[neilwillgettoit]

I would not take a startup that is outsourcing their development seriously. All of the institutional knowledge of how a product works goes right out the door. If you cannot fix your own product if it breaks, do you really own it?

[shoo]

A couple of things spring to mind:

Naur's "programming as theory building" essay [1]. E.g.

  > programming properly should be regarded as an activity by
  > which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of
  > insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This
  > suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more
  > common notion, that programming should be regarded as a
  > production of a program and certain other texts

This suggests that it might not be a great idea to outsource understanding. The entire essay is worth a read.

Yosefk also gave a fairly amusing characterisation of what it is to work for a software company [2]:

  > Basically the "knowledge worker's" contract is
  > something like this:
  > 
  >   > We'll give you a precisely defined salary
  >   > and a benefits package. In return, we
  >   > request that you handle some problems that
  >   > we're told we're having. We hope that you'll
  >   > solve them well enough to prevent us from
  >   > having to know what they were in the first
  >   > place. Please help us maintain the feeling
  >   > that we own an asset similar to land or gold
  >   > or something. Please keep the realization
  >   > that we're more like the operator of a
  >   > flying circus than a landowner from
  >   > disturbing us. And certainly, never, ever
  >   > ask us what to do with any of the moving
  >   > pieces of this flying circus, because we
  >   > seriously have no idea.

[1] there's a copy here http://alistair.cockburn.us/ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn...

[2] http://yosefk.com/blog/information-asymmetry-cuts-both-ways....

[mooreds]

Wow, those are fantastic excerpts.

Thanks for sharing.

[twunde]

I disagree. Many companies I know started out by outsourcing development to some sort of agency and then brought some development in-house after the product is finished. Many agencies will give you a much stronger initial product, since they're used to making good v1 products.

Usually to be successful, the non-technical team must have complementary strengths, such as great domain knowledge and industry contacts, good sales ability etc. Purely technical startups are rarely successes outside of Silicon Valley, usually the tech needs to be married to a strong non-technical team that sets up sales, distribution networks, operations, etc

[mooreds]

Sure. However, the value of their company is really going to be the network and community they build. I believe they are planning to bring development in house as soon as they can afford it, but are trying to get the project going with the overseas team.

[neilwillgettoit]

I think it would be a much more positive indicator if they had chosen to learn the skills necessary to create their product.

[mooreds]

I agree. I mentioned a couple of times that they should learn the platform, or at least the underlying language. If not enough to code, at least enough to do quality control (code reviews).

However, they are both working apart from the startup (I believe) so it's tough for them to pick up one more thing.

[neilwillgettoit]

That's a great point. It's one thing to be able to program it yourself, and another to understand enough to ask the right questions about the code to learn how it works.

If they had the ability to QA the outsourced team's work at a semi-granular level, I'd imagine there would be a lot less disconnect between the work done and expectations.

[mooreds]

And one suggestion I offered was to find someone (some uninterested third party) to spend a few hours a week doing code reviews, so at least they have some insight. Of course, it'd be better if it were one of them, but some technical insight is better than next to none.