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I think you're right in one regard, it will induce a race to the bottom amongst larger companies going this way. Quality is going to decrease over time. Lay of

I think you're right in one regard, it will induce a race to the bottom amongst larger companies going this way. Quality is going to decrease over time. Lay offs mean the loss of institutional knowledge, team experience, internal quality standards, business relationships, inter-team relationships etc. etc. etc. that let them get things done. The new teams will be riding any technical capital left behind by the old guard for a while but I'll predict it'll run into problems by the 5yr mark. Costs will skyrocket as projects take more time, work processes have to be rebuilt, relationships start from scratch, etc. In terms of the bottom line, it looks good now, but they're going to be paying for it later. Either in higher costs to the contractors to fulfill projects OR paying consultants and internal teams absurd money to fix technical debt. It will happen. It's cost shifting. Edit: The other thing I forgot to add is loss of ownership. Shifting IT/development staff to contractors is going to decrease the sense of ownership in the project which means the level of care and concern about the success of the project are going to decline. Yes, it's an intangible and an important one. If I own something and feel like my work on it is necessary for success, I'll put in the work to do it right and set it up for success. Contractors will build to the contract and everything else is an add-on that costs more. Want that plugin for a new feature an internal dev would have built in as run of course because they see a future need? That'll cost you another 4 weeks of contract developer time because it wasn't in scope of contract.

seivan 11y ago
Keep in mind the extra you pay for contractors isn't actually going to contractors in question. It goes to office rental, accountant, sales team, internal HR and other crap. Not to mention the contractors in question will be hassled to spend time estimating future project scopes and sometimes help out on other projects and etc. So yeah, if tech is important to you and you don't need specialized skill-sets that's rare, contracting out is always pretty fucking stupid.
- floppydisk 11y ago
  The game isn't producing working projects, the game is getting so embedded you're there forever and then you nickel and dime for every little thing. Need a 30 second change of color on the HTML bar to fix accessibility? That's a week of dev time. Not only that, as the Contracting Corp, you lose control over the quality of candidate being hired to work on your projects.
manyxcxi 11y ago
> Shifting IT/development staff to contractors is going to decrease the sense of ownership in the project which means the level of care and concern about the success of the project are going to decline I could not agree more. I have worked with so many big companies that have outsourced their IT and tech (part of the reason I was doing work there in the first place) and the lack of empathy and general apathy by these providers has always been a huge reason for overruns and delays. There's no accountability, so a mess up doesn't get anyone scared for their job. If the worker is offsite it means the work goes through their ticket system and you just wait for it to get some- but it's probably going to get bounced back three or four times because the person didn't read the ticket. A perfect example is "we need a new database schema deployed to a dev database instance- here's the instance name we need it deployed to, here's the SQL script to be run, and here are the user permissions we need." Ticket gets bounced back: "What instance is this supposed to be deployed to?" facepalm On top of that, most the companies that come in, provide the bare minimum of resources, so that guy that's not getting paid enough to give a shit has too much work on his plate to keep up with it anyways.

seivan 11y ago

Keep in mind the extra you pay for contractors isn't actually going to contractors in question. It goes to office rental, accountant, sales team, internal HR and other crap. Not to mention the contractors in question will be hassled to spend time estimating future project scopes and sometimes help out on other projects and etc. So yeah, if tech is important to you and you don't need specialized skill-sets that's rare, contracting out is always pretty fucking stupid.

floppydisk 11y ago
The game isn't producing working projects, the game is getting so embedded you're there forever and then you nickel and dime for every little thing. Need a 30 second change of color on the HTML bar to fix accessibility? That's a week of dev time. Not only that, as the Contracting Corp, you lose control over the quality of candidate being hired to work on your projects.

manyxcxi 11y ago

> Shifting IT/development staff to contractors is going to decrease the sense of ownership in the project which means the level of care and concern about the success of the project are going to decline I could not agree more. I have worked with so many big companies that have outsourced their IT and tech (part of the reason I was doing work there in the first place) and the lack of empathy and general apathy by these providers has always been a huge reason for overruns and delays. There's no accountability, so a mess up doesn't get anyone scared for their job. If the worker is offsite it means the work goes through their ticket system and you just wait for it to get some- but it's probably going to get bounced back three or four times because the person didn't read the ticket. A perfect example is "we need a new database schema deployed to a dev database instance- here's the instance name we need it deployed to, here's the SQL script to be run, and here are the user permissions we need." Ticket gets bounced back: "What instance is this supposed to be deployed to?" facepalm On top of that, most the companies that come in, provide the bare minimum of resources, so that guy that's not getting paid enough to give a shit has too much work on his plate to keep up with it anyways.