[j_baker]

I agree that a startup should hire multi-talented people. But it's a bit extreme to say that startups should hire people who can do UI design, backend programming, and do business deals. Certainly such people are useful, but they're incredibly rare and are probably more interested in founding their own startup.

Also, I don't agree with the "just contract it out" philosophy. The problem you run into with contractors is that even if they're good, they don't have anything invested in what they produce. They don't have to live with it long-term.

I'm not saying that it's bad to hire contractors, only that you have to be careful with them. And I certainly don't think that it's a good idea to hire contractors because they're easier to find and fire than full-timers. In fact, many times it can be harder.

[HaloZero]

The important thing that I think Jess forgot to mention is that inDinero doesn't contract out critical parts of the sites. It's usually smaller things that we want to get done that aren't important enough for the full time engineers. Example is a small ad that we run to get user feedback on the dashboard page, something easy to build but not super critical part of the site.

We also make sure all contrator code goes through code reviews, which takes up my time but ensures that no code enters our site that isn't up to our caliber of quality.

P.S. I'm an engineer (Rohan) who works at inDinero in case that wasn't obvious.