Hiring an outsourced programmer is fraught with risk. I’ve discussed this in previous articles, but today I want to highlight all the good that happens once you find the right programmer. I am not going to name the client this work was done on, since it could be a bit sensitive for various reasons. However, I am going to explain to you, at a high level, what happened. Perhaps you’ll see possibilities for your own organization, especially if you find yourself in the situation my client did.
I am not a programmer, but I have worked closely with some of the best since 2002. By “best” I mean they understand agile team coding practices, they quote their work so that it includes refactoring, and their technical prowess is such that their code remains resilient and secure as time passes. You might think these would be basic requirements, and in fact they are. So, in addition the basics, a “best” programmer also listens and communicates well. That is, in fact, the most difficult quality to find.
I’ve been given permission to mention the programmer by name in this article that I had such a great experience with. His name is Derek Brottlund, and I found him on Upwork after the previous programmer I hired quit the project mid-stream. The problem before us was significant and we knew would be expensive to fix. The website that needed our help was extremely complex. It used two financial channels to take revenue based on tax exempt or not tax exempt, as well as selling access to exclusive events that used those channels. The system was not to allow a single purchase to mix the financial channels together, and so had to contain error messaging that would let the end user easily understand what needed to happen in order to complete their purchase in situations where the channels were mixed. There’s more, but you get the idea. The website was brought to my attention by a colleague who calls me “the fix it guy” because I always seem to be able to figure these problems out and if I cannot remediate it I find someone who can.
The previous programmer I hired couldn’t get it done due to an unanticipated health issue, but he was not making much progress besides. Now we had lots of incomplete code to deal with that solved some problems but not others. And yes, this is a WordPress website, but with a lot of custom functionality and therefor a lot of custom code. We paid several thousand dollars and got nowhere. Now we were faced with the prospect of having to hire yet another programmer. I put on my manager’s hat and set about evaluating other programmers. I found Derek, and never looked back.
From the beginning, Derek was clear that getting into someone else’s code, especially code that wasn’t annotated (no comments in it to tell you what the various code blocks were doing) wasn’t a good idea. He started from scratch. He replaced some plugins that were no longer supported by their authors (not easy to do), and completely re-imagined how the purchasing interface should work with the two financial channels. It took several more months of work, but in the end he turned in a stellar product. The new website now runs on PHP 8.2 just fine (was on PHP 7.4), and is much faster than the previous incarnation. He also provided a series of videos explaining how the system works. He made another series just for me, because I’m the one that has to keep all this updated and so I needed a bit more of a technical treatment. It’s been fantastic.
It was a bit scary, having already spent so much money only to have to start over. But Derek definitely made it worthwhile. Along the way we did status checks. He asked a lot of questions, some we had never considered, which helped us avoid dead ends or re-work. In other words, Derek’s ability to anticipate problems was critical to the success of the project, in addition to his programming skills, of course. To top it all off, Derek is friendly and easy to talk to.
When it goes right, hiring an outsourced programmer gets you to the finish line in solid fashion. When the programmer has the big picture in mind and knows what questions to ask or suggestions to push back on, that is a leader, and that’s what you want to hire.