Category: Outsourcing

Sofia Marchetti · Jul 16, 2026

Nobody outsources software development because they want to. They do it because the alternative is waiting nine months to hire two engineers locally at a price that makes the board flinch. So the question was never whether. The question is where, and then the much harder question of who, and most people answer the first one carefully and the second one by picking whoever replied fastest to the enquiry form. Which is roughly how you end up eleven months later with a codebase nobody wants to touch and a vendor relationship that has curdled into email passive aggression. This is the version of the decision I would want if I were making it again from scratch.

Julian Reyes · Jun 18, 2026

The proposal says thirty five dollars an hour. You do the arithmetic in your head, compare it against what the same role costs you locally, and the decision feels obvious. It usually is obvious. That is not the problem. The problem is that the number on the proposal is roughly sixty percent of what the arrangement will actually cost you in year one. Not because the vendor is lying. Because the vendor is quoting the only thing they can quote, which is their own labour, and the rest of the cost lands on your side of the line where nobody itemises it. I am not here to talk you out of outsourcing. I am here to make sure you budget for the real number, because the companies that get burned are almost never the ones who understood the full cost and went ahead anyway. They are the ones who budgeted for sixty percent and then spent the next six months quietly wondering why nothing felt like a win.