I dunno what the deal is, but we’ve been having terrible luck with filipino designers, to the point that I’m pretty much ready to write them all off and either find US-based people or go to a different culture that doesn’t have the constant excuses and laziness that we seem to be experiencing.
We have detailed discussions with all our designers before we start about how we work. We send an email, then we follow up with IM convos so there’s no ambiguity. We send a job and arrange a price.
One guy, halfway through the job, decides that he wants more than twice what he agreed to do the job for, even though the specs hadn’t changed at all.
Another guy, who wasn’t very experienced, did a whole bunch of work for us, which we paid him for at his agreed-upon rate, and he then announced that he had new rates, which were higher than what much more experienced designers were getting. And it wasn’t like he had other people lined up to work with him, either. We tried discussing it with him, but essentially, he’d rather sit and do nothing if he didn’t get his rate.
Most recently, we had a guy who seemed really promising… but after the discussion and agreement on price, he sat on the job for 2 days saying he was “waiting for me to come onto Yahoo chat to discuss a couple questions” (no emails till I pestered him) and now he’s telling me that he doesn’t want to be bothered with email, that the only way he’ll talk to me is on Yahoo chat (which I hate and don’t like to have open.) So we’ve blown him off.
I know of at least a couple other people that have reported the same issues with offshore designers, but it seems, for whatever reason, that the Filipino designers are particularly prone to a million excuses, their parents dying multiple times per year, their relatives in the hospital, and that sort of thing.
And it just galls me to pay middlemen twice or three times the rate that the actual designer is getting. I’d rather pay the designer directly a fair rate.
Are other people having the same sort of issues?
