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by darkmarmot 672 days ago
I used to do this kind of work as a contractor (for logistics and manufacturing), and I've it seen go both perfectly well and tragically wrong. The most common points of failure I've seen are underestimating the amount of business/domain knowledge needed and picking the wrong team.

Sometimes it's worth bringing someone in to build a temporary prototype to test the waters (I once wrote a wireless hand scanner pick system for a startup warehouse in a weekend -- they planned to throw my code away but just needed something functional right then.)

I would only pursue it if:

- your business is truly niche/unique and there's a significant cost due to process friction

- the total amount of work needed to have a functional product could be completed by one or two good developers in a matter of weeks/months.

If you do pursue it, I would try to take advantage of the Python Paradox (https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html) and hire someone, counterintuitively, working in a niche technology. You could probably find someone pretty good willing to build it in Elixir without much trouble.

1 comments

> You could probably find someone pretty good willing to build it in Elixir without much trouble.

While I agree with that assessment, you’ll also spend the rest of your days cursing yourself if they were to leave.

It's not hard to learn and my current Fortune 100 has had zero trouble hiring for it.