Web Development - Made In USA

RustyBrick has a long standing policy of not outsourcing our technology outside of the people who work exclusively for RustyBrick. That means, all the technology that comes out of our company, all our web sites and backend technology, is home grown directly by one of the people from the RustyBrick team.

Why do we have this "policy" you ask? The main business reason is being able to control the whole process. I need to be able to meet my deadlines and if I hand off a project or even piece of a project to an outside agency, then I lose control. I know if I have an emergency deadline, if the code is internal, I can easily get it done here. On the technology front, there are often quality control issues with the code. At least from what we have seen produced by some of these companies. Time control and quality control are important reasons for why we don't outsource. But those are not the only reasons.

We take pride in our work, and by "we," I mean every single person on our staff. To outsource our work, would diminish some of that pride, but further more, it might reduce employee satisfaction. I bet, if the staff heard that we would begin outsourcing some of our coding - it might draw some concern about job security. Each and every employee here is incredible valuable to us. So valuable that I do not even want them to feel as if their jobs are in jeopardy. The team RustyBrick has here is just too valuable to the company and to our clients, that it simply doesn't make sense to sacrifice that to save money.

Yes, I know you can save a tremendous amount of money outsourcing. I know. But at the expense of losing control over time management, quality of the code and employee moral - it just isn't worth it.

You wouldn't believe the number of phone calls we receive from companies all over the world, asking us about outsourcing our technology to them. Most call and ask about a business partnership or opportunity for us, some are outright clear about the outsourcing part. Most of the phone calls come from India or someone who sounds they are from India - but not all. Often, when I answer the phone - I can hear it in the person's voice that this is an outsourcing sales call and I stop them right away with my one liner... "We do not outsource our technology." Some try to find out why, I don't blame them. Some argue that they do not want us to outsource to them, but rather form some sort of partnership - sorry, not interested. Then some say, okay - goodbye.

In one case, the person on the other side started to laugh. I heard him then say something in an other language to the people in the call center next to him. They all laughed and I then asked, "so we are clear?" He said, "yes" and we hung up. That was honestly a bit funny.

Too be honest, I am always a bit nervous I jump the gun too quickly with my 'one liner.' But I am rarely wrong with those calls. Worse case, I turn away a big company looking to buy us out - which is something we are not looking for anyway.

To summarize: We do not outsource out technology.

Image credit on Fire Monkey Fish's Flickr stream.

Bookmark and Share    
blog comments powered by Disqus

7 COMMENTS

posted by Partner Source on: May 28, 2011 01:14am

Great subject and content. I will recommend the site without a doubt, great spot!! I will be back to check out more for sure.  Glenn Wright VP of Marketing Partner Source  (Ranked #3: B2B/B2C Appointment Setting | Lead Generation and Market Research Company) Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States http://www.thepartnersource.com

posted by Partner Source on: May 23, 2011 11:25pm

  Great subject and content. I will recommend the site without a doubt, great spot!! I will be back to check out more for sure.  Glenn Wright Partner Source (B2B/B2C Appointment Setting and Market Research) Minneapolis, Minnesota http://www.thepartnersource.com

posted by on: Feb 15, 2010 05:27pm

Agreed, but in addition to repetitive work Americans cannot handle building and developing the technologies and platforms that form the core of their industry, so they outsource doing this to "third world" countries since people here (in addition to repetitive work ) "are already used to" using their heads

posted by on: Feb 15, 2010 05:33pm

Agreed, but in addition to repetitive work Americans cannot handle building and developing the technologies and platforms that form the core of their industry, so they outsource doing this to "third world" countries since people here (in addition to repetitive work ) "are already used to" using their heads

posted by Harshad Katikar on: Sep 17, 2009 11:02pm

Hi Barry, Its great to know that someone from America- The largest market for technology outsourcing cos, values "the employees' sense of pride" and their morale over the cost advantage derived by outsourcing. Before reading this I was forced to think that business people who value things like pride, the joy of working and employees over commercials are a thing of the past. If you keep this up and not let your employees down I don't think they will EVER let you down. P.S: Its Ironic, that this comment comes from a person who is involved in calling people like Barry and asking them in a (I admit) thick Indian accent , "Hi Barry, Why don't you outsource ?"

posted by Ronnie Schwartz on: Sep 11, 2009 05:53pm

We also have a policy of not taking over pre-developed sites; we will insist on a rewrite. The main reason for this is that it was almost always outsourced and the code proves it. I once saw some code developed in India that was so bad. It was an e-commerce site. When you click the Checkout button, the credit card, expiration, username AND password were ALL in the url! To the credit of the programmer, the site was ssl. But that really doesn't help because the url is not encoded. Someone can easily check the browser history to fetch the confidential info. This was a really bad case, but I've seen the same in cookie info. There is just no way without reviewing every single line of code that we can guarantee the site is secure, works properly and is optimized for seo/speed/etc. Faster and more efficient in the long term to rewrite the site.

posted by contractor web design on: Nov 21, 2009 06:38am

maybe that means that americans are lazy and couldn't handle repetitive work. they "outsource" on 3rd world countries since people in there were hard working and already used to it. Uncle sam is not like that :D