I think trying to build a search engine with external coders is madness.

If you have some budget (it sounds like you do), you’d do better to find someone local and gifted to work with you, preferably at least part time in the same space.

Overall, building a search engine is a monumental task. Make sure you have your specs and expectations well in order before you start.

Thanks for the kind words. But I think the blended model already exists. It’s called hiring a software house. It’s more expensive but a hell of a lot more reliable.

That’s what we do. Provide integrated solutions and do custom coding for some fairly large applications.

We have our book filled for at least three months in advance. The issue is more with finding talented and reliable developers to add to our team.

We will look at new projects, but we pick and choose.

I congratulate you on the lively discussion that you’ve generated on your post and thank you for your informative replies. I completely agree on the benefits which you pointed out regarding the instant feedback that you receive from face to face development work. Because of the short-comings of off-shoring these benefits are a tremendous opportunity for some company in the future. Perhaps a blended offshore/face to face model will dramatically change the development landscape one day. Such blended teams do exist and have worked but I don’t believe that even any big consulting firms have figured out a way to do so predictably. It’s a problem that I’ve been trying to crack for years. I still salivate over the market opportunity.

As an IT manager you are the ideal user of oDesk.

A big issue with outsourcing is that the person doing the outsourcing is not at all prepared to manage IT projects.

Unfortunately, these sites seek to cater to the widest possible audience. Which leads to a lot of broken sites and software. If someone does not have a strong project management or technical background s/he should find a project manager first and then think about outsourcing.

We’ve decided not to outsource and instead to build the resources in-house. Although we are good at managing these projects, there’s nothing like getting together in the same space and looking and pointing at a monitor together.

While nominally more expensive, the savings in time and increase in quality more than make up for the expense.

As a professional IT manager from the experience of seeing so many people asking for completely unnecessary and extraneous skill sets when hiring, I know that it takes some skill to clarify the precise problem that needs to be solved, identify the skills required to complete that job, and assess whether the candidate has the required skills. However if you CAN narrow the scope of the problem you can certainly get good results out of oDesk or any other developers.

I would go so far as to say that any business owner thinking of spending lots of time themselves working on a solution they could outsource should seriously assess the worth of their time and consider outsourcing. Perhaps the inability to dissect problems and delegate work is a business growth limiting issue. Some startups and small businesses certainly have more time than money, but that is not always true. I believe Companies like oDesk are a great asset. Whether it is oDesk or some other upstart that does it better and eventually puts oDesk out of business, such companies truly have a fantastic future.