The Retrospector

In today’s competitive software development world, companies are experimenting with many scenarios to reduce the cost of their software. Some companies prefer to develop everything in-house. Others prefer to outsource everything. With both options being rather expensive as professionals aren’t exactly the most affordable, some companies are considering outsourcing to companies abroad.

Offshore outsourcing has been proven to succeed for some companies, but it isn’t the alternative choice for everyone. One alternative with many similarities is to use college students as a workforce for the same elements you would consider off-shoring. I’m sure there are some companies that have found the off-shoring business model suits them perfectly. I say “good for them” if they got it to work out the way they wanted.

I have to admit that I’ve only been involved with one major project that involved an offshore development team and the entire experience was horrible. I can’t say much for how it works now (a few years later), but I imagine things have probably gotten better. What I am interested in pointing out is an environment I’ve seen work very successfully with many similarities.

Finding the need for alternative labor

I worked for couple of companies where it was difficult to find a lot of people with the same skill sets we needed. There are a number of reasons, be it political, personal, or financial that a company will dismiss off-shoring as an option. These types of companies liked to “grow the talent from within” by bringing in inexperienced new-hires and molding them into the “resource gap-fillers” they needed.

Advantages to college students

When having to tackle an extremely large project while very short on resources, creating a team of college students and training them to use the selected tools and obtain the needed skills for awhile before tackling the “real” project proved to be quite a nice plan. I’ve seen many advantageous results that weren’t even expected:

1. New Perspectives. With a group of inexperienced people, you have a new opportunity to take advantage of a mostly unbiased pool of ideas for obstacles you encounter. This is most helpful in the brainstorming sessions for proposing solutions.
2. Larger learning capacity. Having ten individuals taking the place of a couple professionals allows you much more learning bandwidth for the group. Ten people learning new things over the course of the year might allow you to have people specialize in different areas to cover more ground than just two people normally would. (Some would say professionals can learn far faster and would cancel this point out, but over time the quantity of people tends to outweigh the experience factor.)
3. Retention value. Having trained the larger number of new employees on your systems, when they finish their degree and become eligible on the job market they are far more valuable to you than any other fresh graduate. They’ve been exposed to many existing systems in your organization and can “hit the ground running” as opposed to learning from scratch and relating to other experiences to make up ground.
4. Finding the “Gold Nuggets”. Of the many college students/interns you hire, you often find the extremely brilliant ones that can handle the workload of a Jr. or Mid-level professional developer. The advantage here is that you don’t pay them nearly what their professional equivalents would earn. However, the moment they get their degree they have to be given ample salary offers to compete with others that will want them. For those that aren’t worth what you’re paying them (as little as it is) you can simply let them go on the next turnover schedule to look for more worthwhile replacements.

Need a well-rounded group

While “growing the talent” for the skills necessary to build the project, you also need to have experienced members to help grow the group into a more well-rounded unit. In order for the students/interns to be able to fulfill their roles as a workforce, they’ll need examples to follow from more experienced professionals.

The combination of the experienced professionals with the students make for a very comparable model to most off-shore outsourcing organizations I’ve seen. Though the off-shore developers may be able to turn around a product in a much sooner timeframe, the advantages mentioned above make more sense for an organization working on an application it intends to support internally.

Conclusion

To conclude this discussion, I’ll simply ask what you think on the topic. I’m not saying either is ineffective, I’m simply saying that I’ve seen one be more effective than the other and am interested in what others have experienced. Has anyone else out there been exposed to both environments to be able to compare the two and comment on their findings?

   

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