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Finding a Ready-Made Dev Team?
marshrew writes "We are a small startup just coming out of a period of R&D with IP and prototype code (containing open source, commercial & freelancer-built custom components) developed/integrated in-house by essentially one guy. We're at the point where we want to build out first commercial implementation which will require a handful of developers for at least six months. We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with. We don't mean a splinter group from a larger dev house, but an agile, self-contained team, who enjoy working together and have an existing practice. Geography is not a problem as we are used to working in a distributed manner." Does such an animal exist? What have other teams done in a situation like this?
In 2005, a crack Hacker unit was sent to prison by an over-zealous RIAA for a crime they didn't commit(Theft , it should have been copyright infringement).
,to the Los Angeles und3rgr0und!!!!. Today, still wanted by their Previous employers due to a contractual problem and for maintaining some perl code , they survive as Developers of FORTRAN.
These men promptly got released due to a technicality
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...the @-Team.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
That's who we used in 2001 when we needed a huge web-based Java system done. They brought in nine programmers with a top-notch project manager. It cost a lot, but it cost less than not doing it.
It's called "The Internet"...
1. release source
2. internet builds product
3. exploit generosity
4. ???
5. profit (maybe?)
Try www.rentacoder.com , or other such sites. Although most people on the site are private individuals, there are some organizations with dozens of programmers, that can be hired for any period of time or to accomplish any set goal. Plus there is the benefit of user feedback from others who have hired the same team in the past. You can browse the list of teams with the highest user feedback, and invite them to bid on your project.
I hear there are a group of developers who are just being dropped by Song BMG, perhaps you could give them a call ;)
liqbase
Sourceforge? www.sourceforge.net
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc. What we'd really like to do is find a small pre-existing team which which we could form a relationship to get our product out the door and possibly continue working with.
If you've got a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . The Dev Team
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
When a company shuts down or lays off a bunch of developers, whole teams become available. I've seen hiring 'feeding frenzies' resulting from this, you're not unique in wanting to hire teams. Sometimes a team is hired as salaried staff, sometimes a team leader gets asked if he can get a team together for a contract (ie "form your own company, and we've got a job for you").
Either way, its rich pickings and unfortunately not that hard to find.
in Cambridge, UK. I worked with them once. They are like a small Logica.
Or S3 (Silicon Software Solutions) in Dublin, Ireland. I used to work for them.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
This is optimistic at best. Remember the power of 3 rule: :-) )
(where UOW=unit of work (man/month
1 UOW = program for yourself
3 UOW = give it to someone else
(you install, you copy, etc)
9 UOW = give it to local group
(howto, platform change)
27 UOW = shareware/open source
(configure/make/make install)
81 UOW = product
(real docs, slick UI, support teams)
243 UOW = business
(lawyers, CEO, sales, marketing)
you're looking at a lot more work than you're willing to
admit. unless it is a trivial application you need to
understand that writing the program in the first place
is the easiest part of the whole problem. Teams which
don't include the original developer are even harder.
Tim Daly
That's what we did - to a company that was essentially the modern-day version of a typing pool. A bunch of coders with nothing to code was waiting for us in India (Bangladesh). Not only that, we still had coders working days in the US, plus the devs working in India, so we were coding over 16 hours a day.
Have you given SourceForge http://www.sf.net/ a good looking over for projects similar in scope and application to yours? Seems to me it shouldn't be too hard to find a group already working together working on X.application developing in X.language. Good luck...
These were some guys who worked with my company in Massachussetts. They're pretty Java-focussed, I think, but they're good. They formed their group to do exactly what you're asking for. They were composed of three or four guys at the time.
http://team345.com/
Speaking as a developer starting out, and having just joined a startup myself, I believe if your project is cool enough, people will be willing to work with you. And what's more, the people you'll attract will most likely be the ones who stand to contribute most to the project. The converse is also true. Startups have succeeded and and failed according to this rule.
Motivation is a key factor among geeks. Spread awareness of the project, show people that it's worth something, and that its success is in their best interests, and you can stand back and watch the magic. Of course, that's easier said than done. Learn to manage your geeks.
If we abstract it a bit, it sounds like exactly the type of work my previous employer contracted inhouse. They specialized primarily in building automation, but that's just a different field of work.
I would be surprised if you couldn't find consulting engineers (no clue what you call them in English) that specialize in software development. While I don't personally know of any, try calling around to various consulting engineers, or visit in person if there are any in the local area. I know that my employer had calls like that at least once a week (not software development though), and they never had a problem in directing people to the right company (knowing that they in turn will direct people to them). Even if they don't know a company for sure, they'll probably know who might know, or they'll get curious and start asking around themselves.
I hope this helps - and if you manage to find some that do this, by all means tell the rest of us - we never know if it might come in handy.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Now, what happens when the product is in need for support? Who are going to support code written by a team of super corders?
What happens when there's a demand for extra functionality? Who's going to implement that?
Who will maintain the code?
Yes, you could try to reassemble the team, but developers hate support. And besides, the team will much rather start on a new project than supporting the old one.My suggestion is, that you take your time and hire people the old fashioned way. If you don't have enough time to do that, your project is doomed anyway.
Underholdning.info
Looking for people like this? http://www.pov.lt/ Of course you may want a different language but I'm sure there are other groups like this...
AGILE.....goddamnit. It's software, not a 4 legged creature!
This guy is way out there
The question very much reminds me of what I guy I know said when his 15 people ICT security company were looking for a new guy: "All the good people already work for us, or we know who they work for. Now we're looking for the person nobody else has found yet". This will be the same with the ready made development team. They have a job somewhere, so unless they are a small contracting team that just happens to have an open spot in their schedule you're more or less doomed.
Managing this group is even tougher. The way you describe your company is that it is small, tightly knit, build around one person. Now you need to get new people to work with your group, to smoothen out differences in development philosophy, to get the leader to let go of parts of his baby etc etc.
Tough job ahead of you. Good luck.
Use Adsense for Charity
The word you are looking for is "contractor."
We don't mean a splinter group from a larger dev house, but an agile, self-contained team, who enjoy working together and have an existing practice.
How would you know that the team enjoy working together? Anyone can form a group and say "Hey! You know what, we enjoy each other's company and we work good together"
So I guess it would really be difficult to find a group with that criteria. What can be done though is to find a team that has produced a reputable piece of work and infer that the team "enjoy working together"
The way one local (and now powerful) company did it was by "hiring" people for pizza. If the product is cool, then you'll corral some college geeks to do the groundwork and free up your good coders for the cool work.
0 0713.html ) that college students, who were used and abused during the bubble, remain a good resource of, dare I say it, cheap labour. They like the prestige, need the experience, and are used to working in small project teams. And yeah, you can pay them peanuts.
This has been touched on recently in some blogs ( http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/ and http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/0
And no, they don't even need to be in college. Two of the most impressive code monkeys I know dropped out of High School.....
You could try and partner up with an IT firm.
We currently are partned with three startups; our company provides the IT knowledge for a seriously reduced fee in exchange for a partial ownership in the product that is being build.
Basically we're investing (the reduced fee is still very much required, so that there is an incentive to actually finish the product). However you still need to convince the IT firm why it should invest.
Tbee (or not?)
I hear Bangalore have such a team, as long as they don't have to deal with "rude Americans", you don't mind second-rate Java and the whole identity theft thing can be overlooked.
Oh and if you need a call centre for tech support, then we have someone who can read from a script in an accent that's sure to make people just put the phone down, in fact we have a family household of 100 such people who are all willing to move to Mountain View, CA.
Lame.
This team works for cheap:
http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/talent.asp
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
but the poster probably doesn't want another top-notch, ASCII-art dungeon game.
...you have a mamoth project that you cant cope with yourself and you want some other people to work for you for free.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/95759/4240
You can find everything there...
Well, since you're posting as anonymous with high praise for IBM Global Service, let's see this counter argument from Kuro5hin: How IBM Conned My Execs Out Of Millions .
