
Headcount  - wglb
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/02/11.html
======
ehsanul
_At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of
requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer..._

The converse (and less stupid) idea is to require every employee at your
software startup to do sales/marketing/customer service. There are a bunch of
great examples of this, but what comes to mind is how the employees at Wufoo
rotate the customer service position daily (mentioned here:
<http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/>).

~~~
illumen
Expect to lose staff if you do this suddenly. I've been at a place where this
was implemented... and in a few months a bunch of people had left. Many
developers at companies just want to do development... and not sales and
support. As usual, changing a culture of a place should be done in
consultation with everyone there.

~~~
ehsanul
Good point. The other, probably better way to do it is to have that kind of
culture from the beginning.

~~~
skmurphy
If you make it clear it's formal part of everyone's responsibility during the
interview process you will likely get a self-selection for the development
team that you are looking for.

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siculars
What Joel should argue, in addition to "don't outsource programming", is that
one could augment sales and marketing. A sales and marketing team in a major
region like China or Russia could multiply good coding done at home.

If code is the analogue to manufacturing in the digital age, why would one
outsource the manufacturing of the new industrial revolution? It would be like
Henry Ford contracting with Mexico instead of building factories in Michigan.

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netcan
_US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring
software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or
China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston,
but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5%
advantage from offshoring development._

I assume he's talking about some specific class of company. Anyone know what
it is?

~~~
ordinaryman
For whatever class of company, I am puzzled why is it wrong to assume
marketing and sales cannot be outsourced. Marketing allows work to be done in
flexible timings, for sales and support one will require employees to be awake
at odd hours, specific to their customer's time zone.

And, I have personally seen it being done successfully - not in an outsouring
company, but in an India-based product company.

I believe that as long as there is going to be considerable cost arbitrage to
be taken advantage of, there will be outsourcing. Development / sales /
marketing - anything that does not require direct visit to customer premises.

~~~
dagw
For marketing to be really effective it needs specialist knowledge of both
field and geographic location. There are countless examples of marketing
failures where people simply assume that what works in country A will work
just as well in country B. I wouldn't trust a marketing firm halfway round the
world to know what works and what doesn't in my home market.

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kiba
The marginal uillity of programmers have an inverse relationship to the
quality of the codebase.

The sale force's marginal utility increased in relative to code quality.

However, all else being equal, it is probably best to hire the best developers
and salespersons you can for your money.

I think this sum up the blog post? Maybe I got the explanation wrong?

