As a Developer in a small marketing company the development “Team” is a whole 2 people, this means that out time is not only very valuable but we try and be as efficient as possible with what we do. It’s therefore easy to justify using a freelancer when we need them, if a whole website needs to be created and we need the extra hand, sure, use the Freelance guy.
From a business point this all makes sense, it means you can grow your team to take on a project when needed and once the project enters maintenance and update phase you kick the extras, thank them for their time and then carry on as normal with 2 developers looking after the myriad of pages and posts and updates created.
So why do I say it’s killing our industry? There’s a few reasons and I’m going to be as reasonable as possible for this; I mean, I don’t want to, but if someone does read this I don’t want pitchfork anarchy showing up at my place of work.
Freelancers have no accountability, they do what needs to be done to get paid, drop the project like its hot and then that’s it. Gone, no contact and no obligation to answer any question other than “Can you work for us again? We’ll pay you!”. But what happens to the developers that stay on? (me!) we have to now learn how the hell this guy codes, read through his largely undocumented project and try find out how the hell he did it in order to get familiar with the code. Now you might be thinking, “Aw don’t be like that, reading code and understanding it is easy”. And it is, right up until you get tasked with changing something, and you have to spend an extra 20 minutes to change a setting in a plugin that you didn’t know existed. “It’s only 20 minutes” you say. Yes, 20 minutes 3 times today, twice tomorrow, next week it’s going to take us an hour to find the Google API that he used so we can change the address for a client. This time adds up, and I’m pretty sure in the long run it means more cost to the client (Remember, we charge hourly) than if we had developed the website in house.
Another reason is that some freelancers create a website completely out of scope, then throw it at the company’s feet, say “thanks” and walk off, company then gives it to another agency who manage the website, they see that the freelancer was crap so they make more changes, but not real adjustments, just duct tape and some cardboard to make it “Work” again. Then that website gets passed around a few more times, each time the developer (or nearest person with google) tries to make some changes, this goes round and round until it end up on my desk (or my server, you decide what is funnier here). And here it site, like a blobfish falling apart while I have to spend extra precious hours trying to save this thing from falling apart. All because some freelancer didn’t take the time to document or just build in the correct way of doing things and did the shortcut to make it work.
The last reason is that Freelancers are in high demand, because full time developers are expensive, so they aren’t working full time, this means that every Freelancer that you hire is also working on something in Angular, and IONIC project, 3 WordPress websites and his own “Million Dollar” Android app. But he promises he has the time for your one project to be done in a week. These guys are burnt out and underpaid at best.
So what’s the solution? HIRE your good freelancers, the guy is probably a multi tasking machine, and like a BA student that has to review his own essay, let that guy review and maintain the shit he wrote.
RagingNiceGuy 