than the ‘devs are the problem’ mantra.

    Best of luck!

    Reply

    • Fast forward 1 year later. A new team has fixed all the issues. Scaling is much better now than it was before. Yes I am running a tight ship, as some developers might otherwise always try to backstab the founder.

      I have heard so much – I cannot be on time at the office … because I am a DEVELOPER. I know pay really high salaries. Everyone who just does not comply with normal behaviour gets fired. I dont discuss these stupid things anymore.

      They dont know how it to be bankrupt as a founder, not able to find another job. Some just want to suck as much money out of a startup as possible. They also lack responsibility that a founder might have put all his financial resources into the project. I pay high, demand results, the rest gets laid off quickly.

      Other type of employees are grateful to have a job whether this is in HR, PR, Marketing etc. So its not that this is a general problem.

      Reply

  • Update: I saw a lot of people critized my decision here.

    Finally I replaced all freelancers from the company with people on site. Now communication is much better, people understand the product and no more attitude issues. I don’t regret having laid off any of them.

    Everyone knows that I care about the product and the clients and that the company needs to produce added value. Feeling so much better now.

    Reply
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