[LRUG] Rails / Web óutsourcing

Tue Nov 4 10:48:46 PST 2014

@Matthew makes some good points, most of which I agree with, instead I'd
like to address some of @Loius' original comments which I feel miss some of
the subtleties of the issue.

There are many reasons that you might choose to out-source, including but
not limited to:

   1. You can't find good developers in London
   2. You can't find cheap developers in London

@Loius mentions the first problem. London isn't alone here, it's hard to
find good developers anywhere, not because it's hard to find developers
(anyone can do that) but because it's hard to find *good* ones. There are
many reasons for this. If you doubt this assertion, I direct you towards
the flourishing developer recruitment business.

The second is more of an issue: London is expensive, therefore to pay the
bills a developer has to charge a lot more than they would if they lived in
a physical location that has a lower cost-of-living. I believe that this is
actually a more general issue, namely:

   - You can't afford to run a business in London

If you can't afford staff in the location, you need to be running your
business elsewhere. It really is that simple, software development is no
different to any other kind of business.

As to @Loius' solutions:

   1. Just hire a dev
   2. Just hire a lead dev who can hire devs
   3. "Make them feel invested"

First: hiring developers (good ones) is hard, see above. It takes time and
money. The penalty for failure can be high, certainly high enough that you
can easily kill a SME/startup by making a bad hiring choice. Outsourcing
moves some (but not all) of the risk of this to a third party, that is why
you pay a premium. The trading of money for risk is a perfectly valid and
time-honoured business strategy.

Second: hiring someone who is not only a good dev, but also possesses the
time, project and people-management skills to hire and manage a team of
good devs is the proverbial purple unicorn. Good luck.

Even if you hit the jackpot and hire a good dev manager who is possessed of
the ability to hire good devs, getting said good devs to work together as a
productive team rather than a group of individuals pulling in different
directions is similarly a non-trivial problem.

Third: There is no way to "make them (your developers, or anyone else) feel
invested". Employing someone as a permanent vs. a contract employee is not
going to make them feel anything (other than under-valued, possibly),
certainly not in a startup. Similarly, research has proved the empirical
knowledge that equity/options/... don't make people feel invested either,
see Daniel Pink's book "Drive" for more on this. Creating a work-place, a
team, a culture, where everyone feels part of something more than 'a
business' is not something that happens overnight, and not something that
most people can manage. Ask some of the more experienced startup LRUGers if
you doubt it.

This set of problems are sufficiently 'wicked' that for many businesses,
particularly those for whom software is not a core competency, out-sourcing
is a very reasonable strategy. Paying someone else who has already got a
team of capable, invested developers who work well together is simply a
sound business decision to trade money for time and risk.

YMMV

@sleepyfox
--
P.S. I must declare my investment - and hence the bias of my opinion - the
very reason I started a consulting business was to help startups find a
solution to these non-trivial problems.

On 3 November 2014 22:55, Matthew O'Riordan <matthew.oriordan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Louis
>
> Thanks for the reply, I had no idea that óutsourcing has become an evil
> word ;)
>
> If we could find an individual who is capable and remote I’d be more than
> willing to go down that route.  Managing the team is not an issue at all,
> in fact I’d almost prefer to not have the indirection of project managers
> if at all possible. Any advice on how to go down that route of finding
> remote developers on a contract to perm basis?
>
> Regards,
>
> Matthew O'Riordan
>
> On 1 Nov 2014, at 10:36, Louis Goff-Beardsley <louis at infinitiumglobal.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Just found this in my Junk mail folder, looks like óutsourcing is a
> filtered term.
>
> Unless the project is too small to bother with, instead of hiring an
> outsourcing company you can save yourself a ton of money and get quality
> development done by just hiring remote developers yourself. Outsourcing
> companies markup on developer time is usually double what they are paying
> the developers, you can use the same money and hire the developers
> directly, thus enabling you to hire more senior developers for your money.
> Alternatively you can hire EU based people that can visit regularly, rather
> than non-eu based people you’ll never meet IRL.
>
> If what you need doing is going to take more than one developer and you’re
> worried about managing people and that’s why you’re going to an outsourcing
> company you can get around this by making your first hire an experienced
> hands-on tech lead who’s well used to managing other remote developers.
>
> If its short term, most remote developers are happy with fixed term
> contracts or ad hoc day-rates, you don’t have to commit to hiring them
> continuously.
>
> If you’re using outsourcing long term (as a solution because you’re
> struggling to hire in London) you might as well hire remote developers
> directly and make them feel invested rather than just shipping code for an
> offshore consultancy.
>
> The only drawback is that you’ve got to take ownership of interviewing,
> but you’d probably have to invest the same effort into vetting outsourcing
> companies, plus if the first person you hire is good, they’ll handle it for
> you in the future.
>
> Best, Louis.
>
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Matthew O'Riordan <
> matthew.oriordan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> I have a Rails website we've been developing for some time with a partner
> in Hong Kong, however they are now unable to finish the project due to
> their workload.
>
> Whilst the distance has not been an issue to date, I think the time zone
> gap has been a bit problematic. As such, I am now considering using a
> Ruby/Rails development team / agency somewhere in Europe to both finish and
> continue to maintain the website.  Clearly there are cost advantages doing
> this work outside of the UK and I'd like to explore that whilst I still
> have the time to do so. I have outsourced project work numerous times for
> other technology stacks and I have had mixed results, with some great
> successes and some unfortunate Dodos.
>
> Have any of you LRUGers worked with any Rails teams outside of the UK and
> in Europe that you could recommend? To be clear, I am not willing to
> compromise quality for cost, so am only looking for capable developers.
>
> Thanks for any help you can offer.
>
> Regards,
> Matthew
>
> http://linkedin.com/in/lemon
>
> Sent from my phone
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> Archives: http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org
> Manage your subscription: http://lists.lrug.org/options.cgi/chat-lrug.org
> List info: http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
> ------------------------------
> No virus found in this message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 2015.0.5557 / Virus Database: 4181/8490 - Release Date: 11/01/14
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> Archives: http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org
> Manage your subscription: http://lists.lrug.org/options.cgi/chat-lrug.org
> List info: http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20141104/230d5aa3/attachment-0003.html>