No ownership and no authority
Over my career, I've worked with outsourced software developers - both firms and freelancers - very many times.
And each time, I learned new lessons.
Sometimes, they were an entire team in a different continent, building commodity pieces of a larger micro services system we were building.
That taught me that for most circumstances, outside developers will only do what you tell them to do - no more, no less. This is because they're not ingrained in your team, and have no ownership and no authority.
Another time, I was working with an individual freelancer and friend - the best software developer I've ever known. That time I learned that part of my job is to set my partners up for success - and to never work with friends unless you control the success of the project. Don't worry, we remained friends ... eventually.
I've worked with hourly freelancers - including one currently, monthly retainers, fixed-priced projects, and flexible staff augmentation firms over the last 20 years.
And I've crammed all the lessons I've learned from that experience - minus the friend one, that's just for y'all - into a book, "An Axiomatic Guide to: Outsourcing."
It's with my editor - my lovely wife - right now, but I'm proud enough of it that I went ahead and opened up a preorder for that book, with an included microconsulting opportunity to dig into the specifics of your current outsourcing situation.
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Over on the blog, this week's Axiom is about every software engineer's favorite topic: technical debt.
Primarily about how to sell technical debt work to the larger business.
Unmentioned in that piece is another approach:
Don't sell it at all; just do it.
There's a bit of that alluded to in the Boy Scout Rule section of the blog, but for you I wanted to make it explicit.
If you're fixing things and cleaning up alongside the regular work, you don't need permission from the business.
You earn this right by hitting your other deadlines and marks, but you also control those!
Bake in a little bit of extra time, and then use that primarily as "fix broken stuff" time ... and secondarily as a buffer in case you're not going to hit your mark.
I suspect this topic will come up again in my "Bridging the Business Technical Divide" panel later this month. I can suspect that because I'm also drafting the panel's questions :)
Also, look for one coming from the other angle - what questions you should ask when your engineers come to you bringing up “technical debt” - in the coming weeks.
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Speaking of that panel, running a business is hard.
I knew that already from working in startups long enough and high enough to be privy to board meetings and projections and the like, but trying to build my own has really reinforced that.
Building a business around one person - yourself - is also extra hard.
Every minute of my life, I could be working on something to maybe push the business forward. Every minute I'm scrolling on my phone, I could be writing content or sending emails or doing client work.
It was far easier to quit at the end of the day when I was just working for somebody else.
Instead, I'm here at my laptop at nearly 8pm cranking away at a blog post and this newsletter.
And after this, I'll log an hour or two of client work.
But I also took the afternoon to do my long run for the week.
I'm building this business primarily for freedom - freedom to do the work I want, when I want to do it and how I want to do it.
And the freedom to know that nobody can take it away from me. Nobody but me.
Anyway, I left a discord server for WVU fans today ... because I could be writing you this newsletter instead :) That, and nobody needs that much negativity in their lives these days.
Hope you're doing great.
Pick up some apple cider and enjoy a tall glass for me. Newsletter poll: Do you prefer your apple cider hot or cold?
Let me know!