This is a first-person account of how IBM was able to con my execs out of millions of dollars. Gullible management tries to swim with the shark and gets chewed to pieces. Witness the exec-level FUD sales techniques and the $325/hr subcontractor labor bait and switch.... More...
a) Only work with people you know and trust. Until you're Microsoft, you cannot (CANNOT!) afford to make hiring mistakes, everyone in your team must be experienced and brilliant.
b) Try to arrange for everyone to be in the same building or room, THE only way to brain storm is on an old fashioned whiteboard, not on a chat client, which is really only suited to quick questions and answers, not visual thinking. That's why companies still have physical offices, even in a world of broadband and video converencing.
c) ONLY allow remote workers if you can be guaranteed they WILL be available online when YOU are online to ensure maximum productivity and real-time discussion of vital issues.
d) Only farm out small modular tasks to remote workers, keep your core coders close to hand and reward them with ownership in the project.
e) Have a well written contract and strict but fair code of conduct that should be signed by all parties on paper (not e-mail 'replies').
f) If you lack the personality to be firm with those who let you down, or cannot hire someone to take on such a role, do not embark on your venture, else your ship will drift all over the place only to be washed up on the rocks.
g) Else, go for it and if you need any more tips (or can provide any!), reply to this with posting.
Good luck, and "May The Force be You!"
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
I don't mean to be facetious. It's just the team you describe would normally be 90% of the value of a company, so they will be in the position of strength. In their position my first question would be "Why should we go with you when we could probably get to same position by ourselves?", especially given that you seem to be low on resources.
Not a large company, they are nice guys (have met a couple of them) and they do consulting and have published the most popular Cocoa book.
Most half-decent universities have a final-year group project of some sort for software engineering degrees. If you approach the university, you could pick a successful group up to work on your project. Hire an experienced software engineer to be project leader, and you are set. The graduates will be young, motivated, already set-up as a team, and hopefully willing to learn from their project leader. Also, since they will be usually willing to accept a lower fee, the team size can be larger.
You will get hard workers with a proven track record and they will get valuable experience. As someone who has managed university projects for a couple of years, I can say that the best student groups were far better than any team I have worked with in industry. Put an experienced engineer at their helm, and you have a brilliant team.
Don't you hate it when that happens? You write something well meaning and helpful, do a Preview, and yet still fail to spot all the errors until after posting it. I guess it's the thought that counts! The fact most /. postings are written by busy people in the mo of the heatment mean that mustooks are bond to hippin wonse in a wyle. Oh whell. :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
My experiences from a few years freelance consulting in mid-sized development projects are:
Of course, there are also downsides to building your own team, and you are probably aware of them. I would go and build my own.
Students are often willing to do extra work and/or skip their diploma and head straight out to real life. They're used to working in teams and you might be able to find a bunch of students that have worked a lot together in the past.
Depending on what you're after I can get you three or four developers on a flexible basis that work in the United Kingdom. We've all known each other for years at University, and we're recently finishing off a couple of other projects that are going to leave us with a lot more time. We're all close friends and have a wide variety of skills and industrial experience.
Contact us at:
clients@cobaltsoftware.net
</plug>
Wasn't there such a team to hire on Ebay a while ago ?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
There is an Australian based development studio who does just this. Their website is www.adamant.com.au
IBM milks its clients for the maximum money it can get. I've seen it myself, we would ask for a 1 line change in the code, even show them how to do it and they would milk it for 4 months of team money.
5 years to make a website? No problem, IBM can drag it out that long.
10 years to make a database, yaking so long that the hardware goes out of date before it's complete? RAF can tell you about that one.
Small Team. Palo Alto, Moscow, Tokyo. Full time together 7 years. Special projects only. Available from January 06.
http://www.scguild.com/
It's the Software Contractors' Guild. An organization of Software Contractors and Consultants worldwide.
You can list by many aspects.
there is a bunch of small software companies earning a living working for larger non-software companies. and the teams those companies have would be a lot happier if they got to work with novel technologies or simply for someone newer. as a matter of fact I'm from one of those companies, size 6 people. dimaqq@gmail.com
what about a serious and renowed technology firm? These guys have your team ready and can assemble/send you a new one -- a GOOD one -- in a matter of days. OR they can manage them for you.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them, I do NOT receive any $$$ from them, but most of them are former University colleagues of mine, and I can vow for their honesty and seriousness. Visit their website, give their clients a call, give them a call, IIRC they can even send someone to talk to you in person.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I had one such practice a few years back. However, in 2001-2003 there were fewer people looking for this kind of service. People were generally unwilling to take risks, and nothing much was happening in terms of application development. Atleast nothing like whats happening now, or back in '99.
Although many websites (like rentacoder.com) offer this functionality, it is difficult to guarantee the quality of people you will end up working with. The surprising limitation of these sites is that they have no mechanism to ensure quality of bidders or participants. Which is exactly why Arzoo.com (by the hotmail founder) failed. Bad quality. Add to that, people simply trying to outbid others. I have even seen $100 for a 1 month job!!! If you go to such sites, you are very likely to lose some time trying to filter out the not-so-good ones.
Since you will be working with people you know little about, there are however things that you could do, before making your final decision.
1. See if they have blogs. Look at their attitude, language, code quality, passion, whatever...
2. Talk to them. Check for conversational skills. These are very important!
3. See if they have done any open source work. (That will be a real bonus!)
4. Ask them to send source code.
I feel such a practice certainly has a place in modern IT. Agile, Quality-Concious and Inexpensive.
Things are looking up again, and thats good news.
Good luck to you.
Life is just a conviction.
I used them for a project a couple of months back and was quite impressed.
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
...and we are also doing som own inhouse development. Mostly focusing on solving our customers needs... http://www.memention.com/
Cambridge is crawling with them. Ran my own one there years ago.
If you leave some contact details I will try to put you in touch with some of them.
Mike.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
A Finnish small company that has a website for selling used cars online did outsource the creation of their system. It is like a mini-siezed half.com for cars. http://www.nettiauto.com/
The coding was supposedly outsourced to India through an agency called Fiare.
Anyways, even in this case, their main core competence were the relations they made with car dealerships. Still, the website seems to have been pretty static with not much visible changes made to it since launch.
I've had a good working relationship for some years with SoftRP.net . The Web site says they're in Canada, and this may be true, but the outfit originates from the Ukraine. AFAIK, most are graduates from the University of Kiev.
These are a varied and skilled bunch of coding mercenaries, and they quickly and graciously executed a number of small projects for me (figureheading for a small company that was the actual customer). Their prices are a bit higher than your run-of-the-mill Indian/Chinese shop, but that was compensated by their ability to think for themselves and produce a working product off a simple, not overly detailed spec. Also, and I find this important, they ask questions rather than stumbling into blind alleys. As I mentioned, I'm a one man show and my projects were small, on the order of few man-weeks, and I was sorry not to have a decent-sized job for them to chew on. They certainly suggested they had manpower in reserve.
No, I'm not affiliated or kickbacked or anything. I'm just a satisfied customer and would likely hire them again for the next project that comes up.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
OK fair enough that you can't afford to do the recruiting cycle for a whole team, but I would go through the effort to hire someone you trust to find and manage the right team for you. Whether these are student "code-monkeys", international cheap-labour, or the IBM-team from hell, all that doesn't matter if you have someone that works close to you and knows how to find and utilise these resources to their fullest potential.
Outsource it to India. You will find a lot of Indian companies, ready to help you out.
What about language? Chinese ok? Korean? Japanese...? Call now - operators are standing by.
I've worked with them before. They're based out of Denver, but have other offices.
I was on a team of about 4 employees with 8 contractors, plus project management and specifications writers who were also contractors. It worked well, but there was certainly still some startup cost.
If this is true and you're happy with IBM work, then why are you posting as AC.
Oh right, its a complete lie. The numbers you quote are far below IBM GS rates and the service you describe is nothing like the reality. A personal chef, & maid for only 9 people? I call BS.
"And in all the years of working with GS, I have never seen them subcontract. "
I AM an IBM subcontractor, they hire me through Jobserve when I'm needed and sing my praises. When I'm working for some other major firm, they FUD me like crazy to get their guys in. It's a big game and everyone played along right up until IBM started outsourcing all our jobs to India, then we started to blow the whistle on the scam.
"Another way to look at it is, how would you find a group of local guys that work together well that are all willing to work 80+ hours per week?"
The same place IBM finds them, Monster & Jobserve! Pay $50/hour and they'll sit around for 80 hours a week to milk you of money.
Hell, everyone else is adertising, why not me too. 4 person team (can be extended if needed), english speaking, Web, Windows and Linux programming, registered business, so you don't have to worry about legal matters. Waiting for a sign and details if you want. adrian.dinu@gmail.com
If you are really serious, I know of such a team. If the idea is decent and the funds are adequate, I can set you up with a team that has done multiple startups and worked together on multiple project for the past 6 years. Java, Opensource and C#. email to javastudstuff@yahoo.com. We are located in the midwest.
