Tag: software

The quality of work done by low cost outsourcers is an obvious issue. You can overcome this problem by instituting a strict Test Driven Development cycle with your programmers.

Technique: The 4/7 work unit

When hiring low cost outsourcers, I use what I call the 4/7 scheduling technique. The work day is 4 hours long, and one week out.

4 hour work day: I have noticed that computer programmers work approximetely for four hours. If you make them sit in front of their workstations for 8 hours, you get about the same ammount of work done as when you sit them down for 4 hours. I leave it to the philosophers to discuss why, it’s just true. Knowledge workers should work in 4 hour shifts.

One week out: I hire low cost LAMP programmers on sites like Upwork and Freelancer all the time. You can debate the morality of hiring overseas, or offering low wages, but you shouldn’t debate the metrics.
You can post an ad for a PHP programmer and from the moment you post the ad until the time the programmer is working can be as low as 15 minutes. So there is no lag time to get the worker.
The concept of “one week out” means that if you hire a programmer this way, he will work for approximately one week before you notice a significant drop off in the quality of work, or the outsourcer simply stops responding. This is just a fact of life. How long would you keep working an $8/hr job with zero chance of promotion? These people aren’t stupid, just broke. It’s fine to offer a low wage, because that’s money that human being wasn’t going to have before they met you. Be upfront. Don’t nickle and dime. But don’t expect that person to be happy about it, and don’t expect them to do any kind of work that requires them to sleep on it. They’ll decide there are greener pastures somewhere else.

This is fine though, and part of the paradigm. As long as you maintain security best practices, high turnover isn’t a problem.

Test Driven Development really shines as a methodology when you have low skilled programmers. It simply produces very high quality code, it’s just time consuming. With ultra low cost programmers, time isn’t a factor. You can just hire more manpower and go to a 24 hour schedule.

In terms of WordPress, the difficulty lies in setting up the test environment. Low cost programmers can easily understand the TDD cycle, and can be taught quickly how to write tests. It’s the setting up of the system that they can’t do.

You should setup the development server yourself, and simply give access credentials to the