I don't usually go out of my way to give negative reviews, but after having arguably the worst outsourcing experience in my life, I felt it necessary. The bottom line - don't hire Tyler Lemieux for any coding jobs.
Almost a month ago, I contacted Tyler about designing a Wordpress Theme for me. He agreed, we agreed on a price and I was excited. Then he fell off the face of the earth. In his almost two week absence, I was forced to find another designer. I found WF member Symptic who did an AMAZING job on my theme and I couldn't be more happy.
Now I've got a WP Theme designed and I need it coded. Up pops Tyler wondering when I want to start with my theme design. "Ummmm... you disappeared and wouldn't respond to AIMs, PMs and E-mails so I had somebody else do it." He apologized and was apparently addicted to WoW for 2 weeks and wanted to code the theme because he needed some money.
Fine. We agreed on a price and tentative timeline and it began. It started off alright, until he disappeared for two days and then popped back up ready to finish the job. Unfortunately, he COULDN'T finish the job and alignment between FF and IE was completely fubarred. He would have to pay someone else to fix the problem. Great. Had I known that I would have just hired the person who could actually do the work to DO THE WORK.
He told me he found someone... a WF member who I know well who I won't mention... and that they would be fixing the problems. I contacted them and they said it might be a week or two before they could get to it, they were busy. I asked Tyler what was up and he said he would find someone else.
While I tried to find someone else, Tyler AIMed me again saying the WF Member said he would do it. I contacted them again with a WTF response. Okay, this is getting really annoying.
After hours of back and forth bullshit, I gave up for the day/night. The next day Tyler AIMed me saying he was on AIM with a developer who was fixing the problem that very instant. He asked me, LIVE, to tell him other problems I wanted fixed. There were quite a few things that needed fixing.
One of the SIMPLE things that needed fixing was that I wanted my index page to neatly display excerpts as he currently had it displaying full posts. The response I got was basically, "you can do that yourself in WP admin settings." Ummm yeah but I want to make sure it looks good and I'm paying you to do it, dude. I told him all he needed to do is change the_content to the_excerpt in the loop. He said I was wrong over and over until he realized it worked. Ummmm who is paying who here? If you don't know that and you're trying to do WP coding jobs you have a serious problem.
He clearly meant to AIM the developer a series of 4 or 5 condescending sentences but ACCIDENTALLY SENT THEM TO ME. They basically said, "the client is being a prick and wants the excerpt changed. he is a lazy bastard can you please change that?"
I responded back with, "wrong AIM?" He tried to pass it off as a joke, saying he meant to type it to me. The way it was typed, it didn't even make sense as a joke and even if it was, it wasn't very funny.
I woke up in the morning to some severe WF drama - the coder hijacked Tyler's hosting and removed all of the content. Wonderful. That got fixed up and all I wanted was my damned theme after all this bullshit.
Tyler sent me the theme files and I tested them on a blog. The widgets didn't work. What was in the sidebar was hardcoded and any widgets I added displayed without any CSS. I asked Tyler what was up with that and he sent me back a link to a wordpress.org article explaining how to fix it. Basically, this was a "fix it yourself" kind of thing.
I hadn't even paid Tyler yet. I shared the theme with the OTHER WF member who initially was going to fix the theme and he said the coding/css was pretty much disgusting. When he could tell I was pissed, Tyler offered to fix the widget code but I had simply had enough. I wanted to be done with him. I paid him for a half-assed, half done job from a non-coder attempting a coding job.
Had the job been done poorly but there was good communication, I wouldn't be posting this negative review. If there was no communication but I got a good product at the end, I wouldn't be posting it either. But my experience with Tyler was the worst possible combination of a poor final product and complete neglect of client communication that I felt compelled to share my experience here.
I've had Tyler do some design work for me in the past and it has been good. In these cases, he was online and I said how much for XYZ, I paid him and he delivered within an hour or so. While he is a good designer, I would be reluctant to contact him for any in-depth job I actually cared about cause there is no telling when I would hear from him.
I feel bad about posting this... I think Tyler meant well but just got in over his head. And when the project was going sour, rather than stepping up to the plate and handling business, his age really showed with interactions that reeked of High School. I'm all for fun, games and dicking around, but not amidst a huge meltdown in results of a paid project.
Poor results. Poor communication. No accountability.
I already have a limited budget and now I'm out couple hundred dollars with a WP Theme I'll probably have to have recoded anyways. Worse than paying for a product that didn't deliver is the many hours wasted. In the end, I paid money to have my time wasted.
Perhaps the worst part of this whole thing is that after the meltdown already occurred, Tyler was already responding to a post on WF asking about HTML/XHTML/CSS coders... while he was busy completely not knowing how in the fuck to complete my job which he was in the process of outsourcing to someone who also didn't know how to do it.
Sorry Tyler, it's all true. I would still trust Tyler to do some small design work in the future, but there has been a HUGE loss of trust. And as the title states... never, ever hire Tyler to do coding work unless you want him to outsource it to someone else who sucks just as badly.
