Clinton Skakun

Hiring Madness and Freelancing

With technology with now days, outsourcing is common place and anyone with a laptop and a Internet connection can become a web developer. We call them freelance developers. People who work for multiple employers or clients. Many of these freelance developers are amazing, they blow your mind and compel you to tell the world. Then, there are those developers that set high expectations of themselves, make big promises to clients, and after the initial deposit you never hear from them again, or they spoof the project. And then there are those developers that are sincere, they work their asses off … but they can’t communicate with you. Maybe they can’t speak your language, or maybe there’s a lack of communication because of the medium you’re using(e.g. Text only gets across 7% of your communication), OR maybe your coder is just one fo those people who think you’re full of crap and don’t want to listen. Have you ever been in one of these situations? Most people who have had any hiring experience have.

I believe the main pitfall of even experienced programmers is listening to the client from a “coder’s” perspective. Thinking about HOW to get it done instead of truly understanding WHAT the client’s vision is.

You’ve lost Time and Money and … You’re Not Alone!

A gentleman, I previously talked to about a web project, told me about an experience he had with a non-local freelancer. His complaint was that the coder he was dealing with just simply didn’t listen, he didn’t possess empathy and he couldn’t fully understand what needed to get done. He came to me because he wanted someone local and he liked what he saw on my blog(one of the reasons why I blog in the first place).

Don’t just hire anyone! How much money do you have to spend on people who don’t get the work done? How much of your time and hard earned money will you waste if you don’t hire the right programmer right now … instead of later?

Lesson 1: Empathy is always the 1st trait you want to look for in a freelancer, especially a developer. A developer must always shows he or she cares and make attempts to dive deeper into your vision.

Price vs. Quality, is there even a correlation?

It’s a popular thing to do now days. Hiring overseas to cut costs and widen margins. Everything from Virtual Assistants to Writing Articles can be outsourced to people anywhere from India to Texas to the North Pole. Does lower cost automatically mean lower quality? Of course not. The fact that anyone with a computer and a PayPal can become your employee doesn’t mean there aren’t tons upon tons of excellent, experienced people out there ready and waiting to serve you with every ounce of breathe they have. For people in India, or other foreign countries, your work might mean food or no food for them and their family. Most people won’t fowl that up. Then we have to deal with people who don’t have a concept of professionalism. When you work with businesses all around the world your professionalism has to be peak. For example, spelling mistakes or grammar errors on a resume is a professional leak. Or people you don’t hear from for 3 days because they went on vacation and forgot to tell you.

Lesson 2: Professionals almost NEVER undersell themselves. Why would you encourage people who do?

Does Education Matter?

Let me tell you something: YES! Can you imagine hiring someone who’s uneducated? Let’s avoid the topic of formal education or post-secondary. I believe that there are better forms of education than college. Self education, learning at your own pace, is the most valuable and most overlooked education out there. There is no limit to what a person can learn by simply going to a collage library, picking up a bunch of books and then instantly putting what you learn to practice. Educated people are more passionate, they know how to sell themselves(even if they don’t have a degree) and usually more street smart.

Lesson 3: Having a BS in Computer Science or MBA or Marketing degree does not assure you that the person capable of getting the job done. It’s how much they learned in those classes and how much they put to use. Don’t judge by education alone.

Does Experience Matter?

Let me tell you something: HELL YES! I have a saying, “You don’t *know* anything until you *do* it and do it well.” The people who know and the people who do are two very different people. The people who have perfected their skills though practice are the ones you want to hire, not the people who have perfected their knowledge. I have to tell you, in my own career, experience is something I’d pay 10 million dollars for if I could get it the first day. But of course you can’t get sufficient experience in one day, it takes a long time. That’s why it’s important that you pay close attention to how much experience a programmer has before hiring him or her. The less experience a programmer has the longer it takes, and you’re paying for that inexperience.

Lesson 4: A programmer must have lots of experience, and show signs of constant and never ending improvement.

The Pain is Greater than the Paying, Always!

A good programmer or web developer is your best friend. Good people are rare, GREAT people are even rarer. A great programmer has improved VERY FAST! He knows a lot about what he does and has spent hours upon hours experimenting and pulling his hair out. If you run into a bald programmer you’re in luck!

Can I be your Web Developer Already?

