Hiring Developers: Outsourcing Companies vs Freelancers |
Posted: May 25, 2019 |
Should you outsource development to a company or hire a freelancer? This is a common debate many business owners have to face when desiring affordable business growth. Before even beginning research, they would have been exposed to many different stories, hearing about positive or negative experiences with both options. Negative experiences are indicative of inexperienced developers and careless hiring processes; concerning both types of developers. This piece isn’t to help you find quality developers, but instead will compare the two by the general processes associated with them. Compare your current business situation with the information below to give your business the most promising step forward. Outsourcing to a CompanyQuality Assurance The best web development companies have already done initial screening for you. They only hire those developers with plenty of expertise and will add to the growth of their company. Credible companies have a work portfolio publicly available, this is a great way of finding a project that is similar to yours. The developers involved also boast well developed soft skills. Communication skills are extremely important in an outsourcing situation and have a large influence on tasks being understood and executed efficiently. Backing Outsourced employees need to have adequate resources to complete their projects. The best companies understand that developer productivity are influenced by the hardware they’re provided and the working environment around them. Especially, when it comes to building, buffering or testing; developers with state of the art equipment will provide updates quicker. Another advantage web developers have is the expertise surrounding them. If they come across a problem, they have the support of those around them to find a solution. Upon finding solutions, they can get the opinion of the surrounding team to discuss benefits and predict consequences. Confidentiality Security should never be taken lightly, it’s a good thing to be precious with personal/company code, it’s the heart of your project! Confidential information may be anything that can be used by another party to create their own technology, software and content. When outsourcing, your confidentiality will always be respected. This will be secured by a confidentiality agreement (CA) that binds both parties to ethical practice. Such an agreement creates a base for developing a strong working relationship. This also guarantees future security, if your project is used in a company work portfolio, only common details can be shared.
Availability This is a really simple reason why outsourcing is preferred compared to freelancing. Hours worked are consistent and guaranteed, making it easy to schedule meetings and request progress updates. Outsourcing comes with the expectation that you may be operating in different time zones and experienced developers value the importance of maximizing windows of mutual uptime. Availability is especially useful during crunch times where live updates are required. Pricing Options The most common way to pay outsourcing developers is on a monthly basis, in which many companies will provide cost effective developer packages that suit different companies. This is what sets web development companies apart from individual freelance hiring. Developer packages will range from hiring a single developer to hiring an entire development team. Imagine you need to hire an app developer, project manager, support technician and professional tester; yet hiring each role individually costs an unbelievable amount, a developer package is your solution. One outsourcing company that has found global success providing developer packages is CodeClouds, who provides monthly packages for things like app development with dedicated developers and shared resources for other important roles. Hiring Freelancers Freelancers tend to be a bit more scattershot than remote developers—I’ve hired some very good freelancers, but I’ve also hired some very bad freelancers. It’s often harder to vet an individual than a company. There are services like Toptal that will help you out with that but they can be difficult if you want to find somebody local. In those cases, there’s a low-tech solution that’s so obvious a lot of people miss it entirely: ask your colleagues. Find out which freelancers local businesses have worked with, and check out their work yourself. Forums are also a good source, though you need to be careful about trusting everybody—almost certainly, some of the people posting are trying to sell you something. A lot of HR managers get this idea that freelancers are cheaper: they see people offering $20 website development on Fiverr and think they’ve stumbled on the holy grail. It’s a bit of a cliche but it rings doubly true when talking about freelancers: you get what you pay for. The ultra-cheap freelancers you see online are often scammers, and even if they’re sincere they tend to be extremely low-quality and you’re going to need to pay a better developer to fix it all later anyway. You don’t hire a freelancer because you want to save money: you hire a freelancer because that specific person has exactly what you need for a specific job and if they have that then you’ve gotta pay for it. Furthermore, retaining freelancers long-term can get absurdly expensive. Their model tends to assume that you’re retaining their services for a specific, short period of time; if you want them for a year or longer, you’re not really looking for a freelancer. If you’re planning to do that, just offer them a job—it’ll make both of you happier. They might say no (they probably went freelance for a reason) but it’s worth checking anyway. Both options have their pros and cons, you need to weigh them up and decide which is best for your current situation. I would recommend going with a freelancer if you have a very niche project or problem that can be resolved short term. However, if you require long term assistance, consistency and a wider addition of expertise, choose outsourcing every time.
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