He has been disapoining me and giving excuses since December. The exams were given to him in word documents with all questions and answers in the document and the answers highlighted. Before December his performance was great. I really have no idea why the major drop in performance but we live 1000 miles apart so there is no supervision at all.
Do I need a new programmer?
Having explored the mess that is sometimes referred to as oscommerce, I wouldn't be surprised if this took an entire 20-hour week to get done. And I'm assuming here that he can get a working script to convert those 600 questions into php scripts automatically.
He has been disapoining me and giving excuses since December.
If he's been giving excuses for this particular project, could you share any with us? Perhaps he's run into legit issues. (Probably not 6 months worth, but you never know.)
we live 1000 miles apart so there is no supervision at all.
Some people can work without supervision, some people can't. Since you've been working with him for 3 years I'd assume he can.
I need to know if I have a donkey trying to do a stalions job.
I find that to be an insult. Everyone starts somewhere and learns.
You should get him to report his daily maybe even hourly work. Get him to tell you what exactly he has done in laymans terms.
My moto, Want something done 
DO IT YOURSELF!
Originally posted by dsnhouse
I have a programmer doing work for me. He has been doing work for me for over 3 years (over 20 hours per week).
Ummm, if you have all this time together then why are you posting here? I would think you'd have a working relationship by now.
It seems more like a management issue...go and find out what the problem is and deal with it reasonably.
Originally posted by Installer
I don't know if by "all data provided" you mean the actual questions. I suspect not or you wouldn't have couched it in those terms. I can tell you that writing 600 quality exam questions is not a 3-4 hour job, or even a 1-day job. Maybe not even a 1-week job, if these are tests you're charging customers for. That's something a team of people might spend some time on.
I probably should have stated that I made the assumption of that all data provided was questions+answers as was stated under your post. Anyway since its multiple choice Ive managed to do one in 3-4hrs it didnt look pretty, and I also had the questions organised properly as well so that sort of helped, now as there in a Word File id imagine it would take a lot longer than 3-4hrs just to get into a proper format such as in a Database so it could easily spill into 2-3days.
But yes as its been an ongoing partnership/relationship surely by now there should be some level of trust and it doesnt sound like there is, which is a real pitty. Maybe its time to show whos in control and hit the question head on and be blunt about it.
Originally posted by NetNerd85
I find that to be an insult. Everyone starts somewhere and learns.
But by the time they're working professionally, you expect them to show some competence. That's what you're paying for.
Heck, the guy could have used osC to take the payment and then Moodle to administer the exam. Once payment is accepted, it could shoot off a password which would forward you over to the moodle part of the site where the user has access to the exam. Doesn't sound that bad to me.
However, to give the guy a break, osC is absolutely a big mess, especially if you're not familiar with the way it's set up. There could be a big learning curve there... as well, I know you're a paying customer and I'm all about the importance of customer service in an extremely competitive market... but maybe he has taken on more projects from other customers and isn't the best at project management and multi-tasking. When we estimate projects, we give a reasonable time frame for completion based on our current work load... i.e., something could take 10 hours to complete, but that doesn't mean it will be done in 10 hours from now. We have numerous other projects going on and a limited amount of hours in the day, so we have to juggle things from time to time. And we all know that nine women cannot make a baby in one month. Some things just take time.
6 months is a long time however for even a 20-40 hour project, imho. I agree with the others - you should confront him, and if it can't come to a resolution there are numerous other budding web developers out there who are hungry for work.
In total agreement about oSC here. I have a client who uses this alot along with some modules which can be downloaded from the website. One particular one has around 3,000 lines of code with barely a comment in sight. It takes an hour just for your eyes to stop hurting
I wonder if this guy is a perfectionist or an idealist and is spending too much time on "features" and getting it to be some epic acheivement...? I know I have a tendancy towards this that I daily have to manage.
Or I wonder if he has other issues in his life right now: somebody died, or he's going through some difficult time, or he has some addiction wreaking havoc. These things can be quite de-stabilizing, especially in certain people. Everyone is different. Perhaps you should find out what is going on, otherwise I agree, confrontation, because enabling isn't good either... 
my experience is you get what you pay for. i would be interested in knowing what this person gets paid. you also need to have your developer create milestones with dates. let him choose the dates as most developers are notorious for short changing themselves as they think they are better then they really are.
most developers are notorious for short changing themselves as they think they are better then they really are.
NEVER :eek:
*the sarcasm meter squeals for mercy in the corner
:evilgrin:
my experience is you get what you pay for.
I prefer to charge for my self pitty and doubt, everything else is FREE 
, even the sarcasm :p