Ask Slashdot: Moving From Contract Developers To Hiring One In-House? 524
An anonymous reader writes "I run a small software consulting company who outsources most of its work to contractors. I market myself as being able to handle any technical project, but only really take the fun ones, then shop it around to developers who are interested. I write excellent product specs, provide bug tracking & source control and in general am a programming project manager with empathy for developers. I don't ask them to work weekends and I provide detailed, reproducible bug reports and I pay on time. The only 'rule' (if you can call it that) is: I do not pay for bugs. Developers can make more work for themselves by causing bugs, and with the specifications I write there is no excuse for not testing their code. Developers are always fine with it until we get toward the end of a project and the customer is complaining about bugs. Then all of a sudden I am asking my contractors to work for 'free' and they can make more money elsewhere. Ugh. Every project ends up being a battle, so, I think the solution is to finally hire someone full-time and pay for everything (bugs or not) and just keep them busy. But how can I make that transition? The guy I'd need to hire would have to know a lot of languages and be proficient in all of them. Plus, I can't afford to pay someone $100k/year right now. Ideas?"
Re:Pay for the tests (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Have u thought about.. (Score:1, Funny)
Yes, but you still outsource to Raj and Howard. Those two cause way too many problems.
Re: Have u thought about.. (Score:4, Funny)
When you understand the Halting Problem, and you understand what that has to do with bugs, THEN you will have a right to critique programming as a profession.
Unfortunately, to understand the Halting Problem, you have to first understand the Halting Problem. So it's rather difficult.