Lucky to see this get posted the day after my team's existing contract came to an end. We spent yesterday afternoon writing a 'joint CV' and wondering whether anyone would want to hire a ready-made dev team!
We're a team of four (three devs and a project lead) who've enjoyed working together, from our respective homes, on a similar mission for the last eighteen months and want to find a way to keep on doing it...
nagoff@gmail.com
A bit of a dumb question, but I would of though that it would be important to know what technology is going to be used first before hiring a dev team. This was not specified, not every team can code a dozen differenet languages and technologies.
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It is strange that nobody post it before, but there is a website where you can find such a team. Rent a Coder (shameless aff. link). You can post your proyect and then lots of developers bid for it. You could also choose a set of developers first and then submit your proyect to them and start a private bidding.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
You might want to take a look at bitHeads (bitheads.com), an excellent firm here in Ottawa, they were founded to do what you are looking for. I've worked with some of their people in the past. They've done a lot of work for startups and I've heard that they sometimes take (partial) payment in equity.
Best wishes...
Please please, take the time to hire developers based on skills rather than looking for a 'ready-made' team. My company did the latter and, several months later, we still haven't made a deadline yet. I do more work than the team of outside 'experts' that were brought on board.
Remember, a highly qualified individual can easily integrate him or herself into an existing project. A ready-made consulting team brings preconceived ideas and is mainly interested in how long a good contract can last.
If you can't afford to recruit a development team, you can't afford to be in business as a software vendor. End of story.
Outsourcing involves huge overhead and dicey contractual negotiations, and you'll spend more money than you'll save as a small outfit, even if the coders themselves are in India. The money you save in HR you'll blow on travel, telecoms and lawyers. Especially lawyers, and you'll lose the company if you try to half-ass it.
If you are unwilling to hire more than one geek to do the work needed to create your product, you are too undercapitalized to be in business. Fix that, and try again when you're able to spend some money to make some money. Otherwise, you're wasting your time, your employee's time, and your investors' (woefully inadequate) money.
SoupIsGood Food
that there are a number of crack development teams in India just waiting for a chance to prove themselves.
Go for it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Steve, is that you?
Ruffdogs, Inc has a great team of developers in house that have worked on a number of projects together. I don't know if they are willing to travel or not, but I do know they have the talent and experiance.
The company I work for does these things from time to time. Have a look at http://www.dekimo.com/
Around the time we decided to develop new Eclipse-based tools for our product we met an Indian company with experience in this area at JavaOne. This company was on their last leg financially and needed help. So we signed a Build Operate Transfer (BOT) agreement with them which put their top engineers and QA team on our project, headed by their VP of Engineering. Poof - instant development team. It went so well we executed the transfer at the 6 month mark and used this core group to build our India development center - which I've been here in India managing for a year now. It worked great - highly recommend it if you can find the right opportunity.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I've been working for small software consulting companies in Pune, India, since I graduated about 5 years ago.
If you want to pick an offshore company to outsource your development, make sure you clarify the following points:
1.) Management experience -- are their enough guru's in the company who can mentor the team that works for you? Do they have experience working on International projects or with different cultures? Does a process exist to pass their experience onto the other employees?
2.) Talent -- You might have to work with inexperienced engineers, but do they have strong fundamentals, and can they learn.
3.) Infrastructure -- How willing is the management to put up the necessary infrastructure (servers, servers rooms with the right air conditioning, power backup, IP telephones etc. etc.)
4.) Hiring pipeline -- Does the company have a good pool of potential employees wanting to work there? Do they have a good liaison with local universities?
5.) Relevance of skill set -- Does the company match your profile? Is their collective skill set relevant to what you want?
You might want to check out the company I work for right now, I think they do pretty well on all these counts.
http://www.gs-lab.com/
For instance me.
:-) (I hardly play with), but it's in my main mail pipeline so I see anything that shows up there and isn't spam. I'm based in germany, but as you said, that isn't really an issue nowadays.
I have a list of people I know personally and have worked with and allthough I'm not the Über-developer I'd say I could come up within a month the most with a team that can pull off nearly any coding job. People who know me call me with the most remote and unusual developement problems, because they expect me to have some ace up my sleve that will bring their project up to speed. And ususaully I have.
There should be other people like this, because this is a market, as it fills the gap between the people who code all day and the people who sell the stuff they code. In large companies this is something simular to the technical account manager. In the Cyberpunk Roleplaying Game "Shadowrun" a freelance version of this type of job is called a "Fixer". I've actually come to think of myself as such a Fixer.
I'd say you recongnize one of my kind by a solid presentation (website, businesscard or simular) without any all to shallow marketing babble. They appear hard to reach on their website (because reachability is one of their main products), but once your on the line they'll start working on your problem instantly. They usually have good oral skills and probably speak 2 or more languages fluently, as this trains the brain in the way needed to pull this type of work and comes with it naturally.
They appear as a jack of all trades because they usually are. If they are good, they know themselves that they are master of none and will come up with experts for the job and position themselves as mediator by themselves. (f.i. I personally am trained in Arts and have developed since the age of 16, making me an ideal mediator for any web application and RIA stuff)
Allthough my kind hate grunt work and fixing the details, I can see the ones that need to be addressed imidiately before anybody else has even thought of them. People like me can usually tell you if your project is doomed before you blow any larger amounts of money. They'll name the loopholes and bottlenecks and maybe even give advice what to look out for.
If you say this all sounds like a real consultant, it probably does. But I'd actually be insulted being called a consultant, because I've actually learned the professions I trade in, even if I don't practice them as purely as others do.
Look around for freelance professionals that advertise their conections in a reashuring manner. Don't be put of if they seem hard to reach (hard to find contact data on their website, only a mailadress, etc.). Go after them. Once you've got them on the phone you'll be able to tell quickly if their up to the job. I tell my customers imediately if they don't really need or want me and if they should look somewhere else. Another thing professional "fixers" are recognized by.
Good luck.
P.S.:I don't do usually don't do this, but if you'd actually like to get in conact with me to get on your developement problem, mail me at moira [somewhere near] demetria.de . It's the mail address of my WoW Character
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We'll be glad to do it, please contact us at www.mbdsys.com
We'll sure be able to work something out.
Enterprise Distributed Technologies do outsourced development and their EDTftpj library is very usable. I've got no other connection with the organisation.
... the sort of thing my former employer does. They specialize in outsourced product development for companies that can't maintain a permanent in-house R&D dept, and have the experience, brains and checkbook to do pull off major projects.
It's a management thing:
:-)
If you want an old fashioned team to sit around your desk in your office, drinking coffee, get them all up to speed in 2 days, and never have a single problem to fix, ever, after they have gone in 6 months time - well, good luck to you
On the other hand:
If you have a good managager, who is capable of handling disparate groups of (remote) people and delivering a sound product used by millions (eg; linux), as they say in the Matrix - "there is no problem!".
If you want to talk, we'd be happy to discuss the possibilities (should you be bold enough to go forward with the consultant option after all these negative posts). Bottom-line is, people do what you're asking and do it successfully. Is it risky? Yes. Is it the best option for your company? Probably not. Can it work out well for you? Yes, if you get a good team who cares about the work and your company as a client. We work almost exclusively in this type of augmented development consulting world... it does exist and can be successful. Best of luck!
I do have a team. Look at jrMan and IENJINIA, both projects are writen by the same team (in our spare time). You can look at the source code and check if it fits with what you would expect from a team. If you are interested contact me at mago@mundojava.com.
comon! people who write good blogs are people who write good blogs.
While they might be entertaining and a good read your 4th point is the most important! It goes like this.
1. send me source code
2. talk me through it as i investigate it
3. let me guage your personality in respect to; pride in your work, humility when you recognize a better way, an ability to correct someone in the appropriate manner, operate under pressure.
Holy shit, everyone goes on about how hard it is to do hiring for programmers. Its not hard, the only problem is, there almost noone out there capable enough to justify the salaries they demand.
The post-9-11 bust hit this company pretty hard (hit a lot of them I would think) but they survived it and are still doing work.