After all this I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to someday serve your web development needs. I know how hard it is sometimes to find a good web developer and that it can be a frustrating process. I know you might be saying, “what sets you apart from everyone else?” This is why I’ve devoted my web development career to helping people like you find true quality service. And isn’t that the kind of service you want? I’d love to hear from you and learn more about your project, your needs and what you look for when hiring a developer. If you want to know more about what it is I do, please head over to my Service Page. Maybe I can even find someone who could do the job better than I can. Do you have any concerns, any questions? I’d love to hear your comments and opinions on this post. Please feel free to network with me on Twitter.

Photo Credit: The Wisdom Journal

Outliers is a MUST READ for anyone who studies history, successful people or the hidden side of what people call “genius”. Outliers explains how people who like Bill Gates, the Beatles and Dale Carnegie achieved on a massive massive scale and how it wasn’t caused by luck or genius like most like to believe.

What the hell is an “Outlier”?

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers-in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Bill Gates, Lucky or Genius?

You’ll learn that Bill Gates, the whizkid who had a higher than average IQ, didn’t actually make his business success on smarts, or at least not alone, but rather because of the one in a million life time opportunity to have constant use of a computer(which in those days, most grown ups didn’t have access to a computer, unless they designed or programmed them). Bill Gates spent more time using a computer back then, than more kids now days dp. How many kids Bill’s age had a computer 40 years ago? Not too many. How many more “genius” billionaires would there be now days if more 13 year olds had full time access to a computer 40 years ago? A lot! If you continue to read the book you’ll find out that Bill Gate’s mother had a lot to do with his business success. Having two rich parents who both, had connections and money to buy him computer time, it’s not a surprise Bill Gates had chances no one else had.

The 10,000 hour rule

Malcom Gladwell says that almost everyone who has succeeded at a large scale, some time in history, all had around 10,000 hours of solid practice under their belt. 10,000 hours is a lot and Gladwell says it’s almost a guarantee that you will do well at your craft, and maybe even become another billionaire(or millionaire). Not everyone is interested in becoming a billionaire, some people are just happy to live a productive life. By any rate, success never comes unless there is a great deal of practice involved. Someone once said, “If you haven’t practiced you don’t deserve to win.” Rarely does anyone do really well just on talent, without commitment and hard work and constant practice. If you want to beat everyone else, just practice for 10,000 hours, most people quit half way through.

This was true for the Beatles, who were given the chance of a lifetime to practice over 10,000 hours before going mainstream and becoming a hit.

Even Mozart needed at least a decade before he was up to standards:

“By the standards of mature composers, Mozart’s early works were not that outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang’s childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K 271) was not composed until he was 21. By that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years.” – Quote found at BeatleTracks Band

“I don’t know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody — somewhere — was practicing more than me.” – Larry Bird

Study their Environments

Gladwell says that there are tons of self-help books in bookstores that are more than eager to give you the 7 steps to success, or the 5 traits of successful people. But, he says, there aren’t a whole lot of books about the environments of these successful people, and how that contributed to their successes. It’s important to study the person, and it’s also important to understand the chances they were given in the age they lived in, their heritage, and so on. At first it may seem like Gladwell is saying that success is an accident or caused by luck(growing up in the right place at the right time) but what he’s really saying is that the people who were presented with opportunities took them. We ourselves are all born with opportunities and we have the ability to take them when presented. This theory backs up that most extremely skilled investors and entrepreneurs study the future needs, wants, changes etc and are the ones who can best adapt to them and can take advantage of these changes when they come(while everyone else wakes up one day and wonder why doing the same old thing doesn’t work any more).

Consider this book apart of your education! Read it and share its ideas with people around you.

“How do you cut through a rock? You either use time or a water-jet-cutter. The problem? For most, the proverbial water jet cutter hasn’t yet been invented.”

As a nation where the word “instant” is commonplace and where we can get results within seconds, we’ve undervalued this thing called consistency. We’re always looking for instant cash, instant breakthroughs and instant improvement. The problem with breakthroughs is that their extremely rare and most people cant live on lucky breaks. Instantaneous change also brings low value. Usually, the faster something is made, the lower its quality. It creates unpredictable and artificial results. It ignores the laws of momentum and the worst part is, it only works once in while.

