Outsourcing Patterns

 The online work marketplaces are clear exemplifications of the saying "good things come to those who wait". Just like in case of starting a new business, an employee needs to work hard on dozens of smaller and bigger projects until after getting noticed by employers applying best practices in field of outsourcing. 

These best practices are as diverse as the technologies and the customer needs they serve. I'm going to describe a few employer types proven themselves as successful outsourcers during my years spent as a freelancer.

The Craftsman: skilled worker with sound portfolio, good resource management skills and sufficient soft skills to build a team and maintain a positive working atmosphere, even if his or her business is limited by its nature.

The Consultant: highly skilled specialist with a proven track record, who has chosen to start a boutique consulting company, being many more interested in the technical aspects of his or her area of activity than the business aspects. He or she usually hires a complementary team of 1-2 assistants who are able to take care of the administrative tasks.

The Middleman: is usually starting his or her career as a worker with more or less technical skills but great people skills and interest in growing to take up the role of an agency manager. He or she is perceiving the problems as opportunities to acquire the right human resources to solve them, being a magnet to tasks and workforce.

The Scrum Master: a tenacious, constructive person with a rare combination of technical and people skills, acting as a mediator between executives, managers and customers in order to get the job done on time, on budget, and on spec. My personal experience as a member of various scrum teams is verifying the general opinion that performing well as a scrum master is hard, and "many called, few are chosen".

The Growth Hacker: his or her job history is listing managerial roles. None of those roles mentions explicitly the mission of upsizing the business, but the company was growing and its results were improving while he or she was making decisions. Scaling a company is a big challenge and be grateful if you have on your team someone who has the skills to do it right.

Outsourcing Anti-patterns

Beyond the marketing buzz of "getting your job done in one click" (for employers) and respectively "working online makes your life a walk in the park" (for employees) outsourcing is more like a new genre to be mastered both by managers and executives, since getting a job well-done is both art and science.

An online job intermediation company like Freelancer (and many others) is a great place for a youngster to gather experience in human resources, because in a couple of years one can meet a big variety of collaborators - both managers and executives. It's neither easy nor smooth, but the steel is hardened by heat. 

The virtual job markets are very attractive to startups, because this informal work environment with flexible costs is ideal for doing experimentation, the core process for shaping a successful business. Unfortunately the below approaches are rather anti-patterns:

The Brainstormers: if they have a good sense of time management, then you will have to sit too many hours of meetings; otherwise you will be the target of instant text or voice chatting sessions day and night. They have difficulties setting goals and directions, and are expecting the employees to keep the boat floating - in general not a realistic idea.

The Scientists are building experiments and are learning from the outcomes, being more interested in elaborating new experiments than in their product. They have good technical skills but little or no people skills, and the contractors are running away because of the random requirements or an improper manager delegated to drive the business.

The Magicians are promising persistent work hours, consistent bonuses, good business outcomes against the odds. They are funny and charming, it's a pleasure to spend your time with them, but after some time you will need to step back to continue with your life, just like their customers.

The Gold diggers are risk-takers, the first who are taking action within commercial conditions reshaped by political, technical or other changes. They have the necessary people skills to attract work force, but will always avoid to sign a win-win type agreement. Ultimately they are good guys, because they are offering you the chance to get out of some hopeless situation, but on the long run you need to look for opportunities elsewhere, because they are always focused on short-term gigs.

The Godfathers might maintain a familial and caring atmosphere, or an uncertain "divide and rule" environment, or a combination of both. Either way they are expecting employees to listen and execute, and you will never know the differences between their words and thoughts - not a good working recipe on a rapidly changing market.

The Blessed Requirement List

It's surprising how many managers have difficulties expressing their expectations when comes about work processes. As a debutant business analyst I was advised that whenever I'm dealing with a team leader having trouble defining their requirements, the best thing I can do is to encourage them to note down their needs. Then after a series of discussions with their documents and the software at hand the puzzle will get resolved.

Nowadays this methodology is called agile, the requirements are collected in a written backlog during multiple iterations, attended by techies, and compared with the written definition of done. It's a common misbelief that scrum is about ignoring documentation and real team work, since the KPIs are focused on individual productivity.

Thank goodness I've had the chance to work between others in a few well-driven scrum teams. I can say that scrum is about optimizing the amount of written papers (what a new team member would need to know when joining the project), and the daily meetings are not only about educating people on the task but also about supporting them to grow. 

Who is not demanding database diagrams, commented code, trackable tasks, written backlogs and priorities, is growing impediments. While a semi-structured environment offers sufficient flexibility and support for dealing with new challenges, shooting in the dark is expensive from financial point of view and toxic from HR perspective.

Since hundreds of years is known that writing down one's thoughts is a good exercise for clarifying and organizing them. Teachers and coaches engaged in developing various skills are advising people to keep a journal.

The right written document flows are battle-tested tools for making us efficient and happy, and putting down a requirement list is the best point to start from.

