In light of my changing of jobs, it has finally hit me why places outsource their dirty work. Yes, money is a large part of it, but it is not just because they don’t want to tap their own talent, it’s that the company has no skill (or care) to execute/create/manage the proper resources (read people) to make inhouse abilities worth the investment.

In the position I am leaving I did a lot of stuff. I made dozens of applications along with hundreds of tiny little processes that make many behind-the-scenes things run properly. I did it essentially all by myself from sketch to product. Some things came entirely out of my brain to solve a certain problem. It was a lot of fun and everyone liked only having to go to one person to get things done. A one-stop shop.

But now with me leaving everyone - including myself - is realizing just how much stuff I have touched over the past five years or so, and now they are in quite a pickle. They put all their eggs into one basket and now the basket is hitting the road. I really didn’t give it much thought when I was in the middle of making all this stuff. I enjoyed designing and developing tools and applications. Most of the time I actually forgot that most places have a team of people making products.

And there in lies the problem - the lack of a team. If the place had started out properly, there would now be a team of people involved in projects, not just one person. Now that I am leaving I see them going, “Oh boy, we’re not going to do stuff on our own anymore. We don’t want this to happen again.”

The problem isn’t that they don’t want to do it inhouse (per se), it’s that they didn’t execute or organize their resources from the start. Instead of taking stock of what was happening, they just let me keep on grooving. Sure, it got them a lot of neat stuff that worked great, but if they had assembled a team - even a loose team - they wouldn’t be in the situationn they are in now where they’re wondering how to support and create things in the future.

To sound all corporate buzzwordy, they should have cultivated inhouse development a little more. Start with one person, but once you realize the concept has legs and saves money, apply some more brains to the process and then magically you have a dedicated team of people that are making great things to help the company cut costs and keep things under control.

Just today I was in a meeting showing off a Google Map mashup and explained that it was all free. The manager did a quick double-take confirming that I said the word “free.” Apparently, other mapping solutions they were looking at were anywhere from $20,000 - $30,000. Granted it was very powerful software and while Google can’t do everything, it did enough for them to use it for a marquee project.

Ah the power of inhouse development.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.