Six to nine months ago I spotted a trend on the Ruby on Rails job sites. The number of telecommute jobs was going down, drastically. More and more, companies were hiring full-time, on-site developers. There are many potential reasons for this, including development processes in place, and wanting more control over the developers and their schedules.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a recent eWeek article by Nathan Eddy says that the use of independent contractors has gone way up, with April ending at 3.94%.
And unless you’ve had your head in the sand, you know that there’s a global economic downturn that has companies entrenching themselves, and watching every penny that is going out the door.
So on one hand, companies are hiring more full-time employees for Rails work, and generally speaking, companies are using more independent contractors. Toss on top of that the fact that for Ruby on Rails, offshore development firms are beginning to catch up to US-based firms in terms of quality. To be sure there are many other considerations than price, and I’m not suggesting a jump to offshore developers. Quite the contrary. I just want to get the point across that it’s happening, and we have to be aware of it.
So where does that leave US-based firms that develops custom, web-based applications?
In my view, having a US-based company that primarily offers custom software development is, in the long-term, a losing proposition.
This shift won’t happen overnight, nor will we see it deeply impact us next week, or within the next few months. But it’ll happen. It’s already happening. As less expensive offshore teams catch up in terms of consistent quality, as communication barriers are broken down, and as companies look for even more ways to cut costs, the shift will continue.
Remember, the shift isn’t only to offshore teams. The Rails community is growing. 70% of the 1200 attendees of RailsConf 09 were at their first RailsConf. I had 100 people in my tutorial on day one of the conference. As the community grows, companies have a deeper talent pool to pull from. And they’re looking to hire.
So what can we do about this?
For us, we’re balancing out our custom development services with our SaaS products and Agile consulting. We’re also doing more to show how our methods along with the infrastructure we’ve put into place (continuous integration, development servers, scrum’d) creates large amounts of value for our clients, and allows us to rapidly and consistently deliver value.
How are you hedging your bets?
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