It\u2019s 2017, and freelancers, independent contractors, and consultants now make up close to 15% of all workers in the United States. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thanks to a rising number of freelancing platforms, hiring talented freelance developers from all around the world is just a few clicks and a couple of Skype calls away!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the world of freelancing is not all rainbows and unicorns, and the recent explosion of freelance work has not been without casualties. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether you represent the hiring side or the hired side, there are plenty of horror stories to tell. You might want to read these with the lights on!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking for top talent fast? See how <\/em>Arc<\/a> can help you:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u26a1\ufe0f Find developers, designers, marketers, and more Hire top talent with Arc risk-free \u2192<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe seem to be experiencing some kind of performance challenges with our WordPress website,\u201d a client told Moose WorldWide Digital<\/a>, a dev house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The website seemed fine on the surface, so CEO Alan and his team at Mose WorldWide Digital dug a little deeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After downloading the client\u2019s WordPress site, which had been designed and implemented by a freelance developer who had since left, Alan and his team were completely shocked and speechless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo our amazement, the site had nearly nine hundred thousand files<\/strong> in it,\u201d Alan exclaimed. This wouldn\u2019t necessarily be a problem if they were working with a very complex site, but this was a 9-page website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After downloading this beast, they discovered a strange directory structure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it turns out, three years before, the freelancer had modified the WordPress core to write every SQL statement to a text file on the server, creating a new directory for each year, month, day, hour, and second. What\u2019s worse was that the developer then left it running for three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though Moose eventually removed the debug hack and deleted the folder structure, the freelance developer\u2019s failure to write maintainable code cost their client extra time and money fixing a problem that should never have existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More<\/strong>: 31 Y Combinator Application Tips to Successfully Snag a YC Spot<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in August 2016, Karrie Sullivan and her team at Culminate Digital Consulting were brought into a huge company scandal \u2014 one of their clients\u2019 in-house developers had leveraged the company\u2019s website to siphon revenue from them. The desperate client ran to Karrie and asked her to rebuild the website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The client had a very complex website, and Karrie knew she had to find a group of phenomenal developers to help accomplish this task. Karrie found a group of freelance web developers to estimate and build the new site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The freelance group made an offer with two conditions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRest assured, we\u2019re all experts in Drupal 8!\u201d said the developers. Though Karrie had concerns about developing the company\u2019s website in the newest version of Drupal, she decided to trust that the developers knew what they were doing and signed a contract with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A month later, they noticed that they were paying invoice after invoice but not seeing any results. Concerned, Karrie picked up the phone and called the developers. They reassured her: \u201cDon\u2019t worry about it, the project is just a bit complicated. We\u2019ll call in a couple of additional freelance developers to help out!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though Karrie decided to give them another chance, the same problem persisted. Eventually, Karrie and her team decided to call in another development shop to audit the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward 6 months, and Culminate Digital Consulting is now headed to arbitration and has had to hire an attorney to fight bills for hours that weren\u2019t worked. These freelancers essentially turned a terrible situation into a real nightmare!<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked why something like this happened, Karrie said: \u201cWhen you get to the bottom of it, you\u2019ll realize the biggest problem is that freelance shops usually don\u2019t have project managers to keep things on track \u2014 it simply doesn\u2019t work in freelancers\u2019 interest. If the client doesn\u2019t have a great IT project manager and a tight scope, they should insist on paying a fixed fee upon the project\u2019s completion instead of paying by the hour.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, we\u2019ve found that one of the top reasons why freelance projects fail is the lack of adequate project management. If you\u2019re looking for freelancers on various freelance platforms, make sure to find one that offers project management services<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More<\/strong>: Why Employee Development is Good for Business and Your Dev Team<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years ago, Ian Wright, now the successful founder of British Business Energy<\/a>, wanted to create a website that would make comparing the prices of diamond jewelry easy and straightforward. He wanted to make a website where users could create semi-customized jewelry by simply filling out a few forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He had a brilliant idea \u2014 all he needed was someone to bring it to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lacking experience with freelancers, Ian went on one of the popular freelancing site to look for a few freelance developers. Not knowing what to look for, he simply went for the cheapest developers he could find. Though there are certainly good developers who charge lower rates, these were not the ones Ian found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After hiring them, Ian realized they could barely communicate \u2014 not only was it nearly impossible to do this, but, due to the language barrier, they could barely understand each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To make things even worse, with very little experience, Ian assumed he could just give general specs to the developers. After endless back-and-forth and many failed attempts at communication, Ian received a sub-par product that was far, far from what he had in mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Though he continued to ask these freelance developers for revisions, after countless delays, he eventually ran out of money before a viable MVP could even be launched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI know it wasn\u2019t completely their fault,\u201d Ian admitted, \u201cit was partially my fault for not being able to communicate my ideas clearly.