One of the larger sites for finding and hiring Filipino virtual assistants is Onlinejobs.ph (headquartered in Utah).

Not surprisingly, the site uses Filipino workers to build and maintain their own website… artists, support staff, programmers, etc.

No doubt they save a lot of money by using Filipino developers.

But if you’re going to save money on developers, for goodness’ sake double-down on Testing. (“Testing” in a broad sense to include for example functional specifications.)

As an example, here’s an incredibly stupid bug I found today on the very popular Onlinejobs.ph site… which as I write this is adversely affecting the site’s utility for both employers and workers. (And no telling how long it’s been broken, perhaps since day 1.)

The website hosts job postings from employers, and resumes of job seekers, and offers employers a way to keyword search for job seekers, and offers job seekers a way to keyword search for job postings.

So the fundamental CORE of their service is SEARCH so employers/workers can find each other. The rest is window dressing.

But in an example of inept programming PLUS inept testing, their search is fundamentally broken in the sense that if a job post is open to “any” type of worker (full time, part time, or freelance) a job seeker searching for full-time will NOT SEE that job post. The only job seekers who will see that job post are ones who ALSO specify full time AND part time AND freelance.

(In other words, their search should “OR” the job post work type -but it stupidly does an “AND”.)

Hey, that kind of bug can happen, especially when you save money hiring cheaper and less experienced developers.

Which makes it all the more important to NOT skimp on testing methodology implemented by someone actually thinking about the test cases. It would have caught this bug before it failed untold times to correctly match workers and employers.

(Another bug on this site is the ongoing inability of their PHP programmers  to figure out “escaping/unescaping” submitted text so job posts containing a percent symbol or an ampersand symbol render correctly. But those at least are obvious by proofreading unlike the search bug.)