This comment applies to non-engineer college students who have ideas for complex websites, big ambitions, and are looking for programming help. This doesn't apply to those looking for spot jobs and minor features.

Personally, I've gotten burned big time hiring "talent" abroad, even utilizing a bidding and feedback system like that on getafreelancer.com, primarily due to the fact that (at least for me), it's impossible to get a foreigner psyched on a predominately American consumer product. I found that these programmers are constantly striving to provide the bare minimum, they constantly recycle code from other projects where they think it might fit (even if it doesn't), and they are desperate to close the ticket on your project and move on to the next as quickly as possible.

In my opinion, my observations fall in very closely with what Marx describes as "alienation," wherein workers (or in this case, foreign programmers) are to the extreme out of touch with what they are making. Sure, you can provide detailed documents specifying the exact nuances of what you want implemented, but you will NEVER anticipate the misunderstandings that are possible when traversing across complex language barriers, and secondly, you will never get the fit, finish, and craftsmanship that only somebody passionate about the product can imbue into it.

The second trap, of course, is to think that you can hire American freelancers, or, better yet, the "hacker" at your particular university. This, of course, comes with other disadvantages. It is often the case that university undergraduate "hackers" have several pet projects, and even in the case that they are open to discussing programming your idea, they often eventually begin to doubt whether it is worth it to essentially build your website for you (as they see it) as you sit around and tell them what to do. After all, did YOU spend the time, sweat, and endure social ostracism honing the valuable skill of computer programming as they did for years? Look no further than what happened to the Winklevoss twins at Harvard when they tried to get Zuckerberg to do ConnectU.

These arrangements almost inevitable fall through, consistently. Having been very close to entrepreneurship circles at an elite university, I can tell you that I have never once seen a non-hacker recruit a hacker to build a product successfully, though I've seen, and made, multiple attempts. The hacker's pet project ALWAYS comes first, followed by school and internships. And too many hackers, in my observation, are trying to chase the Zuckerberg dream by precluding any strong non-coding liberal arts thinkers from their teams and making all business and user experience decisions themselves. I can't speak to the success of this trend because I haven't seen the opposite case even attempted due to the pervasiveness of this hacker-centric startup attitude.

My pessimistic conclusion (though it might have a silver lining) is that unless you have a really trusting programmer friend who will help you out of your preexisting relationship, it is both not worth it to pursue hiring a programmer for your startup from abroad and not worth it to pursue alliances with your local college hacker. The best way to go is to bite the bullet and learn to code, and that way you actually have a means of effectuating your own ideas, which are liable to change, multiply, grow, etc. at a pace that you will want to control. Once you learn to code, you'll gain more respect of the hacker types anyway, and from that point you can build meaningful alliances of mutual understanding and respect. This is the route that I have taken, and I don't regret it one iota. A year into programming, I've got three iPhone applications in the store, with several more coming. The only limit for me, now, is time, and that's the only limit you really ever want to confront when building a startup. Depending on a stranger who is just doing it for money? For the birds.