\u201d With that said, it is even more important to find qualified freelancers than simply going for the cheapest ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More<\/strong>: On-Site vs Remote vs Distributed Engineering Teams: How to Choose?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Spoiler Alert)<\/strong>: If you\u2019ve seen Stranger Things, you\u2019ll know what happened to Will Byers. After a fun night of Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, Will disappeared while holding a gun in his own home. (End of Spoiler Alert)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Didn\u2019t think something like this could happen to a website? Well, Sarah at Enigma Digital Ltd. can tell you otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the summer of 2012, everyone at Enigma (Infinity Wireless Ltd. at the time) was filled with excitement that their startup was finally ready to launch a new project into a new market! All content for the website was created internally and was ready to be inserted into the site design. Everything went off without a hitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Happy with the end results of the site, Sarah and her team found freelancers to do some simple work to optimize the design of their website. Little did they know, this would turn into their worst nightmare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of making the website better, the developers deleted all the content on Sarah\u2019s website! If this was not bad enough already, these freelancers did not create any backups before they made changes to the site! What this meant for Sarah and her marketing team of two (including herself) was countless nights in front of their laptops, reformatting and re-inserting one page at a time. Not only that, the two of them spent weeks on internal rewriting and amendments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, mistakes happen, but the developers you work with should be responsible ones who truly have your best interest in mind. They should follow common practices such as creating backups during site updates. Making the best of their tragic experience, Enigma later developed their own software to help smartphone users who have accidentally deleted their data!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More<\/strong>: Are Personal User Manuals Useful for Managing Remote Teams?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If freelance developers appear to be the villain in all freelance horror stories, consider this: apart from common difficulties freelance developers run into \u2014 unclear and ever-changing specs, communication and time zone issues, payment delays, etc. \u2014 sometimes, their identities get stolen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephanie Caudle, a freelance web developer and founder of a micro job platform created to help connect African-American women freelancers, Black Girl Group<\/a>, found that her identity had been stolen a few days before Christmas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephanie had been freelancing part-time for quite a while, but only recently did she take a leap of faith and decide to go all in. Before she became a full-time freelance developer, Stephanie had surveyed the landscape and signed up for countless freelance sites. She made sure to keep all her information secure to protect herself on these websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few days before Christmas, she received the horrific news that someone who had posed as a \u201cnew client\u201d to her on Upwork then turned around and stole her identity. Not only was the individual using her portfolio, he or she was also using Stephanie\u2019s name, images, and social security number on other job sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stephanie was shocked to the core. \u201cWhy would someone do that?\u201d After calming herself down, she did a little research and found out that the person was trying to get Stephanie to pay the taxes on his or her work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The issue has since been resolved, but the feeling of being violated still haunts Stephanie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read More<\/strong>: Synchronous vs Asynchronous Communication for Remote Teams<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t be afraid \u2014 not all freelance stories are as frightening as these. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With the right project management support and proper vetting of developers, most of the issues we\u2019ve discussed can be prevented altogether. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to avoid project nightmares and low-quality freelance developers, Arc may be exactly what you’re looking for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With our rigorous vetting process, our team has a thorough understanding of each freelance developer\u2019s technical abilities and communication style, which can directly influence a project\u2019s success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also try <\/em>Arc<\/a>, your<\/em> shortcut to the world’s best remote talent:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u26a1\ufe0f Access 450,000 top developers, designers, and marketers <\/a>Try Arc and hire top talent now \u2192<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here are 5 freelance developer horror stories of instances where working with contracted software devs went terribly wrong!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-hiring","category-management"],"yoast_head":"\n
\u26a1\ufe0f Freelance or full-time remote + fully vetted<\/em>
\u26a1\ufe0f Save up to 80% with global hires<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n1. Directory Gone Wild<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
2013\n \t01\n 01\n \t01\n \t01\n \t05\n \t10\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n2. Bought Myself a Lawsuit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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3. Sunk Cost, Sunken Business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>4. Stranger Things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
5. Face\/Off (Identity Theft)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Avoid Freelance Horrors \ud83d\ude31<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u26a1\ufe0f Vetted and ready to interview<\/em>
\u26a1\ufe0f Freelance or full-time<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n