Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?

I agree with your general thoughts. I've been designing+developing+managing ERP/SupplyChain/WMS/Shipping systems+projects for a loooong time and the chance that a person with no background in it will build the right small team to pull this off correctly on the budget any small to medium size company has, while running their business, is generally low.

> You might get around the drudge work of automating some of the toil work by hiring freelancers/consultants.

Finding the right people with the right experience and right aptitude is tough (for any role). Whether internal or external resources, my rule of thumb is that maybe 20% are fully capable, 50% are reasonably valuable to some degree, 20% have limited value and 10% are just not in the right role at all.

Whether trying to find a PM or solution architect or technical lead or dev, these same percentages apply. You have to really have experience to have a reasonable shot at finding that 20% person for your most critical position, the technical lead (whatever you call them in your org or project).

If you look at all of the talent out there today, you will see a zillion candidates with extensive experience moving workloads onto the cloud etc. etc., which is a good and valuable set of skills. But those skills and similar tech skills are not what you need to build your core systems.

You need people with the following:

1-Domain experience (you don't want people that have been designing+building streaming video systems their entire career)

2-Experience extracting business requirements, and organizing and managing that information. This is an art that takes a long time to acquire.

The business will tell you they need an alert when inventory is too low, but the real question is why is the inventory low? You need to follow the chain back to the planning system where they are excluding transactions they should not be excluding.

3-Experience creating solutions (functional and technical) that meet the business requirements and other domain requirements not explicitly stated by the business as well as a reasonably pragmatic design that accounts for the various gotchas that a good designer will account for (otherwise you will play a painful game of whack a mole of small/medium issues for years and years never realizing it's because the design was not good enough)

Full disclosure: I'm a Technical PMM at Retool, which makes me a little biased, but I'm also a developer who’s seen these sorts of projects from both sides.

I generally agree with most of the commenters here, that you need a team of just a couple experienced people to start building your in-house platform. But when you're constrained with that small of a team, building something full-code can make it tough to find the momentum you need to get any one solution over the finish line.

If you already have a solid software development process or a team already in place, maybe going with full-code could work. On the other hand, we have a customer that replaced a custom-built React dashboard that was powering their whole business with an app entirely built in Retool, and let them work with the team they already had in place. Empowering the entire team is one the reasons Retool exists. They’ve been prototyping new features incredibly fast, even the non-technical folks on their team can contribute, and they haven’t had to worry about managing freelancers or attracting and hiring a team.

You've got a lot of choices ahead of you and a lot of good advice here in the comments. Feel free to reach out to keanan@retool.com if I can help sort through any of it!

If you take this route OP, I hope that you'll ensure the freelancers are in person and on site. It's much easier for them to build the right software if they can sit next to the users.

My opinion, warranted by experience, is that no SMB should be in the software development business for their core systems.

The likelihood, even in 2024, is that you'll do a poor job, spend too much, and suffer along the way.

There are exceptions.

The safest course would be to evaluate the packaged systems used in your vertical and license the one that best fits your current and future needs.

That'll get you 75-80% of the way there. The rest can be made up with help from the vendor or external consultants that can tweak the system.

I feel this is pretty accurate. How much does the off the shelf solution cost? How big is their team? You can take that into account when pondering on a dollar amount that would actually get what you want done. I mirror mywittyname's sentiment. If you get the right person in there they can probably do it solo. But its going to be a large number that you are not going to like. Otherwise you can hire more, less qualified people, at a lower rate and end up with the same or worse result and it will take 10 times longer. E.g. probably the team the solution you are using now has.