

One of the Most Time Consuming Startup Roadblocks - pragmatic
http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2009/07/14/one-of-the-most-common-startup-roadblocks/

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moe
To me this looks like the old outsourcing myth in a new(?) disguise.

The question remains: How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy
partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like
these?

Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever. How am I supposed
to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests?
Database Development?

I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because
the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid. Over here in the
real world it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to
speed, even on small tasks. In my expirience outsourcing makes more sense for
slightly bigger chunks, to justify the overhead, instead of the teeny weeny
bits.

~~~
oldgregg
I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff
(plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we
scuttled the whole office and started everything from scratch. Everything they
produced was garbage. Can you find talented people in India? YES. But it will
cost you so much there is no point.

There is _no_ sense of company loyalty. There is _no_ sense of how to work
independently without being told what to do. Status is defined as 1) how many
people work under you, and 2) how many servants you have. If another company
offers to give them 5 junior programmers ("freshers") to work under them
instead of 4 you can kiss them goodbye. Oh, and never take their word about
anything. You need to review the code on a daily basis to make sure something
is actually getting done. Not to mention, while they will tell you otherwise,
java and .net is the only thing they give a rip about, maybe a little php.

A startup is an inherently creative process. It would be like Bono outsourcing
a new album-- then finding out they only play sitar. He would spend TONS of
time documenting everything about how he wants it to sound and telling them in
detail exactly how it should work. If he is _lucky_ they will get 75% there.
Creative processes just don't work like that.

Large bureaucratic organizations can squeeze the cost savings out of
outsourcing, but for a startup it's just asinine. The only exception is VERY
rote tasks. Basically just data mining. Send them a link to a website that you
want mined and they will do it pretty cheap. Now, you could probably write a
script to do it in about the same time, but in some cases it's easier just to
give it to them.

Now that I think about it, the reason I left to do a startup was because I
wanted to get away from people who get a big chubby over Thomas Friedman but
don't have a damn clue about software development.

I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around
Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.

~~~
joubert
a little servant boy?

~~~
oldgregg
their words, not mine. the caste system is alive and well, now it just has a
capitalist tinge to it.

~~~
solutionyogi
That's incorrect. In India, a small company office will have full time 'peon'
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon> . This person will be responsible for
various office chores, the main one being to get 'tea' from nearby teashop.
[Imagine having an office boy here who gets a Starbucks coffee for you when
asked.] This happens because in India, concept of 'vending machine' is not
very popular and labor is cheap. A lot of times, young kid from a poor family
seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. I am
from a smaller city in India and I haven't seen any caste system
discrimination in my 24 years of living there.

~~~
anamax
> A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This
> has nothing whatsoever to do with caste.

Oh really?

Let me suggest that you're using "caste" in a somewhat different way than we
are.

------
tc
He thinks this needed a perl script or defining the task by email for an
assistant? Seriously?

    
    
      $ wget -i urls.txt
    

I understand that this may have been a contrived example, but many of these
foreign VA stories sound pretty contrived. Having worked with foreign and
remote staff, I know that it is what you're able to make of it. But at the
same time, there are some natural hurdles to doing this effectively at a small
scale. It'd be easy to spend a lot of time managing the process, doing quality
review, and providing feedback.

When you can scale delegation, or when you're talking about things outside of
your skill set, then there is of course no question.

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delano
"Micro-outsourcing" daily tasks isn't everyone's cup of tea but there are
absolutely huge gains to be had if done carefully. Not just for technical and
business tasks, but personal ones as well (cleaning, cooking, errands,
etc...).

I find it really difficult to maintain focus when switching contexts from one
task to another so for me it's really valuable to be able to fire off a brief
email to hand off stuff that doesn't require my direct attention.

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tdoggette
The value of this depends on whether you can afford to make that trade of
money for time.

~~~
DenisM
Can you afford not to?

~~~
jsonscripter
What happens when the outsource work isn't to your quality standards? You've
wasted a lot of time already, and now you have to dispute it and waste some
more time.

~~~
RK
That's how my friend's service-based startup died before it even got out of
the gate. He tried to outsource way too much overseas, not realizing the
extremely low quality of work he would get (e.g. copy writing). He had to have
a lot of it redone and burned through all of his cash before he got anywhere.
(And he had a pretty weak business plan in the first place.)

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EGF
I like the idea of drip outsourcing but one common problem I have run into,
and seen others have trouble with, is finding the right providers.

The hourly rates are not the problem, but the quality and source of the
worker. I am location agnostic, but finding the source to do the work is
sometimes a huge part of the time suck that happens when you are looking to to
drip outsourcing.

~~~
3pt14159
Choose 2: Quality, speed, price. I do some freelance work, but not for $3 an
hour.

~~~
EGF
This is great - I just wrote about exactly that topic - choosing 2 (but you
can't have all three) on my own blog.

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JeremyChase
If the time required to write that perl script was longer than writing an
email you should look into a different field.

~~~
ericb
If you think you are correctly estimating how long the script will take to
write, and your estimate is "less time than writing an email," you should look
into managing programmers in a large, clumsy corporation.

~~~
JeremyChase
I am quite serious here. You already have the URI's, and you should be able to
write this script in under 2 minutes. This reminds me of this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=703585>

The amount of time spent defining what you want is surely going to be equal to
this.

~~~
thorax
> _It took me exactly 90 seconds to get the request to him_

Depending on how you code it's likely to take you more than 90 seconds to:
Fire up the editor, switch into mental design mode, create the initial script
structure, write the script, figuring out authentication/cookie management
issues, picking the right regex (or selector), and then debugging the typo or
the 2 unexpected problems that came up (as they will on average).

I think you can see the time and mental differences between that and:

"Here is the URL and credentials, can you log in, visit each page in my
gallery and send me a zip with all the pictures?"

In the end you'll be more proud of a script approach, but that doesn't give
you what you wanted in the first place-- i.e. avoiding the drain on your time
when you have more important things to do.

------
jgamman
i agree with him - i can't code at all so i was forced to go this route to
build some projects for my last position. i invested a lot of time in the
specs to start with and as the contractor and i got more comfortable with what
'success looked like' it got a lot easier and soon he was suggesting
improvements or implementing some features on the fly (you gotta earn that
kind of trust). the key for me was to make sure each set of tasks was distinct
and i could actually test something that works each week - ended up with 4-5
solid iterations before we finished and the weekly turnaround let me get a lot
of good feedback from others.

