Looking for a flexible Joomla programmer shouldn’t be such a headache. We have two excellent guys who’ve helped us in the past who’ve done some incredible customizations for our sites.

At up to $70 an hour it’s unproductive asking them to do simple Joomla tasks so we want a few coders who are happy to do the simper work at a fraction of that hourly rate.

We used the usual channels to source some staff yesterday and were disappointed to find that we’ve rejected over 20 applicants so far.

Some might accuse us of being too aggressive in our interviewing but, considering each position we advertise gets over 50 applicants then its worth us trying to eliminate most of them efficiently.

An interview practice we’ve set up is to provide applicants with 9 simple tasks in Joomla that we know how long they should take. We ask applicants to provide a brief description as to how they’d achieve the task and how long they expect it would take.  We ask them to indicate the number of hours the job should take - knowing full well that most jobs take between 5 and 15 minutes.

We don’t tell the applicant that we know perfectly well each task should take because we’ve done them ourselves. Instead we let them assume that we don’t know anything about Joomla at all.

We have wasted hours today suffering from the same cliched messenger conversation which always begins like this:

Interviewee: Hello
Us: Hi
Interviewee: How are you?
Us: Good, who is this?
Interviewee: We are applying for your job
Us: What Job?
Interviewee: The Joomla Job
Us: OK, so have you received our email?
Interviewee: Yes
Us: So please reply to it. Do you have any questions?
Interviewee: No
Us: Ok, please do that then
Interviewee: OK
Us: Bye
Interviewee: Bye

Of the 20 we’ve rejected, 10 of them have needed to be told to follow the instructions in the email we sent to them. They all replied back to us either without providing descriptions or without providing time estimates.

Sadly the kind of time estimates other providers gave us were insulting at best, a complete scam at worst. Work we’ve done ourself in 10 minutes was quoted as a task that would take 2-3 days (8 hours of work for 3 days each!!).

Thankfully we are experienced enough to know how long simple jobs take but I pity the new entrepreneur who pays these people to create a website for them and is billed for 100+ plus hours when their ’supposedly’ cheap programmers knock out the work in a few hours.

For those of you experienced with Joomla here’s some of the estimates we’ve been given.

Task #1 Upload an existing Joomla template and delete any references within it that say "Created by Jooma Template Provider"

Longest Estimate: 4 hours

Task #3 Backup the entire Joomla website and database

Longest Estimate: 5 hours

Task #9 Add a ‘contact us’ form to an article

Longest Estimate: 8-10 hours
 

You might have your own approach for finding good quality workers. If you do please do post below.

For any of you who are not experienced in recruiting freelancers please do realize that the cheap providers often inflate the hours required to do a job by sometimes many THOUSANDS of percent.

Try to have a good idea of what the work really entails before commissioning it otherwise you risk being severely exploited.  And, if you’re not being exploited you’re probably employing an idiot!

Whilst we respect the concept of a written agreement it seems that a legally written contract is designed very much to discourage other parties to read them.

We are currently creating a distribution agreement for Plug and Save.  Whilst we know exactly what we want to include, the template, created for us by lawyers is unecessarily pompous, confusing and suprisingly ambiguous.

Much of our overseas business entails working with non-native English speakers.  It seems somewhat disrespectful to provide confusing and lengthy legalese to such companies, knowing that they’ll likely not understand the complex wording.  This gives us an unfair advantage and we’ve resolved to translate much of the default terms to something a little clearer.  To us, these documents are intimidating and don’t instill much confidence of a fair trading agreement.

Whichever lawyer chose to phrase this paragraph deserves to be shot …

"The individual contracts for the sale of Products formed by Distributor’s submission of orders to Company pursuant to the terms and conditions hereof shall automatically incorporate, to the extent applicable, the terms and conditions hereof, shall be subject only to those terms and conditions (together with all terms in orders which are contemplated by this Agreement) and shall not be subject to any conflicting or additional terms included in any documents exchanged in connection therewith."

We have replaced it with …

"This contract takes authority over any other agreements made, unless specifically agreed upon in writing by both Company and Distributor."
 

… if only contracts were designed to show how one company wishes to demonstrate that it’s created a fair and respectful contract then we’d have no need for the pompous and verbose contracts that seem so common.

We incorporated our business ‘The True Potential Group Inc." on May 10th this year in Nevada, USA.

Here are a few resdons behind our decision:

1. We are asking American resellers for our Art From Steel business to send often more than $5,000 to an overseas personal bank account. We expected that by Incorporating we ‘d increase our credibility in the short-term
2. In the medium-term we plan to get certain accreditations for our websites and businesses which require a third-party to verify our business background. We can only do this if we have an established company that’s been active for a few years.
3. We ‘d be forced to keep accurate accounts and to take our income and expenses seriously.

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I read a very simple idea to stay motivated when undergoing routine activities and have today decided to put the idea into effect.

To keep motivated on something that requires a routine action (e.g. 1 hour of exercise a day), simply get a yearly calendar and mark on that calendar each day you accomplish your goal. Link these days together with a colored lined so that after a few successful days you’ll be reluctant to break the line.

This seems like a great idea for me because I’m always motivated for at least my first week and then things begin to trail off.

I found a great website that will create custom calendars for free at PDFCalendar.com