| At the end of the article, his explanation of how this used to “work” is based on what developers were once paid. Cost is a tricky thing to sum up because if you state just one thing (monthly rate, as he did), it's easy for other costs to be left out. It is entirely possible to pay less for the same talent. My thinking is that he got lucky though. If you start out underpaying, you can still overpay thereafter. Here is a quick top-of-my-head list of major software costs that can come up (not too far) down the line, after paying initial development wages: - Documentation turns out to be nonexistent or written in a way that is hard to decipher, or wrong. (This seems more likely with outsourcing because heck, you didn't specify that you wanted the code documented, and it'll take hours to add all that, plus you might pay more later if it's not there...) - Serious bugs are lurking that require a little time to discover. - Although the system demo'd well with initial tests, it collapsed when asked to scale slightly; e.g. it exposed a bad choice of algorithm that blew up with large N. Sometimes bad algorithms from inexperienced developers can create a catastrophically large amount of refactoring work. - The developers took short-cuts and exposed the company to a legal minefield (e.g. copying something or injecting patented or GPL'd code without asking), rendering their working and brilliantly-implemented solution unusable. Now what...even if you can argue that it's their fault, you're probably going to be paying lawyers for something (defense or lawsuits). - The system does seem to do what it's supposed to do but it turns out you didn't specify it quite right and it integrates poorly into your environment in some way. So, great: it's done, it's here, it runs but you still aren't getting anything out of it because you have to spend more time and money to bring it to a usable state internally. Typically this doesn't happen with internally-developed systems because the people are familiar all along with the idiosyncrasies of the environment. Even at a cheaper hourly rate, how many more times are you going to go back to the provider (just a few more hours at a cheap rate to fix the next problem...) before you've gained nothing? Much less the fact that you have zero actual employees who understand what you bought so if the provider ever goes out of business or triples its prices, you incur another "new" cost: hiring or redirecting your own people to figure out this thing that you bought and now have to maintain yourself. |