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Game Development

Neutral experience on rent-a-coder

I hired another guy on rent-a-coder, this time to do a php based webpage to store uploaded game servers and send them back to C++. Here’s the page The whole job was a 2 day project, 3 at most. I gave the coder two weeks. He did a bit here and there, but I could […]

I hired another guy on rent-a-coder, this time to do a php based webpage to store uploaded game servers and send them back to C++.

Here’s the page

The whole job was a 2 day project, 3 at most. I gave the coder two weeks. He did a bit here and there, but I could tell by his communications that 75% of the work was started the day before, and it ended up being two days late.

I had to spend half a day refactoring his code, testing, and reporting bugs. There was definitely a lack of investment, by which I mean doing the absolute minimum unless I complain. The webpage is an example of this, where he used a big block for each server, unsuitable for more than 10 or rows. The use of obviously conflicting reserved column names such as “ip” and “name”, embedded into the code, is another example. Were things strictly wrong? No. Could they have been done better by someone who cared? Absolutely.

This is one of the reasons I liked working with Rui before. He would spend the time to do a good job, at the level of quality I would have done myself, if not more. There’s a lot of things you can’t tell in an interview, and you can’t get no matter how much you pay for, and really caring about doing a good job is one of them.

I’ve been on the other end of things so I still rated the coder very good at a 7.

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