Our mission is to accelerate software development, and the most effective way to accomplish this mission is to find talented programmers and get them working efficiently.  In addition to promoting our own capable users, we have been reaching out labor exchanges like oDesk to make this process easier.

Today we posted links to oDesk on our team pages, and on our Talent page.   If you need help, you can fill in the search form, and be connected with a big catalog of “providers” that have signed up on oDesk.  oDesk makes it easy to hire them by the hour, which is perfect for the trial process that I recommend.

A year ago, I criticized oDesk as being rigid for developers and out of touch with the needs of managers running projects with more than a few people.  To remedy this, I rashly announced that Assembla was launching its own online staffing service with fewer rules, more payment options, and generally better integration with a larger project team.

Ahh.. the folly of youth.

As it turned out, the projects that people posted on Assembla were very small – not what I wanted to put before our community of hotshot developers – and it quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to be competitive as an online staffing portal.

So, I took a second look at oDesk, with an eye to what they are doing right. After we tried it, I realized that the job that oDesk does in managing qualification, contracting, and payment for a 10% margin is pretty amazing.  I asked for the chance to sit down with oDesk management, and get answers to some of the questions that had been bothering me about oDesk.

Andy’s concern:  If I am working through oDesk, I have to run the oDesk time logger, which takes pictures of my screen every 15 minutes.  This seems intrusive or impractical, especially for workers that are not coders, which is a decent percentage of the total project mix.
Answer:  oDesk has no requirement that providers run oDesk Team (the automatic time tracker) and we will even bill the buyer for time entered into the system maually (we call this time "offline time").  There are several benefits to running oDesk Team, though.  You can avoid the hassle of making timesheet entries, and oDesk guarantees payment for the time that you track with oDesk Team.

Andy’s concern: I have to pay on a credit card.  This circumvents the normal accounting process for a business.
Answer: oDesk will invoice qualified buyers who prefer to pay by check.  Indeed, many oDesk buyers pay by check.  Look here for more information. 

Andy’s concern: I am prohibited by the oDesk agreement from getting out from under these, and other rules by moving oDesk contractors to direct business relationships.
Answer: It is possible to hire people out of oDesk for direct arrangements for buyout fee.  For more information see our "Buy Out" process.

I realized that the oDesk service fits well with our recommended staffing process, which boils down to:

• Advertise globally, to maximize the chance of finding someone really good
• Try a few candidates.  Pay them to work on real tickets from the project.  This will qualify people more effectively and reliably than an interview process, and more efficiently than a trial that does not involve real tasks.
• When you find someone you like, sign them up.