

My experiences with personal outsourcing - tectonic
http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2012/06/10/on-lifesourcing/

======
tferris
The ongoing discussion about outsourcing on HN is getting slightly tedious.
Outsourcing is like a good api and makes sense ...

\- if it abstracts things away from you

\- if is much cheaper and yield better results than if doing it yourself

\- if the communication, specification and resource management overhead is in
a healthy relation to the actual work

\- and most important: if you stay independent

So, some good examples which make sense to outsource: tax, simple content work
like writing and all areas which are not related to your core competencies.
The problem with outsourcing IT and dev stuff is that even if you are yourself
a developer that you still quickly get dependent on the contractor and over
time your influence on this contractor will vanish away until the contractors
dictates timeline, priorities, features for slowly raising day rates. Changing
the contractor leads to new costs for training or for a total rewrite. Thus,
if you want to outsource development, outsource those parts which do not
belong to the core of your product or which can be isolated from the rest with
a clean API and no dependencies to other modules.

I believe that most development stuff should be done by the founders
themselves. Not because they enjoy coding, no the reason is simple: A founder
or business owner basically build a business systems consisting of business
processes. Business processes and a business system are the premises for a
scalable business. And we are doing tech business anyway, so our code is
nothing else than efficient representations of our business. Our code reflects
our business processes. Thus, I wouldn't like to let third parties decide on
the core of my business. I'd code even a simple website for my product myself
because it's easy and it's reflects all the Marketing processes of my company
and I want to control them myself.

~~~
tectonic
Just to be clear: I've also had mixed experiences outsourcing development, and
I'm a developer. I'm a proponent of outsourcing modular tasks that you're not
an expert in.

------
lpmirage
I know this is exactly what the medical industry is suffering from right now,
in a real bad way. Contractors and outside companies now dictate much of the
policies and timelines, without the accountability, downtime, or maintenense.

"The problem with outsourcing IT and dev stuff is that even if you are
yourself a developer that you still quickly get dependent on the contractor
and over time your influence on this contractor will vanish away until the
contractors dictates timeline, priorities, features for slowly raising day
rates."

------
danso
> _I’ve paid users on Mechanical Turk and later on oDesk to label data for me
> for some Machine Learning research._

What tasks (I'm assuming these involved huge batches if it was for a machine
learning set) were economical to move from mTurk to oDesk? I've never used the
latter but that seems to be a place to hire individual workers?

~~~
tectonic
In this case, I hired people to perform sentiment tagging of status updates
for the training of SVM regression models. oDesk allowed me to interview more
carefully and ended up working better. I wrote a quick Rails scaffold that let
people rapidly tag statuses.

Edit: Something like CloudFlower might also have worked well, but I didn't
want to pay for it. The key was that I needed to ensure a baseline level of
quality in all of the taggings. (Although, to some extent, I could take
consensus labels.)