Almost a month ago, I contacted Tyler about designing a Wordpress Theme for me. He agreed, we agreed on a price and I was excited. Then he fell off the face of the earth. In his almost two week absence, I was forced to find another designer. I found WF member Symptic who did an AMAZING job on my theme and I couldn't be more happy.
Now I've got a WP Theme designed and I need it coded. Up pops Tyler wondering when I want to start with my theme design. "Ummmm... you disappeared and wouldn't respond to AIMs, PMs and E-mails so I had somebody else do it." He apologized and was apparently addicted to WoW for 2 weeks and wanted to code the theme because he needed some money.
Fine. We agreed on a price and tentative timeline and it began. It started off alright, until he disappeared for two days and then popped back up ready to finish the job. Unfortunately, he COULDN'T finish the job and alignment between FF and IE was completely fubarred. He would have to pay someone else to fix the problem. Great. Had I known that I would have just hired the person who could actually do the work to DO THE WORK.
He told me he found someone... a WF member who I know well who I won't mention... and that they would be fixing the problems. I contacted them and they said it might be a week or two before they could get to it, they were busy. I asked Tyler what was up and he said he would find someone else.
While I tried to find someone else, Tyler AIMed me again saying the WF Member said he would do it. I contacted them again with a WTF response. Okay, this is getting really annoying.
After hours of back and forth bullshit, I gave up for the day/night. The next day Tyler AIMed me saying he was on AIM with a developer who was fixing the problem that very instant. He asked me, LIVE, to tell him other problems I wanted fixed. There were quite a few things that needed fixing.
One of the SIMPLE things that needed fixing was that I wanted my index page to neatly display excerpts as he currently had it displaying full posts. The response I got was basically, "you can do that yourself in WP admin settings." Ummm yeah but I want to make sure it looks good and I'm paying you to do it, dude. I told him all he needed to do is change the_content to the_excerpt in the loop. He said I was wrong over and over until he realized it worked. Ummmm who is paying who here? If you don't know that and you're trying to do WP coding jobs you have a serious problem.
He clearly meant to AIM the developer a series of 4 or 5 condescending sentences but ACCIDENTALLY SENT THEM TO ME. They basically said, "the client is being a prick and wants the excerpt changed. he is a lazy bastard can you please change that?"
I responded back with, "wrong AIM?" He tried to pass it off as a joke, saying he meant to type it to me. The way it was typed, it didn't even make sense as a joke and even if it was, it wasn't very funny.
I woke up in the morning to some severe WF drama - the coder hijacked Tyler's hosting and removed all of the content. Wonderful. That got fixed up and all I wanted was my damned theme after all this bullshit.
Tyler sent me the theme files and I tested them on a blog. The widgets didn't work. What was in the sidebar was hardcoded and any widgets I added displayed without any CSS. I asked Tyler what was up with that and he sent me back a link to a wordpress.org article explaining how to fix it. Basically, this was a "fix it yourself" kind of thing.
I hadn't even paid Tyler yet. I shared the theme with the OTHER WF member who initially was going to fix the theme and he said the coding/css was pretty much disgusting. When he could tell I was pissed, Tyler offered to fix the widget code but I had simply had enough. I wanted to be done with him. I paid him for a half-assed, half done job from a non-coder attempting a coding job.
Had the job been done poorly but there was good communication, I wouldn't be posting this negative review. If there was no communication but I got a good product at the end, I wouldn't be posting it either. But my experience with Tyler was the worst possible combination of a poor final product and complete neglect of client communication that I felt compelled to share my experience here.
I've had Tyler do some design work for me in the past and it has been good. In these cases, he was online and I said how much for XYZ, I paid him and he delivered within an hour or so. While he is a good designer, I would be reluctant to contact him for any in-depth job I actually cared about cause there is no telling when I would hear from him.
I feel bad about posting this... I think Tyler meant well but just got in over his head. And when the project was going sour, rather than stepping up to the plate and handling business, his age really showed with interactions that reeked of High School. I'm all for fun, games and dicking around, but not amidst a huge meltdown in results of a paid project.
Poor results. Poor communication. No accountability.
I already have a limited budget and now I'm out couple hundred dollars with a WP Theme I'll probably have to have recoded anyways. Worse than paying for a product that didn't deliver is the many hours wasted. In the end, I paid money to have my time wasted.
Perhaps the worst part of this whole thing is that after the meltdown already occurred, Tyler was already responding to a post on WF asking about HTML/XHTML/CSS coders... while he was busy completely not knowing how in the fuck to complete my job which he was in the process of outsourcing to someone who also didn't know how to do it.
Sorry Tyler, it's all true. I would still trust Tyler to do some small design work in the future, but there has been a HUGE loss of trust. And as the title states... never, ever hire Tyler to do coding work unless you want him to outsource it to someone else who sucks just as badly.
If there were ever any problems with clients, that game was usually the problem, problem solved. As Rob mentioned before, we've had good transactions in the past that were all design-related. I've had my past, and it's just that -- a past. Three years or more back when I was 15, insanely hard to get a hold of and wasn't very vocal about where I was. I've had nothing but good reviews since then and that's not changing. All the best.
