Indian Freelancers | A nightmare waiting to happen.

After working on many projects, we notice that our clients “think” or “believe” that using freelancers from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries is a terrible idea.
Some customers tell us that while It is dirt cheap to have a web developer from India, it also turns out to be extremely time consuming , stressful and on the long run expensive.
You might not know this but Canada Web Developer, works mostly with agencies, 75% of all the websites created by us are for customers that resell our sites to other customers.

Web Developers from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries lack an understanding of the English language, this language barrier is frustrating when you try to convey an idea or an important message.

But the worst part is not the frustration that you get from being unable to get things done. This is also a huge problem to your code, because HTML, PHP, ASP.NET and pretty much all programing languages are based in English.

So if you have problems talking to your Web Developer from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries, think about how confusing technical English is, and then apply that lack of understanding to the work that you are asking them to perform.

The second problem is related to the language barrier that we described before, Poor Coding.

So after a while of wrestling with your developer from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries, you get a website that looks rather unfinished, not polish at all, dull colors, slow loading and 100% hacker friendly.

But why is that?

Well if you can’t talk simple English with your developer, then how can you expect them to create a professional website, if all the code is natively in Technical English?

Yes having a web developer from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries is cheap, they work for less than $5 USD per hour, some will even go as low as $1 USD per hour.
Compared to the standard 50 – 70 USD per hour from a real web developer or software engineer, its dirt cheap. But there is a catch with the developers from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries.

Our Customer, let’s call him Dave, needed a Website transferred from server A to server B, this process only takes less than an hour to complete (at least it does with us), he sent an email to the Indian “Developer” in the morning of Day 1.

The developer replies saying that the transfer was completed the afternoon of Day 1.

Dave goes to his PC and checks the site, the site is not working, and he is getting a page from his Web Hosting Company and not his website.

He messages the developer back, asking him to check what is going on.

The developer sends him an email on the morning of Day 2, saying that the transfer needed more time from the domain provider to work.

Dave asks how much time.

Developer said up to 48 hours.

Dave is confused about this because he has seen from us that site transfers won’t take that long to be active, but he said “different developers, different ways” and waited those 48 hours.

On Day 3 Dave checks to see if the website is working, the same web hosting message, this time he waits for the 48 hours to pass.

On Day 4, he checks again and the site is still not working, so he contacts the developer.

The night of Day 4 the developer sends him and email saying that the hosting company is not working and that he thinks they have a virus, he recommends that Dave moves his site to another company.

On Day 5, Dave contacts the web hosting company and asks them what is going on, the Web Hosting Company tells him that they don’t have a virus and that the domain is not pointed at his account, since he already used his free web transfer they said that they can fix the issue if he pays for a support contract.

Since Dave already paid the Indian developer, so he refuses the help from the hosting company and emails the Indian “Developer”.

The night of Day 5 the developer sends him an email saying that he did what he was paid to do, and that the hosting company is lying.

On Day 6 Dave’s customer calls him asking about the site and the reason as of why the site is still not working, Dave explains the situation (sort of) and reassures the customer that the site will be live the next day.

Right after that he sends an email to the Indian “Developer” asking him to refund his money since the site was not live.

The developer does not answer or refunds Dave, so he goes to PayPal and opens a claim, Dave is unsure if the Hosting Company will be able to take the site live in time.

So he calls Canada Web Developer, explains the situation, pays the transfer fee + rush fee because at the time we were busy with other projects.

And we get to work.

We discover that the developer did not transfer the files to the right directory on the server and the domain was not redirected to the new server.

We had to redo everything that the Indian “Developer” did, we added the domain to the new server, pointed the domain to the new server and transferred the files from server A to our server to check the files for corruption and then send them to server B.

The site was live within 5 minutes of Dave paying the invoice with Canada Web Developer.

Dave lost 6 days and $45 US, because PayPal does not cover virtual goods or services for a refund.

Thing is he wasn’t that upset about the money, he was upset about the waste of time, in his own words:

Dave is just one of many customers that regrets the decision of hiring a Developer from India, like him many more have stated that local developers like Canada Web Developer, while more expensive upfront, we save time, stress and problems.

So we decided to run a small experiment, we created a client account on oDesk and posted a slightly complicated job offer to create a website for us.

The next day we check the account and we got hundreds of applications, 80% of which were by “Developers” from India, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other similar countries.

They included poor grammar, stolen portfolios from sites they didn’t make and people with little or no experience had applied to the job, some with hourly rates set at as low as $2. We specifically asked for experienced designers and we got the “developers” blatantly disregarding our requirements, some individual freelancers from India even claimed outrageous things that could easily be proved false with a simple Google search by any client.

The ones who didn’t lie had portfolios with screens that looked like they were made in paint. No personal online presence, no references, no history.

But for some strange reason they have positive feedback with about 30 or more reviews and yet they lack on everything else, from reading the job post to actually have the sill set needed for the job.

We actually wonder how they can have positive feedback.

And most importantly, why do sites like oDesk allow the clients to be exposed to a possible Scam.