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Today I’ve read an interesting blog entry from Ryan Carson in which he preach long-term outsourcing and building offshore teams rather than hiring freelancers on “fixed project” base.

As its usually the case with the blogs, what was even more interesting, was what various readers wrote as their comments to this post. Some were saying he shouldn’t trust his russian developers. Some other (UK freelancers) were saying that outsourcing his work to Russia was almost a national threat. Finally lots of people asked about communication issues etc. In short, as usual, everyone seems to be divided into those who fully agree and those who fully disagree.

I don’t want to comment on the fact that Ryan actually outsourced his work out of UK to some high quality Russian folks (although I think it was an excellent business decision), but I do want to add my bit on why hiring freelancers is not always a great idea.

Computer software and web 2.0 software especially is a complex thing. What more, its a thing that is constantly changing  - all the time. People tends to think that writing web software is like composing songs - its an act limited in time (an costs). You compose a song, then you are finished and you don’t have to go back t0 it. It’s done. Unfortunately, with today’s web applications it’s a different story - things CHANGE all the time. External APIs get updated, server-side libraries get updates, even the programming language versions progress and eventually expire (forcing you to update the  whole app). Building web applications is not like composing songs - it’s more like building house in a permanent storm. You do progress, and you can build something real - but you should be prepared for the never-ending stream of bug-fixing, updating, changing etc.

THAT is exactly the main reason why I think hiring freelancers isn’t the best way to build web business. Freelancers by the very definition of freelancing wants to get short-term jobs, contracts. They don’t want to stay with your company forever, and help you keep it all up and working. They want one-off job, and then they move to the next client. That’s why its millions time better to actually build a long-term team, to know that you have some people out there, someone who will work for you when you need them and not only when they need your money.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t actually matter if your team if off-site or in-house. What does matter that you have a team - and not just a bunch of freelancers. If you have money to spend on in-house team, or if you decided to try to build your team offshore - doesn’t really matter! (Although building offshore teams is a whole different story which I will comment on in a separated post quite soon).

It’s been only a few days since we are finally done with (already famous) skype outage - and here’s another story which reflects how some companies doesn’t quite get it right when it comes to delivering great customers’ experience…

Following recent acquisition by Google, a VOIP company GrandCentral send a note to (apparently) all their customers, saying their “phone number for life” will be replaced within 8 days - no questions asked. If you use the number as your business phone… if you already distributed it to 100s of you friends… doesn’t matter! Your phone number “for life” will needs to be replaced (by another “phone number for WHOLE life” - of course…).

I’m pretty sure (or actually I hope), there’s an important reason for this kind of urgent phone number replacement (Google probably want to get / own as much as they can out of the deal) but did anyone actually thought about what all their GrandCentrals’ customers would think about such (let’s face it) arrogance? After all, if my phone number is actually not for life but just a year, then why not LEAVE the GrandCentral and join some other, more serious VOIP provider?

I’d do that.

And I’m sure its an option that a lot of GrandCentral’s customers is considering now. The interesting question is - how could Google / GrandCentral not know that it might all end up in loosing a big chunk of their customers. Was is actually planned decision - where risk of loosing customers was balanced with profits of moving to new (Google’s?) infrastructure - or was it a technical failure?

UPDATE: seems like the whole number replacement action wasn’t related to Google’s acquisition and it was purely a technical failure. And its not affecting all GrandCentral customers but only few (400) of them. Hmm… The question remains - even if it didn’t affect you, being a GrandCentral customer, would you trust those guys that your number is really “for life”?