Geeks and Freelancers for Hire

If you're like most professionals, you don't have a staff of technicians on call. But here's the next best thing: Outsourcing.

Freelance programmers, writers, web designers and other technical professionals are all a few clicks away. Find them at online freelancing hubs such as elance, rentacoder or guru.com

Here's how it works: Register at the site. Select the category of work you want done and write a detailed description. You can specify price range, country (e.g., one of my friends has had good results with programmers from Romania), time frame and feedback rating.

Hiring someone unknown can be scary. That's why these freelance hubs have rating systems, with comments by people who have used the services. You can browse the categories to find the top producers.

Finally you click to put your job up for bids. Within a few hours you'll start getting offers from all over the world. (Bidders don't have your email address. They respond to your job description on the website, and their bids are forwarded to you.)

You'll probably notice that bids from America and western Europe are higher than those from other parts of the globe. That reflects the cost of living more than the quality of the work. Respond to the bidders that you want to follow up on. You will probably want to see some of their previous work and check references.

When you are ready to hire one of the bidders, you go to the website and click to accept the bid. Your bidding is then closed.

To think about when hiring an overseas project worker

• If you choose to hire someone whose first language is different from your own, then you need to be especially articulate in stating exactly what you want done. With a language barrier, the problem is not usually the technical jargon, but rather the everyday idioms and slang that could be misinterpreted if translated literally. Be as concrete as possible in your communication.
  
  
• Another potential problem with hiring someone overseas is the time difference. It's pretty cool to think that they're working while you sleep, but when you need to talk to them, or when you need a quick email reply, it can be complicated. I recently had to online-chat with someone in China, which meant some very late nights for me.

Rentacoder is geared mainly for programming and other technical work. Elance and guru offer a variety of services, including technical, legal, marketing book-keeping, ghostwriting, translating and administrative support.

Check them out. If you have any of the above skills (or know someone who does) you can sign up to be a service provider and bid on work yourself.