[mathgladiator]

Everything is a commodity.

When you hire an employee, you hire a probabilistic machine that may produce stuff closer to what you want. When you contract out, then you pay a probabilistic machine that may produce what you have specified which hopefully was what you wanted.

[lobster_johnson]

> Everything is a commodity.

Well, no. That's a very unhelpful generalization that tries to subvert an established nomenclature for an easy, hip-sounding soundbite. The term "commodity" is very precisely defined and has nothing to do with "hiring probabilistic machines".

A commodity is a product which can be supplied and purchased at no difference in quality. It doesn't matter if I buy petroleum from maker A or maker B, because both are, to the extent that I care, petroleum. Commodities allow you to deal with abstract notions of goods, separate from the physical goods, thereby fundamentally changing the way you trade goods, since (for example) you can buy from the cheapest supplier and sell to the highest bidder, with no concern for the actual stuff being exchanged.

[stylejam]

What I'm pointing out is that "what you want" or "your spec" is wrong. What you can and should ask to a designer is: here is my homepage, I want people to understand this and then signup. What happens now is that customers ask for a website they like. You see the problem?

You're probably a developer (my wild guess), you don't have a problem like this. If I have to make a parallel, it's like your CEO comments your code because he coded on the CBM 64 during the 80s. Exactly the same thing.