We’ve seen it many times with our clients: since you’re not a “computer person”, it’s sometimes hard to know how to avoid the common pitfalls when you build technology solutions for your business. We often talk to people who’ve hired a “lone ranger” programmer as a short-term fix, which just ends up creating long term problems.
Building software is a specific discipline within IT, very different than systems administration or maintaining IT infrastructure & hardware — it doesn’t come with an electrical or network cable you plug-in somewhere, or pre-built settings. It’s important to get software experts on your side to build a useful piece of software.
Frequently a firm may hire a freelance programmer to come in and write some custom software, create a database, perform a system-to-system integration, or develop custom reports. This may be a “quick fix” to a short term need but it rarely works out in the long term for the following reasons:
It’s hard to attract a good freelance programmer.
Most firms that are looking for a single software developer don’t know what questions they need to ask a developer. Instead, they ask “do you know how to code in this programming language” and “how much is your hourly rate?” instead of double-checking for the relevant technical skills. While you may end up with someone who is proficient in the programming language you need and does end up delivering software, frequently the implementation tends to be of low quality. Do you have lots of bugs? Is the interface clunky and hard to use? If you’ve got low quality code being written, you likely won’t know it until much later.
You end up overpaying for market talent.
One attempted solution to this scenario is to overpay in the market for talent. Again this tends to be a short-term approach as talented software developers rarely work in a solo environment. The best developers work in a team environment solving larger, more complex problems. Software developers are problem solvers at heart and are always looking for the next challenge. Furthermore, a solo role offers no career development potential. The best developers want to work with more senior people from which they can learn and advance their craft.
There’s only 1 person who knows how the software works, and they don’t work for you.
Lastly but perhaps most importantly, a solo developer represents a huge amount of risk to your business. Only one person that knows how to build and maintain key pieces of software that keep your business humming, so you could be in trouble if they make a career change, or inevitably move on to a more demanding project at another client. Do you know where to find your source code? Is the development quality high or low? Can another software developer understand and maintain the software your freelancer built? If not, are you going to have to start over from scratch, spending twice as much as if you’d built it correctly the first time?
When you work with Entrance, you get to leverage our entire consulting team’s breadth and depth of experience. You get an elastic team that can grow along with your business to meet your changing needs. Because our developers work as a team, they have to write code that meets industry standards and best practices so other programmers can understand and maintain it.