Hire devs or outsource for Bitcoin startup?

#1

Post by HappyFunTime » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 11:33 AM UTC

Hello, massive respect to the hackernews community.

I've had bad luck hiring developers for startups in the past, as I'm not a developer. I have not outsourced development before, and think it might work better?

Luckily some companies already successfully turn merchant accepted into dollars for them. So it's easy to show a developer what an example of a successfully adopted end product can look like to a user. Bitpay, etc.

So how would one choose between a software development company, and in housing?

Re: Hire devs or outsource for Bitcoin startup?

#2

Post by wkornewald » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 12:32 PM UTC

In general, it's better to have the team work closely together in one office. If you want to bring in contract developers they should be reachable during the time when you work because you'll probably need to communicate very often. So, the timezone difference shouldn't be too large (USA - Europe is probably too much already, at least for your main developers). Later you might want to have a backup developer in a different time zone, so he can troubleshoot problems while you're sleeping. Also, when outsourcing it would be better to pick someone (or a team) with startup experience.

Re: Hire devs or outsource for Bitcoin startup?

#3

Post by chicagomint » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 1:03 PM UTC

I would lean towards hiring devs, even if remotely, as opposed to outsourcing.

Especially if your startup may be handling users' private keys, you will want a trustworthy domestic dev team. The last thing you want is millions of dollars (or bitcoins!) worth of your users' deposits to disappear without a trace overseas.

Re: Hire devs or outsource for Bitcoin startup?

#4

Post by HappyFunTime » Thu, Jul 10, 2014, 1:51 PM UTC

Is the startup experienced hire more flexible? Yes, its funny, with a bitcoin business, I'd imagine there is no business that gets port scanned more often. Everyone's probably looking for a hotwallet. I think I can mitigate that with deterministic wallets and or pre computed pools of watch only addresses. Both of these solutions would result in private keys never seeing a network.

So for hiring devs in the philippines, it seems that there's no hits for the word bitcoin in the searchable job resumes. Any tips on what other keywords I might be using? Node.js and javascript if we use any of the bitcore.io stuff? A database guy, a full stack guy? I think 3 guys can get the job done in a reasonable time frame. Chain.com could likely take much of the load off the backend dev.

At a loss as to how to choose 3 programmers from a sea of programmers with job applications ready for hire.