“Trying to make a single momentous change is often not only successful, but often does not result in the desired effect. In fact, it is far better to make small habitual positive life changes that will catapult you to success. “ – Lighthouse Marketing Blog

Success could be much easier and would come much sooner if we could control our urges to rush things beyond their capacity. A lot of problems can be solved if we’d quit working so hard on having it all now and just learned how to pace ourselves. There are countless day to day routine actions you could take to improve your future. Maybe like working-out daily or finishing one small task on an unfinished project every day.

How many times have you spent entire weeks on a project to the point of complete burn out? It distracts your attention from other projects and other things that need to get done. It ends up feeling like you’re moving backward instead of forward. The climax of this overkill is a day of the week where you’re warding off a million urgent little things, fighting burn out and on top of that there’s regular work to do.

There’s nothing wrong with hard work, and sometimes/often you’ll feel the need to pull an all nighter to meet a deadline or get back up to speed. The point is, an effective work philosophy takes all the important areas of life and moves them ahead on a consistent basis, thus creating momentum. Much of this progress is so small that we tend to underestimate its significance. A lot of people throw in the towel before results have a chance to reveal themselves. However once the snowball grows larger it starts moving faster and starts cutting down and crushing whatever stands in its way. Only once it has come to a complete stop is when it’s hardest to get going again.

The momentum factor is what we miss when we overload ourselves with too much work, or try too hard to move things too fast. We’d all love to get a massive load of work done in a short period of time. Although the reality of it is, it somewhat goes against a few laws of nature. What happens when things grow too fast? Growing pains, other parts have to catch up and it can turn into a mess. After the fact, we expect to eat an entire elephant in one bite.

Jeff Olson explains the Sligh-Edge formula: the philosophy of “constant and never-ending improvement” similar to Dr. Deming’s philosophy. Dr. W. Edwards Deming partly responsible for his influence in reviving the Japanese economy after the second world war:

“Dr. Deming is credited as one of the leaders who brought one of the first quality movements to the Japanese. His basic premise was that the secret to help the Japanese achieve world power and economic success was if every single person and organization commit to constant improvement.” – Tony Robbins CANI System Explained.

It has been said, “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.”

“Jeff Olson talks about the Slight-Edge Formula for success. Imagine an incremental system where you consciously plan to improve just ¼% each day, or even each week. Can you do that? Sure you can. Everybody can. It has been said that “you can eat an elephant if you do it one bite at a time.” The same idea holds true with this concept. The premise is to experience minute improvements on a consistent basis that tend to compound over time like interest. A ¼% improvement in any skill each day is a 1-¾% improvement each week! A 7% improvement each month! An 84% improvement in just 1 year! It’s actually higher than that because all of your advances are compounding at an exponential rate! Are you beginning to see the potential of this compounding power at work within you?” – The Slight-Edge Formula

The Slight-Edge formula is easy, but it’s hard if you lack patience. The Slight-Edge formula will work faster than the overload, 20-hour-day-burnout formula. Even a baby can use this simple but dangerously powerful model.

“How to use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly”

If there’s one online marketing book you want to read this year, it’s The New Rules of PR and Marketing. The New Rules are all about using social media to market your business. The book starts out explaining how mass marketing is good at advertising when you don’t need it and hides on you when you go looking for it. Social media is about providing the right information to the user at the right time, at right place. This is what makes social media so powerful. I believe you could take this book and use it as a handbook in implementing social media for your business.

David explains the different vehicles you can use in social media and who their for. David does a fantastic job of summarizing the tools available and also explains that you don’t have to use ALL of the tools or just ONE, you can use as many as you want and whatever you have time for, and whatever your focus can handle in order to be most effective. I’m pretty much sold on the idea of using News Releases, which is one of the most powerful tools for attracting journalists and getting better results out of your search engine optimization. Tools like Blogs, Podcasts, Viral Marketing, News Releases, Forums, Videos etc etc can be used to reach to buyers directly. David will also explain to you how to create content specifically to attract and interest your buyers.

The New Rules can be applied to your personal brand as well. I believe this material applies to anyone who “sells” something on the web, whether it be a product, an idea, a political campaign, education, informative content or a community. I highly recommend you read this book cover to cover, if you’re really serious about growing an online presence for your brand or business.