Let me know if you want their contact info. They're in the Chicago area.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
...assign any potential engineers one or two tests to evaluate their ability to a) Solve problems b) Respond on time. After all, how can you project manage if one or more members of your team cannot be relied upon? Don't just say YES to the first resume or team that you discover or that approaches you. 'Shop around'. Have a one on one on the phone to evaluate their personality. However, be aware that an arrogant or socially hopeless engineer may well be a great coder, so don't be put off. All you should care about is honesty, reliability and ability. All the words ending in 'ty ! :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle, create a practice, get the team "gelled" etc.
..." "Can't you just use this chunk of code we already wrote? Just write a simple wrapper -- make it work!" And then, when the first version is delivered, "that isn't what we meant!" "this thing is too slow!"
I have seen this before. I once interviewed for a job with a small group of wunderkinds who had done "all the feasibility work" and had all the "IP in place" and "just needed to hire some developers to productize". I ran screaming from the building as fast as I could. It was abundantly clear they viewed the development job as just converting their brilliance into code, as if coding was a very low value-added activity. I could see the future very clearly just talking to them -- "what do you mean it's going to take that long?! We already figured that out, just do this
There is no substitute for having the "inventors" also be involved in the actual, day-to-day development. There are several reasons for this: First, the original intent will be preserved. Second, there will be inevitable tradeoffs to be made and it is far better for the originators to have the information they need to make those decisions. Third, invention can continue -- just building it will spawn new ideas as long as the creative types (the originators) are in a position to do that. If you have a "spec" then every change becomes a "negotiation" and a schedule slip and cost overrun -- which in the end puts a damper on the whole thing.
My advice: bite the bullet, build a team, make the product. Before you know it you will have built a company.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
www.thoughtworks.com
Development of SchoolTool, an open source school administration system, is done in such a way.
The driving force behind it is the Shuttleworth Foundation, but they have hired different people and teams of people, for different parts of the project.
In my experience it's this kind of set up is quite common in the open source business world. The reason there is many of the companies aren't large enough to handle really large projects, but they are if they form networks.
The company I work for has benefited from this, by passing work we had no capacity for along to others and vice versa. I think this kind of thing will only work if you know and trust the other party, so it's worth investing in long term relationships with other companies, much more than getting it done as cheaply/quickly as possible.
"I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do" - Randy Newman
"In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team."
Read any good sonnets lately?
f) If you lack the personality to be firm with those who let you down, or cannot hire someone to take on such a role, do not embark on your venture, else your ship will drift all over the place only to be washed up on the rocks.
... what am I going to need to do/know if I'm ever to go into business for myself? Starting small, but not with the intent to stay that way. I'm pretty sure I don't want to do this without at least an MBA (and ?). But that won't cover what I'm concerned about. What I'm concerned about is the very thing the parent speaks of ... how does one practice for that? Start drinking? Go to boot camp?
I've had a father and a grandfather before him, tank *numerous* small businesses for this very thing. They simply wouldn't lay down the law when it was business-critical. Forgiving a supplier for being late time after time after time without finding another only because of a personal relationship, you fucked up.
Anyway, on to my question:
So, it's "in my blood" so to speak, and I'm an engineer by schooling/trade
In tight budget consider Russia, Ukraine, etc. Guys have a clue, rates are usually affordable, no that cultural gap as with India. http://www.miik.com.ua/eng/, http://www.teamdev.com/
I would like to recomend Embassy Systems, if your development is to be done in either Java or C++. They are a very skilled small company in Brazil, that already did work for many companies, including IBM and some telecom companies from USA.
I think they are exactly what you are looking for.
morcego
one of the online sites that list people to hire like guru.com. You can often find entire teams to work as smaller companies list themselves.
Stupid things kids do.
I used to work in residential construction, where through the contracting of a house only the very largest companies actually do the whole process in house.
We had a small crew who did framing and all the odd jobs to glue all the pieces together. But painting, trimming, electric, HVAC, plumbing, and architectural design all got handed off to a specialist who was paid by the job, and didn't get hired again if he did a crappy job. After a while it became very apparent which guys in town were worth hiring, and they're the ones who got all the jobs on the next projects.
Sure there were problems, but none of this "oh you wanted the walls actually painted? I thought you just wanted a primer" BS that I seem to hear all the time out of computer consulting services.
And, for the most part, people stand by their work. All work is pretty much guaranteed for a year - if it was their crap that broke, they'll fix it free. Only time you have to pay them for extra work is if it's something in their expertise who breakage wasn't their fault.
And when people did screw up horribly (like ending up with two different shades of paint in the same room) they worked overtime for the rest of the week to fix it so we could make our schedule or they didn't get paid for the lousy work! Why doesn't anyone enforce this sort of thing in the CS environment?
There are some select firms that are able to quote a fixed price development. One I know is Integrated Software Specialists but they are not the only one http://www.issintl.com/ . Boutique firms, if you pick the right one, are always cheaper, faster and better than the big guys. Cheaper doesn't mean cheap, however. It just means they will do the job. Picking the right one means they have done similar work (same basic platform, etc.) and you will get their experienced team. When you hire the really big guys, you get their stars to sell you the business, but you get their new hires to deliver. Finding the right boutique firm means some work on your part.
"If all the American people want is security, let them live in prisons." Eisenhower
We are a team of developers working for more than 5 years together, with lots of experience in working with clients from other countries. We are from Bucharest, Romania and offer competive prices. Please contact me at rodica@nemesisit.ro to get in touch. Also look at http://www.nemesisit.ro/ for more details about us.
That's pretty sad, not a single person going on record and saying IBM did a great job on any verifiable contract. For a contractor the size of IBM GS thats pretty damn sad.
Hello ! We are a small company in Argentina and we make programs for companies in USA, Italy, Spain, and of course, in our country. We work mostly with .NET
Can you tell me what are you looking for? What kind of program is the one you want to build? What language do you prefer?
Greetings !!
...I've heard about them. You dial this 866 number and punch in a certain code when you hear the menu. The menu stops abruptly in mid-recording, and a wailing siren sound starts over the phone. Suddenly office alarms go off, emergency lighting switches on, a chopper flies overhead, and windows smash as the coders enter through them rappelling from the rooftop, garbed in combat-spec bodysuits full of clips and snaps and penumoreactive boots.
City Spiders, they're called. Agile would be completely appropriate.
I had a bad experience and then a very good one with rentacoder.com - basically I had this pain in the ass problem to do with VOIP and I couldn't get to the bottom of it so at the end of my tether I thought - what the hell - I'll drop 100 USD on rentacoder to see if there's someone who wants to take up the challenge. Anyway, I got a couple of bids and eventually I gave the problem to this chap who seemed to know what he was doing. FOUR WEEKS LATER he's only logged into the box once - so I didn't feel that bad when I asked the rentacoder arbitrators to review the 2 week overdue project (or has he put it "ratted me out"). So my options were then either to get the refund from the escrow account ( they do this to prove that you have the funds - but they won't release it until you're 100% happy) or try again - ah what the hell, why not eh? ... sooo I put the project up again and this new chap offers to fix it within 24 hours - I immediately accept his bid ( can't be bothered waiting till the end of the "auction") and send him the IP and login details (this is at about 11pm). By 10am the next day, the dude has fixed exactly what I needed fixing and come up with a number of suggestions about other improvements I could make. Additionally, I've now put approx 800 USD worth of other coding + configuration stuff his way since then.
:
My advice
Start with something small - i.e. around the 100 USD mark. By all means say that it's part of a larger project soon to be up for bidding, but make sure the project tests several areas in which you need experience and expertise, but is relatively straightforward and simple for people who actually know what they're doing. This will hopefully attract the attention of the coders you want and hopefully make it easy for you to weed out the wannabes.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
More complex answer in the form of a question: What are you going to do when the product goes Gold and you are sitting with several megabytes of source code which will require a ramp-up period of at least 3 months before your own team can maintain it ?
That said, please feel free to drop me a mail at info@terrans.co.za if you'd like to have a chat over a cup of tea.
- antoine
I CAN tell you that they did a good job fscking the Illinois State Board of Education on their $30 million project to assign every student in the state a 9-digit number. Ya, that's right. A data center, web-based interface, teams of programmers, a help center, all to assign 1 million students a number.
