Distributed vs freelancing

Each project is different, simple things can have simple solutions. Outsourcing a simple login page design vs connecting a finance app to a high-street bank lending system require different levels of thinking.

Many customers, while initially sure in their thinking around what the best solution to their challenge is. Leave out best fit technologies, underestimate/overestimate the importance of particular features, and have too many “coulds”, “shoulds” and “ifs” in their briefs.

As projects get more complex outsourcing to freelancers becomes impossible without a delivery team that has experience in getting to the best fit solution. While a freelancer is a specialist in one area that can limit their ability to deliver a solution as part of a wider plan. Leading to Frankenstein systems that become a devil to maintain.

Hiring freelancers can be a great way to offload work to a specialist. Our Elastic Team and talent pool is made up of experts that provide client’s access to any specialism with an average of 11 years of experience programming. So it’s fair to say that we trust freelancers to deliver.

To get to the level of talent Distributed has access to has taken years. Carefully attracting, vetting and testing our talent pool isn’t something many of our clients can do overnight. They say the proof is in the pudding – and our freelancers have certainly proven to us and our clients they can deliver.

The question you should ask yourself is: If I hire a freelancer for X project, how sure am I they can achieve the desired outcome?

If the answer is anywhere between 90% and zero then you are taking on a risk that the project gets completed correctly.

We often think of outsourcing, especially to freelancers as a way of reducing the amount of time spent on something. More often than not though the opposite is true. We spend more time trying to brief clearly, more time trying to manage the developer and more time in QA identifying and iterating on mistakes.

Many of our clients – especially the smaller SMEs who started with one or two freelancers, which was manageable. As they get larger managing those freelancers becomes a more complex challenge. Aligning different freelancers to project goals and outcomes. Making sure each freelancer isn’t overwriting the work of the other, can become a constant management headache. This becomes especially true for our enterprise clients, where managing an internal team coupled with various projects with various different freelancers; is a task that reduces the tech leader’s ability to perform their job well – growing the business using technology.

Distributed is set up to reduce management headaches – we knew this problem first hand and realised enterprises particularly, need access to specialist talent but often don’t have the headspace to manage that talent.

A freelancer’s greatest strength – their specialist knowledge – can become their Achilles heel when it comes to project changes. You go out to market looking for that ruby developer, the python expert and that specialism, while necessary one week – may become unnecessary the next.

That’s where scaling past initial projects becomes very difficult with freelancers. Especially so when teams of freelancers are needed.

Distributed trusts freelancers. We believe freelancing will become the future of work for many but it needs to be done in ways that work for its end customer. The businesses that need specialist help.

Hiring a freelancer directly works if the project is not complex, you have time to find the right person and to manage the delivery yourself; you’re sure the freelancer can deliver and you won’t need any other skills than those that the freelancer can provide.

If any of those considerations are an issue then Distributed provides a zero-risk way to work with the best freelance talent on the planet.