2024 week 49 - Outside contractors
💧 A paradox of sw development!
Everyone is looking to develop more features, faster, and cheaper too.
At the same time there's an abundance of agencies looking for more work, and offering great terms.
Why isn't more work given to agencies and contractors? Or more generally, why isn't more software given to outside developers?
Part of it is trust. You want to own what you sell. But that isn't that valuable is it? Engineers and other team members move to new companies and take many learnings and techniques with them (and this is ok). You develop trust as you build, whoever you build it with — a proof of that most companies have loyal clients many thousands of miles away.
Part of it is operations. One thing is an open source library everyone can contribute to, especially if it's just a frontend or just a backend component. Another is a fully fledged software with multiple services, pipelines, etc. You *can* make it work, but work isn't plug n play from the first minute. Then there's conventions and code reviews, and a bunch of other team factors. But things are improving. Workers are already remote, or partly remote, and working async most of the time, and many people even choose to be contractors in a legal sense. This is a tricky element, as you may be walking a fine legal line and some countries are quite specific about what employed work is.
And then there's AI, which is going to empower a new way of working.
Even faster flows;
AI will pre-check and validate work;
AI will do work too. Is AI an employee? No, rather a service?
I don't have a solution to 1+2. But Software needs to be a much more liquid asset.
Software *wants* to be more liquid.
I'm sure this problem will be solved in the next 10 years.