The Poor Man’s AI

Sometimes I have fun with checking the logs of my website. Over the years I’ve changed domains, hosting providers, and technologies, but certain script attacks keep coming in the exact same style. If I’m looking up a couple of IP numbers they are originating from, most of the time I’m finding them reported by admins. 

A few weeks ago I’ve discovered a new phenomenon: an IP reported and blacklisted by a bot. In other words a webmaster with passion for coding, and pissed off by WordPress hackers has invested some time and effort to automate filtering the access logs for common WP attack patterns, and blacklisting the originating IP numbers.

Taking into account that various hosting providers are scanning sites for discovering WP vulnerabilities, and the script kiddies might use IP rotator, it’s hard to tell that blacklisting a particular IP number is always a good idea.

For me the remarkable thing is that people are starting to teach their scripts to identify an unknown script  (bot, crawler, you name it) after its behavior. The first intelligent antiviruses adopting behavior analysis have lifted the software security to a new level, and in my opinion the main utility of AI is offering new possibilities as a tool.

Since the advent of online shopping, travel tickets, sports betting, trading, and property listing there are countless crawlers sent day by day, hour by hour or even more frequently to gather data. While the high-end and middle-market companies are already hiding their data sources behind paid APIs, and using refined AI solutions for blocking the undesired bots, the low-end markets are dependent on the cheaper and less sophisticated software automations.

A small family shop or local business are not losing money by serving a hundred of bot visits per day via a classic hosting package, but a regional online business hosted in the cloud usually has a big database and it's  paying a quantifiable price for the outgoing traffic generated by bots, and the slower response time of their servers might be noticed by their clients.

Many times the velocity of getting the latest data sets, or a specific projection of a big amount of data are the keys of the success of a business. Ultimately knowledge is power, thus for a commercial entity at some point it becomes profitable to erect a fence against bots. 

In a hi-tech country you can buy whatever data you need. In a non-hi-tech country it depends on the local culture, how much is the price-quality ratio of the data you can collect. In the grey area of partially digitized data AI may be used eventually to analyze sound tracks and videos in order to rate the protagonist's objectivity.

Hiring Ceremonies

 The hiring strategies are culture and industry-dependent, even if the final decisions appear to be dominated by the daily mood or delusion of a manager.

According to unofficial estimates in Spain 60% - 80% of the jobs are taken by family members, friends, or their recommended acquaintances. Based on the discussions I've followed over the years in various social networks I believe that the estimate is representative to the neo-Latin communities - I mean more hundred millions of people living in a Romance-language speaking country, city or neighborhood.

People belonging to communities with English-Saxon origins seem to have more appetite for experimentation, and for instance in the USA or Germany a bigger proportion of the work opportunities are taken by newcomers (outsiders, new faces) than in a neo-Latin country. 

In fact the whole telecommuting movement and the specific PM methodologies are based on the Yankee approach of handling multicultural teams and organizations. Their respect of diversity is manifested in the multitude of project types thriving in virtual spaces. 

As a freelancer I've seen both small software boutiques and companies with siloed departments; team leaders making hiring choices based on textual answers to a couple of questions, and CEOs hiring HR experts, or running automated video interviews.

Many hi-tech companies are using multistep pre-screening interviews for hiring. Even if the records of those conversations are analyzed with AI tools, the entire process reminds me of an age-old movie scene, where a mature lady was interviewing jobless youngsters, and selecting the right candidates in minutes.

25 years ago I told my manager of that time that I was not afraid of the future, because the tendencies can be calculated, but I was afraid of the individuals who are unpredictable. Since then  I've learned to deal with the uncertainty, and to appreciate people for the good things they've done so far, not for the mistakes they might make in the future.

Free Source with Upselling?

It has never worked as a business model. Although you can find many companies using free source tools, none of them has made years in a row at least zero profit from selling paid add-ons targeted to enhance free source packages.

From a marketing point of view it sounds promising to label a service offer as based off of a community driven tool, which is meant to focus on the user’s real needs as opposed to an abstract enterprise leader board’s considerations. 

Presenting a business entity with employees making a living from and contributing to the free source ecosystem sounds like declaring the company as part of the sharing economy, and it may attract talent from the Z-generation, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The real problem is with those guys confusing the marketing tactics with a business strategy, and funding startups insisting on such a strategy. It’s never a pleasure to work for a service condemned to fail - it’s a high-stress environment, where the initial success moments are followed by an endless loop of “whatever I do it’s the wrong thing to do” moments.

The history of long and respectively short-lived free source projects demonstrates that the need for paid software add-ons is scarce and/or random, and the revenues collected from selling would eventually cover the spending with hardware and hosting for upkeeping such activities.

This happens because most people and companies using free tools don’t have sufficient resources to pay for the commercial alternatives of those tools, or cannot keep their offers competitive on their markets in the eventuality of using commercial software tools, consequently they are focused on avoiding operative spending as much as possible.

The long-lived free source projects are backed by strategic users, or are funded as side projects by financially stable organizations.

Copy-pasted Business Plans

They are coming in all shapes and sizes, from free brochures for getting rich quickly to fill-in-the-blank templates distributed by banks for getting a business credit.

