Outsourcing your data team vs in-house?

Posted by Significant-North356@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 10 comments

This is something I've been thinking of lately, what are the benefits between going in-house vs outsourcing all your data processes to a third-party provider like Definite and others.

From what I was reading the only reason was to cut cost of running a data eng team, but are there other reasons.

Like what are the main reasons/motivations/benefit of outsourcing everything, a part from cutting cost ?

I'm trying to evaluate both options.

(sorry I'm not an expert in this)

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theschuss@reddit

Data represents the truth of your business and application, so tell me why you'd let someone else define, maintain and curate the truth of your business.

Ancillary data conditioning or industry/product specific specialists? Sure. Your core team? Not unless you want your entire company to run on vibes

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Interesting-Monk9712@reddit

Cost and/or flexibility.

You try, it works, it pays off, it pays for itself

You try, it fails, you just cut it and it's done.

Sometimes it is not worth to bring on a full team, yet too much for one person to do, so its better to outsource until it grows.

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drnullpointer@reddit

I have a simple framework for making decisions about outsourcing.

1) You do yourself everything that is core part of your business. Everything that is specifically providing market advantage for you.

2) You outsource *EVERYTHING* else, so that you can focus on your core business.

So if my business is producing ads, I want to focus on writing software that makes ads but I will not be writing accounting software. Having better accounting software will not make my business better, and so I prefer to outsource writing and maintaining accounting software to somebody for whom accounting software is *their* core part of business.

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throwaway_0x90@reddit

Outsourcing only has one positive for the company, cutting costs.

But outsourcing the data team may come with significant risk. Company data going to some outsource team might be a whole legal web of PII data compliance issues across laws of different countries.

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lenswipe@reddit

Oh, and timezone differences. Hopefully you're not going to end up in that game of email-tag where an issue has to wait until your 11pm for the outsource team responds.

On Friday I sent a message asking our sister team in India a question. It's now Thursday and I'm still waiting for a response.

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Crazybrayden@reddit

It's basically just cost cutting. Quality is worse, coordination is more difficult and requirements need to be nearly twice as detailed to try to counter these 2 issues.

But they're half the cost

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