Bad Developers

You should be happy that the freelance developers got your business this far. It stands to reason that as you want to increase the quality of your product you need better developers, developers you wouldn't have been able to afford in the beginning.

Of course the code is going to be a mess. Take the things you have learned from the first version of your product and use that experience to build a better version. As a founder you should never blame your employees/contractors for the consequences of the decisions you've made. You made a price-quality trade-off, one that was probably <em>correct</em>. If you had to start over today you'd probably make the same choices, because good developers are in such high demand no self-funded startup can afford them.

Sounds to me like a lack of respect from both sides.

E.g. if you refer to your people as 'resources', you risk they'll call you 'overhead'.

Which, in developer speak, is often phrased as "you wouldn't understand, it's tech"...

Disclaimer: I'm a non-non-technical founder.

It's not just freelancers, you can have the same issues with employees. Quality people are the key.

Thank you for sharing this. I very much related to this as I am similarly in an early stage of building my product and my single biggest piece of frustration is working with developers. Although I am not writing the code, I have a semi-technical background as I was a product manager at a large tech company in the Bay area. The biggest issue I am having is hiring good Python back-end developers.. so far, I have come across many who fail to deliver the job or are just plain jerks. As we speak, I have a developer that has take 90 hours to do one FTP CSV import (40K rows) into our database. Each day I ask how many more hours, he keeps saying 5-6 ... It is hard to trust anyone. But I know that I could not be building this myself... just wished that I had better luck with my hires.

Hello,

it helps to have a technical founder.

I see it as a general issue with freelancers. Fast Software development means you are either very good ( not too often) or just develop dirty code. Why should a freelancer, who never sees this project again care? Would you have paired a higher price and took more time from the beginning for (more) clean code without this experience?

To make Software adaptable to future cases takes more time, effort and knowledge. In general a freelancer who asks you about the future of a product tips you off, that this person would think about a more future save solution. People who just do what you ask, without a proper requirements analysis plan a temporary solution for you, which may not be adapted at all.

Best regards

Sounds like you pushed for features when maintenance should have been done. Sounds like you micromanaged the hell out of the devs, too.

Technical debt comes this exact way. I really wasn't surprised that it turned out the way it did for you after reading your post.

The worst thing is that there's apparently no learning effect going on with you other than the 'devs are the problem' mantra.

Best of luck!

Update: I saw a lot of people critized my decision here.

Finally I replaced all freelancers from the company with people on site. Now communication is much better, people understand the product and no more attitude issues. I don't regret having laid off any of them.

Everyone knows that I care about the product and the clients and that the company needs to produce added value. Feeling so much better now.