The mirage of living a good life or even having a luxury lifestyle based on passive incomes is always tempting, but very few are getting there and for a very short time. Receiving millions of clicks for an article or a video is about haphazard, and securing a contract assuring a 7 or 8 figure income is always coming with a cost you are ready to pay or not.

I'm not discouraging anybody from doing investments without domain knowledge or playing the lottery, but I consider these two similar in their essence, and I'd allocate only small amounts of excess money for such experimentations.

While experimentation is considered a fundamental technique for implementing the business idea of a lean start-up, it's not easy to be done right, as it shows the big percentage of failed new companies.

Over the years I've seen a number of very different approaches to develop a new business, and very different chains of decisions. The common root cause of the failures I've seen so far has been the improperly elaborated and/or applied business plan, by following the patterns learned from already established organizations.

If I were in partnership with all those people I've seen giving up on their business ideas, now I'd be an experienced investor. As a freelancer I can only offer an opinionated piece of software for assisting to-be product owners in their financial decisions, available at: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBLGGH52LJC

It's Time to Change

A pandemic it's not something that somebody wishes for. The administrative measures meant to slow down the spread of the new virus are based on common sense. A region where all are sick would produce many more victims and collateral damages than a quarantine.

The chain of events is now facing us with our new reality. For the first time in the history our globally connected communication systems are confronting us with the limitations of our resources and the pitfalls of taking for granted whatever information shared on the Internet.

The global warming and the effects of the chemical pollution are not yet evident for everybody, and it's possible to produce data sets and impacting presentations meant to deny them, but fever, pneumonia and the limited healthcare resources cannot go unnoticed.

The new virus threat has made aware numerous managers, clerks and teachers, that they already have the technology and tools they need for working remotely. Too many and too long meetings are counterproductive - that's one of the main messages of agile.

Business people have an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about the risks and drawbacks of long-distance supply chains, missing alternative sourcing, and in general how the economic slow-down of whichever macroregion is affecting the others.

The globalization's effects and consequences just cannot be swept under the carpet anymore. It's crystal clear that all the properties, productive capacities and inventions of the world are useless without proper knowledge and willingness to make use of them. 

The most valuable asset of our epoch is the applicable knowledge. The rapid growth of tuition costs during the last decades, the real estate bubble, the decline of the hedge funds, and now the restless stock market are all signaling the fact, that rules are changing, it's time to rethink many of the old recipes.

Somewhat similarly to our immune system, the social media has also started to develop antibodies capable to identify and trash the destructive information, but that's a long process, and we are only at its beginning.

Community Culture

This year we are ending a decade of profound transformations in the IT&C industry. On the one hand important software tools like .net Core and React have been listed under the MIT license, on the other hand well-known companies have reshaped their business models (Alphabet, Facebook) or have been acquired (Red Hat, Tableau etc.).

It looks like the big guys are diversifying their personnel and processes in order to offer better services, and are trying to adapt themselves to a rapidly changing economic context.

In the meantime a great number of IT startups are doing their best to attract classic investors,  crowd-funding or even venture capital, and stuck companies with experienced engineers are trying to reinvent themselves by taking over the clients switching from classic hosting to managed cloud hosting.

As a freelancer I'm up to date with the changing list of roles outsourced by companies in hi-tech countries. While in the first part of the decade numerous digital agencies and small telcos were looking for cheap, generalist workforce in order to preserve their competitiveness, for a couple of years the senior specialists (full stack developers, QA team leads, infrastructure engineers) have been more and more in demand.

This decade I've learned that the software tools, just like the hardware and all other products are evolving towards diversification and specialization. While 30-40 years before a software developer used to be considered really good when mastering a single programming language, nowadays the companies are looking for professionals with T-shaped skills.

This decade the biggest cloud hosting companies have learned that they have to offer multiple operating systems and tool sets, because the "Linux vs Windows" dispute is just ridiculous from the point of view of system integrators.

In a world where system software, programming and scripting languages are all just tools with their pros and cons, the project requirements are driving the right mix of hardware and software to be used.

Emotional debates about why a particular software is "good" or "bad" are missing the point: for what?  A startup with around 200 hits per hour does not always need a middleware with support for asynchronous operations, or a (No)SQL engine ready to scale horizontally.

When having a well modularized software project architecture, there is possible to change step by step the middleware, the database, the client apps.

The real problem is choosing between comparable tools like C# and F#,  Java and Scala, Python and Ruby etc. What I've learned during my 15+ years spent around open-source tools is that the community culture is what matters the most.

If you can identify yourself with the decisions, results and working style of the community leader(s), and you are feeling happy with the communication channels, then chances are that their project is a good fit for your product or service.

As always, while your job skills are enhanced, you are appreciated at work, by family and friends, the community is good for you. When you are experiencing persistent communication problems, infrequent updates, quality degradation, there are two main possibilities: try to change the negative trend to positive by contributing, or research and choose a different open-source project.

It can happen that your requirements have changed, or you have an opportunity to take your career to the next level - then again, be grateful for the good moments and for your growth, and follow your calling.