As seen on Mr. T Versus IT Consulting Companies
I've developed software for about 12 years now and have worked on teams of small groups of highly effective developers (some fairly recently)...Why are we not together still ? well, noone wants to pay us for what we think the value is. The company in the main article put it perfectly.. "We really don't have time or funds to go through a developer recruiting cycle". To me this means, "We don't have funds, we want high quality and super-cheap." Guess what ? Everyone wants that. So this means that software development becomes a commodity and the high quality producers of software end up with no motivation to continue developing high quality products. I can't build high quality software for you if you are unwilling to pay for it (or value it). And the days are over of the startup mentality of "work your butt off and get your just rewards in the end".. We've already done that (some of us multiple times now) and frankly we are kind of tired of eating Ramen noodles (except the chili flavor)...
-o
They occasionally sell entire IT teams. loaded and ready to deploy.
I've wanted for years to hook up with a VC firm / incubator and provide this.
Your alternative is to find one good developer and hire everyone he wants to work with. If you came to me with big bags of cash, I could get you a team of 5 good developers that have worked together before. But you'd have to lure them away from mostly secure positions with stable companies. That takes cash nowadays, not just equity positions.
.... then you had a serious problem at the analysis phase of your project, and thus deserve to fail.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Take a look at the guys at DBSentry Corp.. They are the kind of guys you described and need.
A good source of tips could be asking CA employees about recent events. IMO CA excels at laying off / firing many competent people and keeping the chaff (yes, I worked there and no, I wasn't fired or laid off, I got out before they figured out I wasn't chaff :P )
Sorry, but if you're attempting a startup without already knowing who your engineering lead is, then
you're going to fail. My company does offer turnkey development services to startups, but we only work
for people that I've known for years, or their second hop in the kevin bacon network.
There's really no way I'd take on a start up customer I had no previous relationship with.
The risk that they would be crazy and/or not pay us would be far too great.
I have worked with a group of guys on several projects over the last few years. What is the platform and/or nature of the development needed? Contact me if would like: beltira at charter.com
I had an idea to create just such a team a while ago. But I realized that I had neither the skill nor the desire to deal with the business end of the idea. So for those that want to liberate my idea, here's the gist of it.
Put together a crack team of 5-6 guys. Finding these people is a tricky business, but if you've been in the industry long enough it should be possible.
My idea was to put it together as an XP style team (although you always have to bow to your customers' wishes). 1 "customer proxy" and the rest programmers who do double duty doing other things. Note: It's important to find programmers who don't think it's beneath them to do acceptance tests (but it's a crack team after all).
Next, the idea is to specialize *only* in startups with VC. In Ottawa alone (where I live), over $1B Cdn is spent on high tech VC every year. My estimate was that there should be at least 5 or 6 small startups each year with no existing development team.
Now the whole pitch is to go to these teams (see how to find them below) and explain, "We have an existing team with a proven track record for success. We can get you up an running and to your next round of VC funding (usually a year away) with flying colours. Not only that, but we can hire and train your follow up staff. We require X (X being a reasonably large amount of money) for the year.
Now the first few contract will be difficult because you have to find jobs and you won't have the aforementioned track record. But once you start to deliver and create success for startups, you move your sales focus directly towards the VC companies.
VC guys often insist on putting certain business consultants into key places in an organization as condition of securing funding. What you want to do is get yourself in that position with the VC's. You bill yourself %100 as a transitional team; one that will greatly increase the chance of success for a startup. And one that will put everything into place after you leave. You aren't the typical "I'll stay here forever soaking up 3x the money for my work" consultant. You're in there, you set things up and then you leave. By design.
Honestly, I think this approach would work. But like I said, I'm only interested in coding, so I've decided not to do this.
So... Slashdot pushed log-analysis from server-side to client-side, so we get to wait for google-analytics processing before we can read each page?
Short version: visit sourceforge, find a team with skills that actually brought a project to version 1.0 or higher, and offer them money to help develop a hybrid OS/closed source project.
Seriously, browse through sourceforge. Find a project in the same rough skill as your project, e.g. if you're creating a web app in Ruby, find a group that made a web app in Ruby. Don't necessarily look for a group doing the same task, i.e. if you're making a calendar, don't feel you have to get calendar people. Platform and language are more important than domain.
Anyway, find a group that actually brought a project up to "Stable/Production". This means they're probably done except for tweaks and new features. They've worked together, they've delivered something, and they may be looking for a new project.
Tell them you want to fund an Open Source project and pay them to help develop it. Explain it'll start as closed source with open source components and that you have a schedule for slowly releasing the other bits as open source once things are stable.
Pay + Neat Project + Eventual Open Source = Proven Team + Motivation
A.
I would not suggest outsourcing something like this unless you were prepared to do a complete re-write with an in-house team if the initial release seems successful. For reasons that many have already stated, it doesn't work well in the long run. In the short run, you could get your first release out and see if there is enough interest to keep going. But you will want to bring development in-house if you want the product to grow. The fastest way to get going is to find a lead developer you like and see if s/he can bring a team, or its nucleus, with him/her. Then you get a mature team with incentives aligned with yours.
It's hard to enforce this with programming.
With construction you have set plans that don't change too drastically, with programming you'll find people changing their mind through out the build.
Think of it as your building a 4 bedroom single family house and the developer is constantly making little(to him) changes to the plan, you know, add a new bathroom, change the den into a formal dinning room, oh, and the garage is actualy supposed to be part of the house, not a seperate building (didn't we mention that?), and yes it wasn't on the plans we signed off on originally, but those plans just don't work anymore.
Now with 50% completion, the owners decide that what would work at this location, is actually a 4 family duplex.
Now that the building is finished and awaiting final inspection, we need 1 really quick change, insteaad of regular telephone jacks wired to each room, we need Cat 6, as we will be doing IP phones, but thats a real easy change right, a couple of plates is all? Now that you've done that, we talked to the guy who bags our grocerys and he had a great idea, move the hoy water tank from the basement to the attic.
Would you expect the contractors to just eat the difference, or not ask that the deadline change? You as a contractor would point out the changes are all going to cost time and money and aren't in the original thst you based you quote on, but the developer is convinced that it has to be done and pays the extra costs. of course once everything is finished, the developer will go on and on how expensive the project is, and how long it took, and how it still isn't exactly what he wanted (but is exactly what the plan and change orders asked for).
And yes I've seen this, I've provided IT to costruction and HVAC companies for over 10 years and see this all the time. They complain about delays annd costs, and compare it to how they build projects.
----
I heard a rumour that Google is working on a "dev team in a box". It is a 20x40 foot container complete with air holes and laptop computers inside. You upload your requirements then set a couple of knobs controlling how much up front design to do, what programming language to use, and how often to shower.
The box itself is stackable with the "data centre in a box" also rumoured to be in the works at Google.
The first time I read this alarm bells went off in my head.
(containing open source, commercial & freelancer-built custom components)
Hopefully, they are mixing these license's in the proper way.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Yeah...it's called outsourcing overseas.
~Hergio
Just ask people you know and trust to join up.
Maybe even people from a past *successful* project.
Our company has often provided full dev teams for startups and established companies. In fact the reasons you enumerate - time to market, no time to find the right people, don't want to incur the risk of hiring the wrong people is exactly what we mitigate.
:)
Sorry if this is like an advertisement, but your post DID sort of solicit it
http://www.sftsrc.com/
Oh and yes, we are a Windows shop - and I am not posting as AC
It is X-mas time. Games are shipping. When a game is complete, the publisher of the game tends to cut all support to the developer, or at least stretch time taken for negotiations of the next contract to an extreme. Since small developers usually live milestone to milestone - they don't have the money in the bank to survive their burn rate for more than a month or two.
So, watch for "Gone Gold" announcement of smaller games, look up the developer, and give them a call. You can get an entire team for prices that are cheap compared to normal contracting rates, and game programmer tend to be a little smarter, better, and faster (and more bug ridden) than normal coders.
And you can even get really pretty art!
A few points:
1. The client was a defense contractor. defense contractors are some of the most absolutely incompetent companies I've ever worked with. Just as bad as telecom (old at&t) and government.
2. The client apparently went with a waterfall project plan, in which there were few if any milestones. And surprise, they discover at the very end that there are problems. Duh.
3. According to the poster, the client wasn't capable of simple math: didn't know that the contracting run rate would consume their budget before the project was complete. Again, duh.
4. According to the poster, IBM was charging $325 for everyone. That doesn't sound accurate in my experience with IBM (and other large consulting companies) - in which a couple of top people would be at $325, and the shock troops anywhere from $150-$225.
