

Hiring via API - brezina
http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog/2011/08/hiring-via-api/

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raganwald
Outsourcing parts of your software service to other software services via
meterable API is indeed like a brick and mortar outsourcing part of their
product or service to other brick and mortar businesses. In all the good ways,
and all the bad ways. But thanks to APIs, some of the bad ways are worse than
others because they impose switching costs.

In the physical world, if FedEx does your deliveries and they experience a
“service interruption,” UPS will be at your door within an hour to take over.
Simple delivery services are easily substitutable (more complex supply chain
relationships such as integrated data processing systems and warehousing are
not, of course).

APIs are all about imposing switching costs. We need to think about that
carefully, especially when some of these other services can go down.

Which brings me to the next point. Conventional wisdom (“conventional" does
not mean it’s _right_ , just oft-quoted) is that you should not outsource your
core value proposition, just the things around your core value proposition. So
yeah, outsource hosting code repositories. What about notifications? Well, if
notifications went down for a few hours, does your service still delight
customers? If so, then notifications are not part of your core value
proposition. They’re a nice-to-have, or perhaps a checkbox feature.

But if your service becomes useless without notifications, well, this is not
something that should be outsourced without a great deal of thought. Your
notification service is actually a partner of yours, not simply a supplier.
You ought to have a very strong relationship with the provider or have an
infrastructure that can fail over in minutes.

I’m not speaking against the article, just pointing out that APIs impose
switching costs and that we should be careful when using an external service
to implement part of our service’s core value proposition. If the external
service goes down or goes away, we need a backup plan.

~~~
qixxiq
Very good point. I recently got bitten quite badly by having an external email
parse api drop a whole lot of our support emails. I'm quite certain the error
was on their side but theres no real way to prove it (besides log entries
saying it was delivered to them, and none at our notification url).

Its a complicated proposition though. If I switch back to a home-brew system
I'll lose a lot of the nifty features in exchange for more control.

------
wccrawford
“I’d rather do contract work.”

One of the best programmers I know says this.

------
Barnabas
This domain is blocked by my work firewall as "pornography". Too bad.

~~~
brezina
how weird? Sorry about that - I have no idea why that would happen. Anywho -
the post has been added as a guest post over at Inside Mobile Apps. check it
out here: [http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/24/hiring-via-api-
br...](http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/24/hiring-via-api-brezina-
sincerely/)

