Toptal has had excellent and professional contractors in my experience, and it might fit your budget.

>If you have better ideas of where to find contractors, please let me know.

Have you considered hiring actual employees locally rather than remote, unseen contractors?

We have employees. We use contractors for work that we know is finite.

The contractors are remote, but I do see them on video. I'm also remote and unseen, as I've worked remotely my entire career.

How is it from a hiring perspective weeding through all the options? I'm coming at this as a worker, I used to be on there years back but there is so much competition.

I find it easier than traditional means to weed out real talent. Most our best people we found there. But I am aware of how horrible people here are at interviewing (from reading the time wasting ways they interview and give people tasks to find talent); I never really got that but whatever, it is to our advantage. I think most of the issues weeding out talent is connected to the point that people don’t know how to in general, outside or inside upwork.

There is not too much competition for talent. The crap is easy to weed out; most people who are bad have 100 ‘expert skills’ on their profile. So skipping those (which, unfortunately, means that you mostly end up without anyone from Asia) already cleans up nicely. Secondly, remove all the ones that have open jobs at that moment. Then remove low ratings. Now you have a few left to have chat and figure out if they are lying or not. And then you just pick the best one (technically but also if you click with them) that’s left.

I can see that filter working. Other one is if the intro is generic/no context regarding the job.

Yes, but I am more tolerant of that personally, because I used to work via elance (upwork has roots there) and you have to respond to many jobs to get attention. So I understand many go wide and wait with details until they get invited to a chat.

Have you tried agencies in countries that have good exchange rates?

Small cities in NZ have great people. For example www.triotech.co.nz or nodero.com

> countries that have good exchange rates

What does this mean? I equate “good exchange rate” with “low exchange commission/fee” and “low volatility”.

I mean weak dollar. For instance $1USD will get you around $1.5NZD. With the average developer earning a little over $100,000NZD you are looking at around $66,000USD. Much cheaper than many other options. However they're still native English speakers with a very western culture.

You're right about volatility too, the NZD doesn't swing too wildly.

Why would you accept a job that pays only US$66k if the value of your work is US$100k? Here (central Europe) it's common practice to count your money in EUR or USD even though we're paid in the local currency - especially if the local currency is not pegged to EUR.

> Why would you accept a job that pays only US$66k if the value of your work is US$100k?

Because in some countries, you can live like a king on $66k and you'll always have contracts. And anyway, no one gets paid based on the "value of their work". That's how services businesses are profitable at all -- the employees generate more value than they're paid.

Yeah but then I want to move to the US or Switzerland or Germany and the US$66k is suddenly a lot less? I have no idea why a skilled senior SWE contractor would go into that kind of deal, the market is much hotter than that, $66k is entry level rate for a contractor even if you work at local companies here.

Our country will only do better if some high skilled workers remain. With the cost of software development NZ can export development and this will improve our economy. That should help everyone here live better lives.

My standard of living is pretty good too.

Your country's solution to keeping people at home is to pay them so bad they can't afford to leave? Sorry but that really doesn't sound good.