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.
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.
> 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?
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.)
Anytime you require consistency with more involved training, go the oDesk route.
Mechanical Turk can produce quality results but you have to take measures to ensure that quality (gold standard question, triplicate entry, etc). Email me if you want to discuss further. jim.jones1@gmail.com
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."
- 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.