After working with our developers in both India and America over the past month, I have come to think about various differences between the two. I have started to see similarities in people I know here in the US and able to divide them into groups with respect to the skills needed to be an entrepreneur. For example, our American developer is a very independent person who can take an idea and run with it. He lays out a variety of prospective directions to take a project and goes out of his way to present the best solution for a given project. With his knowledge, we’ll be able to use Amazon Web Services and EC2 services to process a large portion of the code we’ll have to run on a daily basis. It will cost us money, but in the long term it may save us quite a bit due to the costs of maintaining hardware and the omnipresent possibility of hardware failure. He’s creative and really knows everything within and surrounding the scope of what we need, allowing us to expand what we would otherwise be able to do.
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My father has this saying, “Never stop learning.” He’s in his mid-70s and he’s always trying to learn new things. Mind you, he has a B.S. in Chemistry, Masters of Public Health and a Ph.D in Toxiology, so he’s got no shortage on knowledge already stored up in his noggin. With this said, every challenge you take up in life should be a learning experience. You should be looking to expand your horizons and grown in your professional. Without going beyond what you normally do and what you already know, you tend to stagnate.
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Having outsourced a variety of projects on sites like GetaFreelancer, eLance and Guru, I would say we’ve gotten pretty good at picking the diamond in the ruff. Below are the top ten things that either make me laugh or make me mad when filtering pitches.
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This web project has officially been in the works for over 4 months now. It’s been my experience that whether you have a team of 1 or a team of 60, whether you have a budget of millions or zero, programming always needs padding time; and then some.
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As with Wei, I too am reflecting more so this year than in past about how I have been changing and growing in my professional development. Personally, 2007 has been a breakout year. I’ve bought a house, a second dog and gotten engaged. All pretty big stuff. For 2008, one of my main goals is going to be a movement away from being the average grunt, trying to take on all tasks myself (and not getting them all done) to putting my efforts into finding others to help with the work and use my own expertise to ensure they are doing the job right.
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