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carlcoryellHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Then the trick is figuring out how to hire, train, and establish a productive environment for the …

… Then the trick is figuring out how to hire, train, and establish a productive environment for the team. My customers approach was to hire a vendor [Pivotal Labs] to ship a first release and help hire in-house staff to replace vendor roles until the team was fully in-house. The customer got rapid feedback that the team and concept worked; we shipped working software. The new hire landed into a productive context, and could see that the company had an effective approach to software development (because it was already shipping working software).

Original discussionAsk HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?594 source comments · at import
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45HCPWHN

I'm an executive at a mid-sized logistics company (~200 employees, $200-300M annual revenue) getting more and more frustrated with our software situation and am considering taking software development in-house. I've been lurking here for years, so looking at the HN community to talk me out of it. We're using a third-party product that functions, but barely. The provider is understaffed and unresponsive and the platform is stagnant. It's a fight getting basic bugs fixed let alone new features implemented. We're having to resort to a separate low-code platform to fill in the gaps. Our business operates in a specific niche and there are no other providers who cater specifically to our industry. As we are growing we're running in to the limits of what this product can offer. We're being hampered in our speed of execution and missing crucial insights. I feel like we could do much better with …

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th3byrdm4nHN

I have a fully staffed team it’s not 5m a year. For a company twice his size. These are very generous consultant pitch #s not reality. We doubled running 1-$200k/guy … 2x full stack devs (me) 2x data guys 1x MSP for IT. That team was awesome and did serious buzz saw damage because we shipped solutions that made the company better every day. Didn’t have to be huge. Just help someone do something better.

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wordofxHN

> Building and running your own software team is probably around $5M/year Do people just pull random numbers out of their ass with no actual experience? 99% of developers do not live in Silicon Valley on 1m salaries.

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davedxHN

$5M/year? In the US maybe. A team of 5 senior freelancers in Europe will cost about 150-200k per person.

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ethbr1HN

With a company OP's size, I'd definitely look at it from this perspective. Funding (and related longevity) are key drivers of technical debt. If a team has to constantly pivot projects to politically justify their existence, bad technical things happen. So figure out a budget model that works, is sustainable, is justified on ROI (as logistics dev will be compared to capex alternative investments). As a "halfway" solution, you could find 1-2 senior inhouse architect type people (ideally, who have reasons to stick around like quality of life) and pair them with project-based freelance/outsourced development teams. (Hard to find good small dev firms, but they exist) That way, if dev screws up the project because they're incompetent, you have more options. But you retain the core institutional knowledge and some dev ability inhouse. And it maximizes budget flexibility and gives you time to f…

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