For any business that is dealing with software development finding people and hiring them to do a good and quality job can sometimes be tedious and difficult.
There is so much to find a good workforce than a simple job interview and „you are hired” at the end! There are so many financial implications for your business when it comes to having your workers do certain jobs. You have to have an HR department, you have to increase your spending for wages, taxes, and other things that blow your budget way off. You also have to have legal teams and whatnot if you want a successful business.
If you are just starting and have a software developer or two and have a bit more demanding task to do, meaning you need to hire more you can opt to outsource this job to someone. To those that do not know what outsourcing is – it is the ability to have labor that is not based in your company but that works for you. You can have them work from home or be hired through a BPO or Business Process Outsourcing company that handles all of the legal and logistical issues for you, while you reap the labor advantages only.
Today we will be discussing the pros and cons of outsourcing when software development is considered and thanks to Softengi, this article is before you all today.
Pros
1. Cost reduction
Outsourcing any job, software development included, always reduces the cost for your business even if you hire people that are more expensive than the people that are located in your local area. For the quality of labor, you are getting you are still saving a ton o money when it comes to outsourcing vs. having those people working for you in your offices. A few examples of those savings are you don’t have to pay for their equipment, you don’t have to pay for physical office or office equipment, and others. Thanks to research outsourcing are good both for employee and employer because employees working remotely from home have more productive work hours than those made in an office.
2. Effectiveness
When outsourcing, projects can be posted easily and get done quickly. This is important because your team can expand or contract very quickly and efficiently depending on what kind of project you are working on. Outsourcing allows for flexibility, especially when software development is in question. Sometimes you will initially need two or three persons on the project and toward the end, you need one, and it is awesome that you can utilize that to your advantage as well.
3. Onboarding
Outsourcing employees allows everyone to have a really easy onboarding process, meaning you don’t have to register a whole bunch of tax numbers because, in essence, they are all contractors that are contracted to work for you. Since there is a lot of bureaucracy that goes into hiring someone to work for you outsourcing makes all of that easy and allows for these bureaucratic procedures, which take time and money, to be bypassed.
4. Global hiring pool
When outsourcing you and your business are taking advantage of a global hiring pool which is not something to neglect. Having a diverse worker with a whole bunch of different skills, knowledge, and work manners benefits businesses a lot. Whenever hiring locally, you are losing out on this and you probably lose on quality of work that could be done but is out of the reach for you.
5. Risk management
When outsourcing a job to someone else you are essentially outsourcing a part of the risk for that job as well. Risk management in business is really important and outsourcing deals with this too. If you are outsourcing through the already mentioned BPO your risk is contract regulated and you don’t have to worry about it. By spreading the risk, your impact, and reducing the overall risk your business carries, which is a smart practice.
Cons
1. Delays
Even though outsourcing is generally a pro there are some downsides to it and one of them is delays. When you have people working for you away from where you can control what and how they do you will have delays. The workers will always have a lot of questions and little solutions but you have to set a new mindset that will be revolving around don’t ask me what to do but tell me what you did. This will greatly reduce these questions and delays that come from them and allow you to have workers that will take action and make decisions instead of waiting for you to tell them what decision to make.
2. Lack of focus
Since you are outsourcing your software project to someone you can expect that the developer has a lack of focus on that project because you are not with them 8 hours a day. You don’t have the same influence or control and you can have the same context of communication as you would if they were in the office next to you. But there is a solution and it calls for regular meets to get informed and to make sure your projects are on track.
3. Privacy and intellectual property
Now, this is a major concern when it comes to outsourcing. Most businesses have certain fears when it comes to this and they are almost always revolving around workers running away with your intellectual property, your payrolls, some vital information, and similar. This is a risk that exists here, but this also exists as a risk with employees that work directly for you in your offices, it is just a matter of temptation. It is a risk you have to take because the benefits outweigh it by far.
4. Fake people/accounts
Some platforms offer freelancers for your needs, the most famous Upwork and freelancer, and there you can hire a person to do a certain project and instead of one person you get a Person Inc. that will have 10 employees behind them and delegate your project to them. This is not what you want and what you signed up but you can also control it by asking for constant updates from that employee to make sure everything is on track and time.
5. Language barriers
Since you are not only hiring in your backyard and you are dipping your feet into the worldwide employee pool you have to expect that there will be some sort of language barrier. English is the world-known language but there are places where it will not have its use or purpose. This also goes for cultural barriers that will emerge from differences in cultures and how a particular thing works in one country and how it is something different in others.
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