5. Also, the customer hired programmers for a small project from a large system integrator. That's never a good way to save money, it's a good way to assemble a team overnight.
6. The poster doesn't really understand knowledge management, business intelligence, or customer relationship marketing. By simply dismissing these domains as over-hyped, he's just revealing ignorance. This isn't to say that everyone needs everything that all vendors claim they can deliver, but these are huge domains full of history and detail. And can deliver a lot *if* you understand them and their best practices. If you don't, then you're probably buying/building the wrong solution anyway.
On the flip side, I do agree that IBM has a hard time holding onto top talent. They don't pay enough, and their bureacracy can be a pain in the butt. When you get a team you should absolutely interview every member, and put milestones in the project where you can jettison the team if they suck. But, this isn't an IBM-thing, it's something you should do for whatever team you work with.
...claims he's eventually going to go into interstellar space to extend the frontiers of social l00s3r-dom.
I've heard good things about using a company like Thoughtworks or Valtech for this kind of thing. They like to do mentoring too, so you can slowly build up your own team while building a product.
item solutions
no thanks...
-bbb
Hi,
:D ) We have 2 ScrumMasters and a very brought skill set.
my team is at 50% unoccupied and we can shift the the rest on a project like yours. We have alltogether 6 developers, 4 senior developers with 15 - 20 years experiance. See: http://www.visualsphere.com/ (sorry web site still not mature but should give a good impression, typos you find you may keep
Our server was down last week and mail is still not reconnected, so contact me if you are interested.
Or look here: http://www.hotdispatch.com/ a web site sponsored by Sun focusing on getting projects and skill published and auctioning contracts.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There are a lot of companies in India that can offer you a "Time and Material" on any number of devs. you want. You could also easily scale up or down without any investment in captial. Some also offer a 20% rebate i.e. you buy 10 devs. and pay only for 8.
I know it's easier said than done, but all you have to do is find the right company that can offer quality on time.
What you described is what we do. We are a small software shop of 4-5 guys located in the upper midwest. We have many years of experience in C/C++/Java and have our own AJAX framework. The team is made up of seasoned coders and architects. We are flexible with regards to changing requirements. We do NOT bill by the hour and have been working together now for more than 5 years.
Sent me an email if you want more info and we can discuss at:
Mike.Moening@gmail.com
This reminds me of the insanity of the dotcom boom (which looks very much like it's coming back to plague us and bust once again), with every dev team and their mothers coming out with some killer app that will "capture the market". The only difference to 1999 is that these days the pay sucks and no one has money for off the wall untested projects, which leads to the siuation described by the author: masses of code that have to be out the door yesterday but we can't afford the time or the devs to build it ourselves.
Hey, you heard the part about making it fast, good and cheap and picking any two?
It's insane to outsource a mission-critical app to another corporation or group of people. If your idea is good, exposing it will only generate a competitor who has the full specs for a better system than the one you currently have very quickly (5 hours after you send out the spec it will be spread across the Internet, make its way to India and China for sure, etc.).
Instead spend 6 months bringing your developers up to speed on the application requirements and Common Lisp and then implement it in that framework. Keep the knowledge in-house, keep developers happy and you will have a system that can handle growth and load.
I work as a manager at a not-for-profit (as opposed to non-profit) research organization - Southwest Research Institute (www.swri.edu). We do work for big places like NASA and the Veterans Administration, but we also partner with small firms in just the situation the original poster describes. Sometimes this is to help prepare a proposal for some type of Small Business Grant, and sometimes it's for Angel Investors who are trying to help get a business off the ground. Because we're a not-for-profit, any patents we develop are shared with the company (750 and counting). Any software we write we turn over (no licensing fees). And so on.
:-)
We're not the only one of these out here, but I will admit to some bias in thinking we are one of the best
subcontracting.....
Okay, so this is a blatant plug and not unbiased advice. Mod me down if you must... but it is in direct answer to the question. I'm posting anonymously so that my karma isn't being used as a marketting tool. ;-)
If you really want quality work, see if Vecna Technologies (http://www.vecna.com/ has any openings in their schedule. They are a private company composed mostly of MIT or other top-notch school graduates. I worked for them as an intern one summer and they are motivated primarily by integrity in their business relations. They guarantee your satisfaction.
we are small development team working as subcontractors for customers from US and Europe for 8 years. east-europe pricing, XP/agile development, java, innovation. chechkit - www.megalogika.com
"Any consultant, IBM included, will eat your lunch if you don't stay on top of them."
So you're confirming it? Speak for IBM if you like, but you don't know all contractors and many are not big enough that they can afford to piss of their FUTURE CUSTOMERS. IBM on the other hand, pisses off major corporations and their business managers blame it on the companies staff, just like you did.
The smaller guys face this all the time, IBM 'Business consultants' come in, attack the existing contracting company with FUD, get their own guys in then bleed the company dry.
I run a small development firm that survives primarily on contract work. Depending on the nature and scope of what you want done, we might be able to hash something out.
http://www.e-gineering.com/
you will be deluged by indian developement companies promising you the world. my experience is that they're difficult to succeed with. Just because they speak english doesn't mean that your minds will meet. they speak english but not american.
free stuff @ http://journyx.com/clf/gendl.html
A company I know of in Calgary is entirely made up of independent contractors - one of the things they are looking to do is combine a few guys together to do some app. development - lots with rapid application dev. experience. Let me know if you want me to send you contact details...
The problem you face is that just about all the best developers are either busy or very busy right now. ...except maybe those crack Fortran guys from the first post =)
The only pre-existing teams are part of firms as far as I know. But you could write your terms into the contract and interview of forming such a team inside an amicable firm.
If you want to 'customize' your team I'd suggest hiring the best tech lead you can...a contractor if you want to keep it external...and let that person build the rest of the team for you.
Also since you don't really know what you're going to be getting you should keep small tight product iterations coming.
i run a consulting company to meet exactly these needs. contact me at (tom at vaughan dot to).
If, after all the discussion on this thread, you're still looking for a ready-made, gelled, development team, please contact me. We are a self-managed team of 4 Java developers who have worked together for the past 5 years.
We are available for contract or full-time work.
DAve
Please tell slashdotters the name of your startup so we can be sure our money does not get invested in that dead fish.
In addition to the team, you also get whatever parts of that project are relevant to yours.
We already have a small and focused development team that does the kind of thing you are looking to do. We'd love to help you out. We also have project management and quality assurance in place. Check us out at http://www.sunergize.com/
You know what the real difference is? In home building the design is probably 10 or 15% of the total cost (pulled that out of my butt), but in software, the design is 98% of the total cost. When you finish the design (the code), you're essentially done.
When you're designing a $250,000 house, and you're half done the design and the future owner wants to move everything around, then it might become a $260,000 or $275,000 house cost and the owner sees a small percentage change because design is a small percentage of price. When you're designing a $250,000 software program which is 98% design cost, and the customer wants to make major changes half way through and you tell him the price is now $350,000 or more, they complain big time.
To fix this you need to break the software project up into pre-design and regular design stages. In the pre-design stage you need a mock-up of the application that you use can see and touch and feel, like the blueprints of a house, and let them change their mind then (i.e. rapid prototyping). The problem of course is that user interface design sometimes takes more than 10 to 15% of the total software time, so it's probably impossible, but something to think about.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
Another interesting option is Macadamian Technologies. They specialize in this sort of work. If you have ever worked on WINE, you will see they have done quite a bit of work on it. And there customer list is pretty impressive as well.
It's interesting that you ask this question. My consulting company has started offered a sort of "bootstrapping" service to startups, and it has become one of our more popular selling points. We're based in san francisco so we obviously talk to a lot of startups, and they all want the same thing: to get up and running fast. But we've been hit plenty of times with problems of ongoing code ownership and making the transition from software development to software maintenance. We're expensive, and it's worth it when we have a team of folks building software, but it's not really worth it over the long run, either for us or the client, to have us dealing with day-to-day web software issues.
So we've started offering a bootstrapping service in which we incorporate the client's team members as they come on board. When they're local they just come in and work in our office, and when they're remote they're remote. But initially they are just one more programmer, and as time goes on someone from the client becomes more and more the technical lead until we just pair program ourselves out of a job. Which is great for them (they have a fully up and running internal team) and us (we prefer the initial software development anyway).
