Any tips for hiring & working with a freelance engineer
I'm thinking of hiring a full-stack MERN engineer to help build my MVP. I'm an engineer myself and have built out the bulk of the early work and framework. But my time is quite limited right now.
Do you have any tips for hiring and working with a freelance engineer?
How do I project plan, set expectations, and most importantly how do I go about estimating a good budget?
This is what has worked for me.
I normally recruit off Upwork if I do not have any people I have worked with available.
Start off with a simple paid project, something related to what you want to build. Something that can be done in 2-4 hours. Test atleast 4 people. The best talking people might not be the best developers so focus on things that matter, check their code quality. Think of it as a interview with them coding a sample app.
Try not to go too cheap. You can find $5/hour devs, but you basically get what you pay for. I have found $30/hr devs out of India, Philippines and Eastern Europe pretty good. But again remember at $30 they are not the best of the best. Less than $20, I have found it not to be worth it unless you get really lucky. But even if you find good ones, their prices tend to go up pretty fast.
So basically estimate how much time you think your project is going to take, figure out how much you want them to do, then multiply that time by 3(we tend to underestimate how hard a problem will be till we do it.) and multiply that time by the per hour cost. That should give you a very rough estimate.
There is a lot more I can write but I am going to stop there. Happy to answer any specific questions you have.
@pras2018 came across you reply and it is very informative. Am new at this, self taught developer and don't know industry practice when working with freelancers
Once you vet the right freelancer through your process, do you use version control like github for the whole project?
It depends, short one off projects, you might not need it. But if it is a long term project then all the standard rules apply, source control, issue tracker/project management tool etc.
When it comes to development for me version control is a default. With github free. There is no reason not to use it. To begin with you can use github for most things you need. Do not even have to go looking for other tools.