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I was the CTO of an R&D consulting company in Poland, and parent is mostly spot on. I disagree, however, about the way they describe in-house management vs giving engineers to the customer. The only thing of real value in a software agency is the team. If your programmers get pissed off and move to another company, you are going to have to spend money to hire and onboard someone, and leave money on the table (you need engineers to fulfill your contracts). So, unless an agency's management totally sucks, they will put a lot of effort to keep their personnel happy. This means, for example, having decent project management (and that's kinda natural, as you tend to do a lot of projects). Second, working the engineers to the bone is very much _not_ in the interest of the agency – if you work super hard and burn out, the customer gets all the upside (project delivered), and the agency gets all the downside. So, a decent agency will be good at pushing back when the client tries to abuse their employees. This is one of the reasons why we strongly preferred managing the work ourselves, and why we stuck to hourly billing (which is super annoying to most of the time, but it aligns the incentives in that regard slightly better than if you bill by the day). If the agency is doing staff augmentation, the developers are mostly left to fend for themselves. This is problematic, as it makes the devs to (justly) wonder what is the agency doing to deserve their margins. (Of course, your mileage may vary. Ours was a small shop with very senior people, and we were doing very interesting projects. Working at a huge Indian outsourcing company is going to be a very different experience.) |