This has worked out great for us but i haven't heard this type of consulting service offered by anyone else (granted, i'm not looking very hard). There are downsides, too, tho. At some point in the project accountability has to transition from us to them, and there is a gray area in there. If we are in charge of the project but the client is the one hiring, it's hard for us to confidently continue to guarantee work, etc. But what winds up happening is we get involved in the hiring and screening process as well.
I would actually be interested to know if there are other companies out there that specifically offer this type of startup bootstrapping, and how they deal with some of the issues involved.
Others have pointed out why it would be a bad idea to outsource a thing like this, and also pointing out getting a good team ready to jump is a hit and miss. But there is a way...
Find one top coder you trust. Ask him to find a couple of top coders he trusts. And so on until you have a small team. This is actually how complete teams migrate from company to another: first one goes, then that person talks another one leaving, etc. The team is already gelled, it's just moving from one company to the next. And people obviously only want to bring the best to the new company they are working for, so the team stays high quality. (Well, some people will probably try to bring friends over, but if the friends are not good then that could easily backfire. That's why I don't recommend friends unless I can vouch for their quality, or quality is not an issue, i.e. it is an entry level job.)
One of the huge strengths of silicon valley is that it has a big population of technical and business savvy folks who have worked with each other at a succession of startups. When its time to ramp up at a new startup, people already know people they have a good track record and they'll either try to hire those people, or ask them to reccommend people they trust.
Similarly systems are at work in other areas like Seattle, Austin, Boston and even NYC, though none are as well developed as silicon valley.
You can try and tap these networks, though as an outsider, you're at risk for being played.
Similar networks also are at play in the virtual world. You might go looking for a well run small open source project whose developers have similar competencies to what you are seeking. You might be able to work a deal with some of the core developers to work on your project.
Whatever you do, you'll be best off if you structure the deal to align your interests with those of the development team as best as possible. They should be treated as individuals, rather than a collective entity. My first thought is to structure compensation as something like a weekly rate plus bonuses for crossing key milestones in a timely manner, or perhaps some upside from the finished product.
>>Does such an animal exist?
Yes it does. We have been doing this since 1996.
>>>What have other teams done in a situation like this?
I don't know. But here is what you need to get started.
If you want our team to do this. You need the following.
1) A++ Credit History.
2) Open up your bank records and show the team leader. He will want to know you have the cash.
3) A budget of at least $250K. We are not cheap.... $250K is about 3 months work part time on your project.
4) Do not try to offer stock unless you can show you have some one who has taken a company public before on your team. BTW stock will not reduce your development cost..
Or be a fortune 100 Company. Then Cash will do just fine...
We are currently booked up through 2007.
My company does exactly what you requested...we're indeed that kind of animal :)
We believe this kind of develeopment method will become more and more common
as we have applied it to several middle to large-sized projects in the last few years
and it has yielded excellent results.
These were some guys who I've worked with in the past. They have expertise from embedded stuff all the way up to AJAX. They usually provide smaller development teams - like 3-6 people.
http://www.tklabs.com/ [www.tklabs.com]
And they are the best way for you to get an expert team together in a short amount of time. But it won't save you money. As they say, you can have it better, cheaper, faster; pick two. You're picking better and faster.
So -> contact me!
Try skimming the article a little further down, it addresses the points you raise, e.g. "There's no question that our senior management made major mistakes in vendor selection and management." But I have good news for you: your ability to write a plausible but detail-free "executive summary" qualifies you for a management job at IBM Global Services!
I once worked with a senior independant contractor who would un-bashfully promote that he ran a very small contracting firm. Essentially, he knew so many people that when a position opened up, he could usually find someone he'd worked with in the past who was trustworthy.
No, I will not work for your startup
I'm one of a team of three that might be interested in such work. We've been working closely together for about two years now (and two of us for about 8 years). We're skilled, pretty flexible, and not afraid to learn what needs to be learned in order to do what needs to be done. We've designed, implemented, and delivered successful enterprise class software applications, both in corporate and start-up environments. Feel free to contact me if interested.
If you choose to go the contracting route, we have had good luck in our limited experience with Magenic. We currently contract with one of their people who was on the expensive end because he claimed to be able to help mentor our team. In fact, he brings quite a bit of depth and is worth every penny. They are a M$ shop. If you don't like M$, you can look elsewhere right off the bat.
Okay. Maybe that's a bit strong. But my former company, Summa Four, Inc. (since acquired by Cisco), made just such a move. We brought in an outside development team to help with our next-generation telecom switch. Four really nice guys would then show up from time to time for dog-and-pony shows, including their president, one Ted Griggs. Ted would bring along his wife. She would -- no kidding -- make really excellent cookies.
THE ONLY THING THE WHOLE GROUP EVER SHIPPED ON TIME WERE HER COOKIES.
On top of that, their foot dragging during the Cisco acquisition cost we lowlife employees HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS in stock, while they made out like bandits.
I wouldn't trust those bozos as far as I could throw them.
Now, naturally, this is anecdotal; I'm sure there are perfectly good groups out there who do this sort of thing all the time. My suggestions:
- Get references. Get references that overlap chronologically, so they can't shove stuff under the rug.
- See some prior work. Sign NDA's if you have to.
- Shop around.
Good luck!
There are all kinds of teams like this. Mercenary teams, teams constructed on-the-fly of freelancers, teams leftover from somebody else's emergency project, teams that are slices of bigger companies. We reply to projects on such sites - particularly guru.com. We're probably too busy, and possibly too small, but contact me if you like. You didn't specify what kind of development or platform you're targeting; that makes a difference, too.
/. posts and get convinced I have the perfect attitude, you have no way to know whether I really know my stuff. All of the normal HR stuff applies - resumes, references, portfolios. But it's still hard to tell.
The big problem you have is you can't trust anyone. Even if you read all my
Personally, I don't trust companies nearly as much as I trust individuals. So regardless of the company size, I wouldn't hire a team unless I trust someone who is in a position of authority.
If you don't have the time or money to do a recruiting cycle, you don't really have the time or money to get your project done. The steps you need to do to ensure that you have chosen a talented and professional team are the same ones you would need to do to individuals - and you should probably do it to all of the individuals. And they'll need to gel with your existing developer; you're not going to save much.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
It is a dangerous business naming names. There have been a number of people sued over the years, along with the organziations that provided the veil for their anonymity. By, for example, naming Mr. Griggs, you are providing only one side of a story, without giving him an opportunity to reply. Since this could harm his ability to get new business, this might be grounds for legal action. Of course, as we say on slashdot: IANAL (I am not a lawyer) nor do I play one on television. So what do I know.
You should check out Critical Path Software at criticalpath.com. CPS has been in business since 1991 providing project team-based development services. They offer complete project teams including project management, development, and quality assurance, or the pieces that you need to complement your team. You should drop them a line at info@criticalpath.com to get more information.
1) I've been involved in many a project, and two dot-coms, and I'd recommend that you really think in terms of two projects. As mentioned above, what you want in the end wont be where you start. Take that as a given, and get a team you feel reasonably comfortable with to develop a basic working model, or prototype. I believe that if you state your goals up front (it must do x, y and z), and it does that it when you're done with round one, then it doesn't really matter whether the work done was "good" or "best practice". Unlike housing, you can build a model, use it, learn from it, then trash it entirely when you build phase two. The only key factor is making sure the data is portable, and thus getting a good db design from the get-go. 2) You could consider hiring a project manager, using your "recruiting" energy to find someone who will then be responsible for the project, and finding the people to accomplish it. In other words, outsource the whole problem - not to coders, but to someone with the skills to put a working team together for 6 months. Once you get to phase 2, *then* use your model to secure funding, and hire an in-house team. $.02 neil
We build custom software. Give us a call: RDA.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Your local Programming, Linux/BSD/Unix User groups. Find the coordinator of each organization and ask them what the acceptable way to post a job listing, or just send a message to a few mailing list members directly. If they are not able to help you, they will probably know someone good to refer to you.
Look for consultancy shops that work on open source. You can see what skills they have and what projects they work on and judge them by their contributions to the OSS projects they work on. When you contact them, be sure tell them you are looking for employees. This will leave you with the single man consultants that might be willing to start an employment relationship with you. Start with people who already know the OSS projects you use in house, then branch out to people who know the distro(s) you use in house.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Good programmers are hard to find but they're there. I agree with a sibling poster, if you can't find them you probably aren't offering anything they want.
