Benefits of outsourcing development v's hiring in-house developers

Outsource

In-house Developers

Costs

Higher hourly rate and larger upfront costs, but this time is divided between multiple specialists. Therefore it is efficient and effective.
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Fixed cost (salaries). Lower hourly rate. Time spent may be less efficient due to learning on the job to fill expertise gaps, so the total hours are can be much higher.
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Fully Managed
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Management is completely handled by Custom D, who have had more than 20yrs experience leading a team of developers.
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All developers require ongoing technical direction, code review, and management. This management is a significant overhead.

Technical Excellence

The team is cross-functional and constantly exposed to a variety of projects and industry-leading technologies and techniques. This results in a standard that can't easily be matched by a small number of in-house developers.
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In-house developers can easily be siloed and become out of touch with the latest technologies and techniques. This has a flow-on effect to the systems they are building by adding technical debt and potential problems down the line.
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Scale Up/Down

With a flexible team, we can scale up the number of developers as needed to meet your project demands month-by-month. We can also throttle down after the heavy work is done. There is no lock-in contract.
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In-house developers are locked in and have a predefined number of hours, which may be too few sometimes and too many at other times.

Time to Develop

Working with a full-stack team that can work on multiple areas at once offers the fastest path to developing and deploying a new system.
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A smaller team of In-house developers will struggle to reach the same speed and typically bottleneck when they hit gaps in their expertise.
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Continuity of Care

Knowledge of your organisation and project is shared amongst the team and we build strong long-term relationships with our clients. If a team member leaves, it will have a minimal impact on the continued support we can provide.
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In-house developers typically acquire a huge amount of valuable knowledge about the organisation and project they're working on. However, this forms also a large risk if they leave, particularly if there are only 1-2 developers.

Standards

For a team that lives and breathes development, we have a high standard of programming that is always evolving. It is also consistent between developers to ensure long-term maintainability.
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In-house developers may be working to a variety of standards, or a lack of. This is hard for others in the business to see because it's under the hood. However, it can have huge impacts in the future on technical debt and security.
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Quality Control

We have implemented a number of quality control processes such as merge review, which means all code is checked by another developer. These processes help de-risk development and streamline the process of iterative changes that constantly improve your product.
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In-house developers often give in to internal pressure (deadlines, technical roadblocks) and lack of strict quality control practices, leading to subpar quality code and a higher number of bugs. We have seen this numerous times when auditing internal client applications.

Talent Acquisition

In 2023, it is difficult to find and retain developers, particularly good ones.
​Developers with a high-level skillset often want to be working in a firm where they're going to be exposed to more learning, other developers, and a variety of exciting projects. Custom D provides this.
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It can be difficult for a business to attract and retain top-shelf developers if they don't provide the ideal environment.