Finding a Ready-Made Dev Team? 294
marshrew writes "We are a small startup just coming out of a period of R&D with IP and prototype code (containing open source, commercial & freelancer-built custom components) developed/integrated in-house by essentially one guy. We're at the point where we want to build out first commercial implementation which will require a handful of developers for at least six months. We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with. We don't mean a splinter group from a larger dev house, but an agile, self-contained team, who enjoy working together and have an existing practice. Geography is not a problem as we are used to working in a distributed manner." Does such an animal exist? What have other teams done in a situation like this?
IBM Global Services (Score:5, Informative)
The global team.. (Score:1, Informative)
1. release source
2. internet builds product
3. exploit generosity
4. ???
5. profit (maybe?)
Dev Team hiring (Score:5, Informative)
Have you tried... (Score:4, Informative)
Look for layoffs (Score:2, Informative)
Either way, its rich pickings and unfortunately not that hard to find.
Try Origin (Score:3, Informative)
Or S3 (Silicon Software Solutions) in Dublin, Ireland. I used to work for them.
Team 345 (Score:4, Informative)
http://team345.com/ [team345.com]
sure they do (Score:1, Informative)
We were one... (Score:5, Informative)
Although many websites (like rentacoder.com) offer this functionality, it is difficult to guarantee the quality of people you will end up working with. The surprising limitation of these sites is that they have no mechanism to ensure quality of bidders or participants. Which is exactly why Arzoo.com (by the hotmail founder) failed. Bad quality. Add to that, people simply trying to outbid others. I have even seen $100 for a 1 month job!!! If you go to such sites, you are very likely to lose some time trying to filter out the not-so-good ones.
Since you will be working with people you know little about, there are however things that you could do, before making your final decision.
1. See if they have blogs. Look at their attitude, language, code quality, passion, whatever...
2. Talk to them. Check for conversational skills. These are very important!
3. See if they have done any open source work. (That will be a real bonus!)
4. Ask them to send source code.
I feel such a practice certainly has a place in modern IT. Agile, Quality-Concious and Inexpensive.
Things are looking up again, and thats good news.
Good luck to you.
Got a team for you (Score:1, Informative)
Okay, so this is a blatant plug and not unbiased advice. Mod me down if you must... but it is in direct answer to the question. I'm posting anonymously so that my karma isn't being used as a marketting tool. ;-)