Slashdot Mirror
Remote Project Level Work?
Genjuro Kibagami asks: "With regards to the current environment in the tech sector and the difficulties finding good positions, I was curious if anyone had taken to running freelance work from their own computers at home? I'm not talking about your regular dodgy fly by night 'Make up to 10,000$ per week with no risk!' type thing. But perhaps problem solving, coding, professional advice, or remote administration / fix functions, payment via paypal or some such thing. Any assistance appreciated."
It's not security, but liability you are talking about. That said, I've worked with several companies that happily outsourced various project development tasks to freelances (both small and large). The key requirments have been Non-Disclosure Agreements and other similar legal restraints. The NDA puts the burden not to disclose on the freelancer. You do have to know who your freelancers are, of course, so random contacts from the web rarely flew.
In a former job, the company I worked for used contrators and freelance developers extensively. Sometimes we needed expertise that we couldn't hire any other way. Sometimes a six-month contract was much less expensive than a fully burdened employee. Sometimes we had to live with budget constraints that limited us to contract workers (in some cases off-shore, specifically Indian vendors). Security was an issue, but rarely an insurmountable one.