That said, I agree that there are far too few good programmers. It's not about knowing the latest whiz-bang languages or techniques, it's about believing in elegance and producing useful and maintainable code. It's about not optimizing without profiling. Not adding a feature without adding a few test cases.
I've seen a ton of really horrible programmers come out of the best schooling. Technically qualified, but unable to reason through the desired mechanics of the program - the ones who tweak blindly and wait for the right output, even if they got it for the wrong reason.
But, I can usually tell what someone is like if I ask to see a sample of one of their work (or equivalent open source, etc) projects, the CVS, documentation or at least comments, and test cases, bonus points for an automatic build/test procedure. If they've got a good grasp of the tools they probably understand the chaotic (butterfly effect - free a pointer one line too early and watch it crash six hours later, under load) nature of software and will at least be solid team members.
1. Come up with business idea. /. readers to build it for you.
2. Post thinly-disguised request for
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Don't listen to the posters with 20 years experience. The world is much different than it was 20 years ago. What you want to do is the future. It will work and it will work extremely well. Go to http://www.openembedded.biz/. We have your team.
Check out our site. We have been specializing in very long term ccoperations (e.g. 5+ years and 10+ projects for a US client) for mission critical solutions. I'd be delighted to discuss your needs.
Bests,
Peter
Blatantly connectted to me. I own 1/3 of it. We have 3 core people and lots of known contractors we work with regularly. All three core people are the former staff Scientists at xSides Corporation and are into all phases of development. They have extensive embedded and set top box experience, OS dev experience, applications framework development, image processing and video processing and well, the list is pretty long. Take a look at the site Cryptocybernetics.com for more of the flavor of who we are. And, oh yes, we have IP in the security and DRM area. We also have the start of an office in Ukraine (not open just yet) so we can have a not-in-US presence for some work. Pick any of the email contacts and ask about CryptoICS our consulting operation. We don't mention it on the site at the moment (we are bringing a site dedicated to our consulting up but it is not reachable). Our client list is pretty favorable though.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
www.decisionresearch.com
we take on lots of side projects
msbit.com
you can't go wrong with SRT Solutions out of Ann Arbor, MI
http://www.srtsolutions.com/
This is exactly what we do. We are based out of Eastern Canada. Please check out our site (www.i-clique.com) and call us with your requirements. We would be happy to help.
I'm sure there are more companies than just ours that fill this niche, but check out http://www.giavaneers.com/>. Giavaneers, Inc is a small company of software engineers that work together in a small office in Santa Cruz and can work as an arm of your company.
I call BS on EE's being good programmers.
EE's are he peopl who did the Video BIOS on the Diamond vido cards, and didn't know enough about CS to separate their PAL input tables from the code that implmnted the mode switching, so that it was impossible to write third party drivers for the Diamond vido cards that didn't go through the BIOS calls for all their mode switching needs.
Diamond didn't publish programming documentation, but it was not them attacking Opn Source projects like FreeBSD and Linux that made them not provide the information, it was that fact that the E's they had programming their BIOS instead of CS people wrote code to the immediate needs, rathre than the problem space.
Then inevitable results of this were cards that could work in the environment for their initial market, and not any future markets.
Only an idiot builds a product that won't let new customers come up with new and clever uses for it - and thereby slling more product.
I'm currently at a Fortune 500 computer company, and they have the same issues with the EE's writing short-sighted code and making short-sighted requirements built into the products, instead of the code being modular enough to be able to expand the product capabilities later.
- AC
The rwo biggest mistakes a strtup can make are:
(1) Do the development out-of-house
If you do this, your business will not own any of th expertise with the code, and they will not be able to quickly modify/update it, if necessary. In addition, you will build the expertise of a team with no loyalty to you other than money, and no reason to not be "first to be second" in your market on your own once you are even marginally succssful. Think "Oh yes, we know them; they aren't really comptition for us: in fact, we wrote their code for them, and we now have 20/20 hindsight on what we did wrong, and no legacy issues to kep us tied down to those mistakes".
(2) Set up a "som pigs are more equal than others" situation
This happens if you job out the work, or if you kep your prototyp developer on as a senior person (I've worked in shops that have don both). Assume you bring these people inside, but keep your prototype preson, and leave them with a senior position, rather than a parallel one. In that case, you hav a prson who's good at prototyping controlling/bossing around/having their decisions trated with a preferential bias relative to the new people - and they are the ones you are going to rely on to build your product. The problm is that people who are good at rapid prototyping out of spit and baling wire are rarely good at design, and vice versa. Instead, you need to establish a separation to keep the prototyper from overriding necessary design decisions. I've rarely seen it work where the prototyper sticks around in the same team, without someone walking and the product suffering. If people are peers, they are peers, period.
So:
(1) Get the people in house; you want to own the organizational expertise, not just its work product.
(2) Get your prototyper out of the loop after initial indoctrination, and have them go work on something new not related; the prototype was their baby, and the product is not: it's going to replace their baby, and they shouldn't be around to do plastic surgery on it to try and mak it look like the baby they had, purely for rasons of nostalgia.
-- AC
They PLANNED AHEAD.
Did you not forsee this eventuality? Did it not occur to you that, at some point in the future, you would need people to write the code for the product that you were attempting, at the time, to demo?
Whoever is in charge of writing your business plan should be politely shot.
I'm interested in learning more about what your looking for from this small team and more about what your asking us to build. I have a small team on the east coast of the US that loves to work in and for startups. We're just a bunch of guys. We have yet to become a commercial entity (easy to fix). Feel free to drop me a line if you make it this far down in the comments. :)
Like the title says I work for a company that earns its bread by selling ready made development teams. You can read more here: http://rolemodelsoftware.com/.
It seems to me that the time and energy it takes to hire the right team is at least as great as the time and energy it would take to hire individuals.
Perusing the comments, there are at least a few dozen people who have posted "hire us" comments. If you were to try and contact all of them and go through the whole interview process, you would probably take up a lot of time which you say you don't have.
My advice to you would be this:
- Hire a "name brand" company to put together a team for you. At least with a name brand you get some level of assurance without having to do as much due-diligence. I say "as much" because you would be an idiot not to do any, since you can be screwed by the big boys too!
- Find someone you can trust to assemble a team for you. Because you trust them, you probably already have a relationship with that person, so hopefully they will do right by you without you having to check them over. Of course, this may just push the problem down on the person you hire for this purpose, unless they already have a network of pros at their beck and call.
- Bite the bullet and plan to spend the time to assemble your team.
I think the biggest problem in finding people, whether they be a team or individuals, is getting the right people. If you skimp on this, then your project is doomed!
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
Thailand is the place to go for high quality development and very reasonable rates. I am and American owning my own Company here in Thailand and there are many American IT companies here that write customized coed for the local Thai market but also multinational companies. The benifits of Thailand is the warm weather, great food, at very talented Developers that can develop code in any language you require. If you are intersted in Thailand, contact me at info@fsa.co.th
Really, there are a lot of companies eager to do exactly what you want.
I had done it, it works.
We got screwed by AC / Accidenture over our BI project.
HIC / Medicare Australia ( www.hic.gov.au ) was screwed bigtime.
Bait and switch (some of the 'programmers' didn't even know Java), deadlines missed, most of the 'applications' were trashed, and now we have to live with two so horrible, so bad and so ghastley that they make the old mainframe systems they are STILL trying to replace look like gold.
Good on you AC. You screwed HIC royally, and with us the Australian public.
Fuck you. Fuck you very much.
They do outsourced product R&D for technology companies and are up in Canada so IP is less of an issue. I've worked with them before and they are top notch.
Hello there, I'm the project manager for a Dev Team in Mexico. We develop for several agencies in the US. We offer several services. www.hangar3.com.mx =)
oDesk (http://www.odesk.com/ claims to be a marketplace and a workplace, and brings together "service providers" and "buyers" (their terms).
Service Providers are techies and developers and programmer, mostly in PHP MySQL, JAVA and a bunch of other technologies. I think they are mostly international, but they have some US and Canada based developers also.
Buyer would be you, or clients that pay the developers.
oDesk connects the parties and let's the buyers manage the developers. There is a FREE DEMO of their service which I checked out. Really awesome.
Go to https://my.odesk.com/ and log in with username "guest" and password "helloworld" (fairly simple). They have a Live Chat options.
I know of a company that recently signed up with them, and right now it's working fine.
Hope this helps