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The title should probably mention this is a 2011 post.
Why? The topic isn't time sensitive.
On the other hand I'm stuck in outsourcing hell with http://classfrog.com It has been close to a year and we are not even close to launch. It would have taken about 2 weeks for me to do it myself. But I'm in denial.
Some developers won't heed the call and prefer to stay "close to the metal" cause they enjoy it more, and some are genuinely bad at managing. However, very often an experienced developer will benefit a project much more when he can afford to look at the grand scheme of things.
I'll share a similar (positive) experience I had a few years ago. I'm not quite what I'd call a developer, but I'm a company founder who's "code savvy". I made the decision to outsource the development of a moderately big PHP project a few years ago -- I went through a LOT of profiles on oDesk and finally settled on a guy (who billed about $30/hr, which was on the high end for non-US guys on oDesk). He was _terrific_…
> My only frustrations were things that, unfortunately, can happen with outsourced work -- timing. My guy was an A developer, but a B/C time manager. So the project took about 2x as long as it should have. So technically, he billed at $60 an hour. And that is the issue with outsourcing. A local guy in your office might have gotten things done in half the time and cost you just as much. There is another issue with tim…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A local guy in your office might have gotten things done in half the time and cost you just as much. Are you implying than developers working on site are never late? This is far from true. Edit: To the downvoters, please explain, I may be misguided.
> Are you implying than developers working on site are never late? I'm implying that when you factor in the lack of time zone differences, communications issues, and the increased efficiency of having your employee in the same office as you, then you'll probably get the work done in half the time. I didn't even touch the fact that your options domestically are far more expansive if you want to hire a high quality dev…
Even that's only the case if your office is designed for software/creative work. If it's a noisy, open-office plan full of interruptions and distractions, it's no guarantee that on-site software developers will be more productive than someone working remotely from a library or home office or the like.
Still, a 2 month project became 6 months of constant delays. Can't say being a dev helped, in fact I think being a designer or a biz-dev guy would've been better since we tended to discuss a lot about what to use here and there: the guy was a better coder but I had more experience, and so while he always went for the "just works" solution I for obvious reasons tended to go to the solution that was more future-proof and less of a pain to upgrade.
Non-devs would just say "I want X" and then get something like X, but be ok with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, but here are your outcomes if you are good at X and need X and Y: You do X, hire Y - You have one skilled person, one question mark. You do Y, hire X - You have one unskilled person, one question mark. Seems pretty simple to me that the first is better. I suppose that you could make the argument that Y may be easy to pick up, but if that's the case it should be all the easier to just hire someone else with a prov…
Just to elaborate what i think stonemetal's point is that. You are good at X. you hire someone to do X. prob. of X being useless <<< prob. of y being useless(if you don't know y and hire for Y)