June 24, 2015
Conventional wisdom at many companies is that you need a rock star software engineer to develop your product. Indeed, I have worked with many brilliant developers in my career and they all had great success at startups and larger companies too. But, they were not the only developer on the team. It takes a team of software engineers, designers and testers to make great software.
Why is it then that so many software companies and IT departments look for that ONE person to save the day and be a software development hero? Even at one of my startups the non-technical CEO wanted to hire a VP of Engineering that could manage a team and code… and design the product user interface too. Hey, why not?
Because those are at least three different skill sets and it is highly unlikely you will find them all in one person. We never did. Even with software developers there can be a wide range of skills and competency. One engineer may be good at user interface implementation but get bogged down with complex algorithms. Another engineer can be good at writing reusable object-oriented code and another great at creating web apps with PHP (and maybe only if he works alone!). You need to build a team of engineers to get all these skills (except maybe that PHP guy). So what’s the issue?
It’s hard to build a software development team! It takes six to nine months to find, hire and get a full team productive. Have you already spent six months trying to hire developers for your team without much to show for it? If so, the idea of looking for an outsourcing partner is probably daunting.
After all, you’ll have to spend another 4 to 6 months looking for a good company if you do it right and are diligent. Then there’s still the risk you pick a loser – a company that talks a good game but can’t deliver good developers let alone ones who can work in a team.
But when done right, outsourcing gives you a bridge to a host of tremendous benefits: a ready talent pool, resource flexibility, more innovation from a partner company with a broad base of client experiences, cost efficiency of course, software development best practices, a software development HR department and more. The trick is to select your outsourcing partner carefully.
The most critical selection criteria is to select a software outsourcing company based on cultural alignment with your company in addition to alignment of the technical expertise you need. Outsourcing extends your team and cultural alignment with your company’s communication style and ways of doing things is critical for success.
If you have software development staffing issues then stop wishing and hoping for a rock star developer to step in and be a hero. Instead use global software outsourcing carefully and quickly hire your software development dream team today.