hiring vbulletin coders

[vbullfan]

Hello Everyone. I have a minor gripe...I'm surprised at how little support there is out there for hiring vbulletin coders. I would think that a firm offering full time jobs to vb devs would be something that is met with open arms from the vbulletin community, but it seems to be the opposite situation. On vbulletin.com there is no place to advertise a job opening, and on vbulletin.org there is just the service request forum, which feels intentionally tucked away. We have even talked to guys at vbulletin and they have no suggestions for us. We have taken out a few ads on other vb sites, but it seems like the best communities (vbulletin.com/org) offer no support for hiring.

Our site is built on the vbulletin platform (although highly modified for business specific reasons) so we can't hire any old php coder because vbulletin has a steep learning curve when it comes to complicated mods. This creates a problem for us scaling our dev team, because it is so hard to advertise to the vbulletin coder community.

Do you guys have any suggestions for us? Our company is a huge fan of vbulletin (obviously, we built our site around it) but building a dev team seems to be a daunting task. Any suggestions? Has anyone had luck hiring vb devs? Any help you can give is much appriciated!

[Brad]

My advice is to post a service request here and talk to everyone that responds to it. Make sure you see work they have done for others, and talk to the people they have worked for in the past.

It'll take awhile to find someone you'll be able to trust enough to do this work for you. Once you find that person though you should hang on to them for as long as possible.

In other words don't be fooled into hiring some random guy with a 'coder' title because that title really doesn't mean anything.

[vbullfan]

Hi Brad and thanks very much for your advice.

I'm a professional project manager and experienced in hiring developers. Choosing the right developer is not a problem for us. The problem is finding a big pool of candidates to choose from. Because we need vbulletin-specific developers, we are limited in where we can promote our job openings. For instance, go on to any of the big job sites and you will find very few (if any) vbulletin experts. Then when we go to the big vb sites, where the pro's hang out, there is no support for hiring. Our dream senario would be to buy banner ads on vb.com/org and advertise our jobs in this way, but obviously there are no banner ads to buy

So what alternatives are there for a firm that needs a to build a solid vbulletin team? How does one reach the proper audience? Maybe there is a big vb event we could sponsor or something? Any ideas/advice on this is much apprecaited!

Oh btw, we were able to purchase banners on theadminzone.com, thanks for your support!!

[StuntFactoryX]

i could be wrong but my impression is vb.org runs a very tight ship and there main focus is to provide add ons for the everyday vb admin and to keep vb.com focused on set up support and "how to use" support. they seem to try to keep this site very non commercial.

however ive seen some of these coders w/ smaller sites. i seen sites like vbmechanic.com that i think specializes in what your looking for.

im a fan of codemonkey at vbmodder.com

but on the bright side vb.org will make your life easier. almost everything under the sun that you could ever want has probably already been written on here and just needs to be installed and maintained.

[vbullfan]

Originally Posted by StuntFactoryX

i could be wrong but my impression is vb.org runs a very tight ship and there main focus is to provide add ons for the everyday vb admin and to keep vb.com focused on set up support and "how to use" support. they seem to try to keep this site very non commercial.

And I respect this. I just wish there was a place that supported large vbulletin-based site because we need support too!

Originally Posted by StuntFactoryX

however ive seen some of these coders w/ smaller sites. i seen sites like vbmechanic.com that i think specializes in what your looking for.

im a fan of codemonkey at vbmodder.com

Thanks, I will check these out.

Originally Posted by StuntFactoryX

almost everything under the sun that you could ever want has probably already been written on here and just needs to be installed and maintained.

I wish it were this easy, but we have very specialized needs and the projects are very specific to our business. Once in a while we use a public hack, but 99% of the time we are building our solutions from the ground up.

[Princeton]

I am aware that you mentioned that you are experienced in "hiring"; I am posting this link here for anyone else that may be interested in the "subject line".

Do Your Research Before Hiring!

[vbullfan]

Princeton, I read your excellent article before posting this thread. I thought it was a great piece.

If I may, I have one point of contention with your article. You say that it is best to price the work on a "per project" basis. From my experience, project based pricing always results in someone getting the short end of the stick. Either the project is easier or harder than first imagined, it never goes exactly as planned. So if it is easier, the client is screwed, if it is harder, the developer is screwed. If the project is way harder than first imagined (which in my experience is 80% of the time) then what ends up happening is the developer says "forget this, this isn't what I signed up for" and the project falls to pieces.

For these reasons I much prefer to pay on a per hour basis. Paying per hour usually results in a fair deal. And I believe it also puts the developer and the client on the same objective. For instance, the client doesn't want to make last minute changes because he knows he has to pay for them, and the developer doesn't do a rush job at the end because he knows he is being paid for his efforts. Also, if the scope of the project changes mid stream (which happens often) the flexibility of the per hour payment wont cause the problems that a per project pricing would.

My points here are mainly regarding larger projects, and I realize that you were probably geared more toward smaller jobs in your article. I'm not so much disagreeing with you as I am trying to share what (little) knowledge I have

[Princeton]

this only relates to people who are looking to hire for custom mods - not providing full-time employment

What you're talking about is inexperience.

Cost is determined by a variety of factors (I won't go into this) ... but ultimately, you can save more money if you accept a "per project" bids over hourly bids.

Just imagine ... paying someone hourly for a project that takes 100+ hours to complete. At $75 an hour, that's $7,500+. Most programmers "here" would have done the project for $5,000 (maybe less).

Inexperienced programmers do not understand the complexity involved in projects ... the same thing applies to people who are looking to hire - employer (member submitting a service request).

For starters, all projects should go through a "beta testing" phase to find bugs and usability issues - some projects will require more time than others.

• most employers do not account for this period ... they want something and they want it now
• inexperienced programmers do not account for this period ... they want the money asap and really could care less of what happens thereafter

I've seen many projects fail because of 1 or more of the following...

1. forward compatibility
2. growth
3. security
4. usability

On 99% of service requests - the above is never mentioned.

When a project fails it ends up costing employer and programmer money.

employer - hires someone else to fix issues
programmer - just lost a paying customer


TIP
When submitting a Service Request - If a programmer does not ask for a detailed bulleted description of your request - ignore them.

Coders looking for work - If employer does not provide a detailed bulleted description of project - ignore them.

[MRGTB]

I tend to agree with Princeton, be careful about offering a coder money based on an hourly fee instead of a total project fee.

[vbullfan]

I'm happy to report that we've had some limited success hiring for our job openings. After working pretty hard for a week, and spending about $1,000 advertising on vb related sites, we have ended up with some pretty good candidates. To anyone looking to hire vb devs, I would definitely advise that you get involved with the vb community leaders. That seems to be the best way to find good people. I also think our "finder's fee" idea is a pretty good one, as it seems most of our applicants are referred by a friend.

I will report back when we make our hires to share any other tips we learned during this process. And as always, I am open to ideas from this community.

Take care all.