As we’re building out sourcerer, I started to think of ideal user groups that could take advantage of the intelligent profiles we are offering. One of the first groups that came to mind were freelance software developers.

Since starting my previous company, several agencies and individuals have approached me from the freelance community hoping to contribute their skillset, expertise, and energy in helping me build out my products. This ranged from anyone with web and app development experience to more seasoned computer vision engineers and data scientists all looking for contractual/project-based work.

Often, these software freelancers ended up coming from the likes of India, Eastern Europe, and South America. I’ve always been enticed, for a number of reasons including handling one off work, internal resource availability, time constraints, and pure economics to accept some of these proposals but have always declined them to date.

What always perturbed me was the lack of verifiable information that I could use to evaluate these groups.

What tends to happen is that you would go to one of the many freelancer sites out there and post your job with details of the project and the kind of developer you need, and somehow, within a couple of minutes, you’re flooded by dozens of candidates pushing their expertise and skills. How is that possible? Perhaps bots? Maybe some new advanced AI that matches your needs to the likes of the best possible candidate?

Regardless, if you can get past the fact that these “individuals” didn’t take the time to read your job description, you still have the problem of verifying their abilities and claims. Has said freelancer in fact spent the last 4 years working primarily in Python using the Django framework you want to use? Does said freelancer write quality code, which is used by others? Has said freelancer used some of the most recent features of Python that you’d like to incorporate into your product?

The list of questions goes on…

How could you find the answers to these questions? It’s tough, all you can really do is blindly trust what they are able to sell you, but can you really afford to take that risk? Perhaps for a personal project but for professional work I can’t be so sure of that. This becomes the ultimate question for me, and one that I’m not willing to take so lightly.

I need clarity and I’m sure others need it as well.

Now, while a recommendation from someone I respect can lend more weight to this decision of mine, it’s still often not enough to get over the hump. What would get me over this hump would be direct optics into their past work. This is NOT a summary of what he or she wrote in their TopTal or Upwork profiles. This is NOT their resume. This is NOT looking and trying out what they claim is their previous work. This is NOT what they try to sell me during our consultation discussion.

It’s what they’ve worked on. It’s how long they have done it. It’s their habits and preferences. It’s there technology choices. It’s the source code they’ve written and the commits they’ve pushed.

It’s all the information I’ve been speaking about in my previous posts.

It’s sourcerer.io