Outsource a function that requires a group of skilled people? The vendor you picked will gradually reduce the quality/availability of the staff you work with. Until eventually you're paying a vendor to train their new hires.
Outsource a software service? Expect them to use vendor lock-in to their advantage. The price will increase 10%+ annually. Changes will become exorbitant.
Outsource a department? Watch their scope become narrower over time, and their demands on anything outside the department increase. Eventually you need massive forms filled out 'just so' to get anything out of them. Errors become rife, and require a lot of effort for an outside party to fix. Emergencies for the business are not emergencies for the outsourced department.
As someone who makes these sorts of decisions regularly, it's rarely a question of what we want outsourced. It's a question of how we can package the function in a way that is conducive to a vendor relationship.
Not a rant against outsourcing. There are other structural risks with in-sourcing.
The other quote I had was every 5-10 years management gets the idea to either outsource or insource to save money. Just switch back and forth every time you get a new CEO.
Here's the thing about outsourcing, the people (FTE's) managing the vendors have to be just as deadly or smarter than their outsourcing peers, otherwise service providers pretty much walk over them.
Marketing tech service companies are notorious for this. I'm looking at you PPC, SEO and Ad buying companies...you're the worst.
During the negotiations they also see if you have some form of in-house expertise. If yes, they will provide us the best available people. If no, they try hard to sell you few duds - people with bloated resumes but not enough knowledge. You end up paying for their training.
Then it comes to actual implementations. If you hired duds, good luck with that. You will be constantly be on the hook for some unreasonable demands. If your hires are good, then everything should be smooth sailing.
Once the project is over the outsourcing firm, wanting a steady stream, will try negotiate a support contract. If you do then the best guys in the outsourcing team will start leaving. Then you end up paying for a lot of duds.
My take is as a technology company, never outsource some new technology. Need someone to work on say Airflow? Build your team and train them. Yes there is a training cost required but would you rather train FTEs or pay an outsourcing cost and training fees as well.
Emergencies for the business are not emergencies for the outsourced department.
Well of course not. If someone wanted to work for company Y, it's because, for whatever reason, they wanted to work for Y. If Y stabs them in the back, TUPEs them over to an outsourcing company, why would they go the extra mile? Good people whose goodwill has been wantonly squandered, and who know where all the skeletons are buried...
Towards the end, they have clarification that states: "Technological development is mainly done at the WhatsApp headquarters in Mountain View and not in Russia as the information suggests. There the company maintains a 'small technical team'."
Our weekly sales calls are done over teleconference, but not everyone can attend. Obviously, a lot of information that we don't want to be public is shared during these calls, like sales figures and client status reports. The calls can last anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.
Right now, our copywriters in marketing transcribe these calls, which they are not happy about. It can take half a day or more to transcribe one call, and it's not the best use of their time. Although they rotate each week, it still takes up a significant amount of time and is not really part of their job description.
Our COO does not want to use an external service to outsource this, as she is concerned about leaks. The fact that many transcription services exist where an NDA must be signed does not mitigate her concern. However, she also does not feel like hiring a full-time transcriber is worth the cost.
The copywriters have tried automated transcription tools but they are not good enough.
I have no idea how this can be solved except for hiring a full-time transcriber ...
I don't save money/time when i have to explain to much and when i have to finish it or checking the result takes to much time.
Wonder how many tasks have "definition" part and "execution" part, so you can make "definition" yourself and let somebody else to do the "execution". Do you mean this approach should work?
Defining only works when you outsource it to someone who knows the task better than you.
But without traffic people don't learn about it.
We have a good conversion rate and good product but without the traffic its meaningless really, advertisers in the bitcoin space seem to accept bitcoin and send fake traffic that never converts into a real user at the rate of other sources (e.g. HN).
Also the way most advertising companies work is they want to see the money upfront, with startups you don't really have it until you get traffic, there's a chicken and egg problem there that makes it hard to get off the ground even when everything seems to be going great.
The advertising companies aren't really bothered about sending you real value just filling the numbers and they aren't aligned 100% with your success, i suppose there are a variety of models that have been tried out already e.g. some companies hire people and offer sales bonuses ect. some offer seo/content marketing ect but again arent incentivized to actually deliver just to take as much of your money as possible... :/
perhaps some kind of paid retweeting service like bitcoin birds (but one that actually works) could work well too. The mainstream advertisers are crazy expensive cpc too.
There is also the fact that they will need the same level of expertise with the database as you have and that already takes months each time we get a new recruit in the team.
It will just be impractical to hand over all the knowledge and the experience working with a MLOC ERP, so we write our own apps and reports.
They are managing not for growth, but for their own survival until retirement. Totally devoid of innovation or initiative.
But it's never in a contractor's best interest to take responsibility for the big picture. So I spend lots of time testing contributions (okay but not much fun/reward) and being a project manager (detestable and a black mark on my resume afaic).
Why I took responsibility when I was a contractor? Clearly I do not always act in my own best interest.
1. Access to snapshots of the last 30 days with single day granuality.
2. Backup has to be encrypted.
We have 7 full servers with over 100 vpses.
However something you'll need to think about if you're snapshotting - do you need to snapshot the memory state/disk buffers too? e.g. a database. Or anything where the total state of the VM is split between disk and CPU/memory.
If the answer is no this is an easy problem to solve.
If the answer is 'yes' life gets more complicated.
I want marketing that demonstrates direct returns and validity through empirical testing.
Most marketing people and companies I've seen will happily take your money all day for no demonstrated return at all, and it's incumbent on you to hold them to account. Holding them to account is the expensive part, not doing the marketing.
I posted an “ask hn” a few days ago about this but it did not seem to make it to the ask page: