Is Being Outsourced A Bad Thing? (From Developer Perspective)

Firstly, A Short Backstory.

We are very transparent when it comes to our recruitment process. We do not want to over-promise and under-deliver. I am always very honest with candidates about our current situation here at NS Code.

I had a Zoom call with one of our potential developers, and he asked a question:

> Do you have in-house projects, or do you outsource your developers to other teams?

And as I said, I was honest. So I replied:

> Yes, we've got in-house projects, but as for now, majority of our projects are outsourcing ones.

Then the candidate said, that he is no longer interested, because he was searching for a company with only in-house projects. He said that he would join our company when we switch the majority of our projects to in-house. And it got me thinking.

The Bad About Outsourcing.

I heard so many times, that outsourcing is a bad thing. What were the most common arguments?

• I do not feel like I'm a part of the company.
• I do not work with my colleagues.
• I do not want to work with external teams.

And I can totally agree with some of them. Because in some scenarios, being a developer for an outsourced project can feel very strange. But hear me out now.

If you are there for your self-development - it doesn't matter.

But Is It That Bad?

A few days ago from this blog post I sat with my friend who is running his own software company. We were talking about business and I came up with this story about the candidate. Then he came up with an unexpected question:

> Would you like to run my company for few months?

And I was like:

> Hell yeah, I would love to!

Do you see it already?

It doesn't really matter if we are outsourcing team members for development / marketing / sales to different companies, because it develops them even further.

Right now you are probably working in some company. You've got some internal coding standards, company culture and other things. Wouldn't it be cool to try new things for a few weeks? Learn new techniques, be a part of different environment and gather new knowledge?

I know that from it sometimes feels strange to be a part of an external team, but look at it from this perspective - you can learn so much.

Summary

Of course, there are pros of cons of every possible situation in life. What I tried to achieve here - look at every situation in different perspectives. Outsourcing at the first sight can be viewed as something bad. However, in reality there are a lot of pros of it.