Cancelling A Programming Contract

We recently had to cancel a contract we had with a programmer to produce some software. Unfortunately the person was just not working out. When employing a contractor is that they will generally be their most communicative at the start. This is when they are trying to convince you that they are the right person for the job. In effect, they are selling themselves to you. In this particular case, they would ask questions, I would provide some answers, and then ask something in return. Usually, I never heard anything back. In case this was a language issue I even had a local follow up multiple times with the promise that things would improve. It would be nice to say that they had, but in the end we needed to hire a new programmer.

The process of hiring a new programmer has been interesting. Given that I did not know anyone locally, I went to one of the multitude of outsourcing web sites out there. I posted a vague description of the project, and anyone who responded and sounded competent got an email with a bigger specification. Of the 30 bids I got, about 20 got the bigger specification, and about five came back to me. I am sure more would have come back to me given time, but it became pretty obvious who I needed to choose, and shut things down.

The interesting thing about this programmer is that whilst his hourly rate is higher than some of the other bids, his estimates of hours is actually lower, leading to a lower overall cost. Over the coming months we will see how this programmer turns out, but I am sure that it will be better than the last one. If nothing else, this one talks to me, and I am learning a heap about the new technologies for developing applications.