The Dollars and Sense of Hiring Software Consultants
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
August 16, 2019
Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash
I’m often asked by family and friends about End Point’s market and how software consulting fits into the business landscape and I thought I’d write up some thoughts for the general public in how hiring a consultant is actually the smartest thing to do for your business and it makes a ton of sense financially.
Let’s talk some math about hiring an in-house developer:
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According to Glassdoor, the average software developer salary is around $50,000–$120,000. Let’s say $85,000 per year. You typically pay for health insurance, other benefits and overhead expenses, so let’s just round the total cost of hiring one person to $110,000 per year (I think that’s actually pretty conservative).
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You’d probably need to hire two people to support anything essential to your business, since having a single developer is risky (illness/vacation/employment change, etc.).
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Your total cost of getting two developers in-house is around ~$220,000 per year
| Hiring your own developers | Software consulting agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Senior developers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Diverse skillset | ? | ✓ |
| Protection from staffing changes | ✗ | ✓ |
| Flexible budget | ✗ | ✓ |
| Staff up and down easily | ✗ | ✓ |
Consulting Instead of Hiring
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Spending less: You could spend $40,000–$50,000 a year in consulting and get excellent coverage, including new feature development and support for your project. Some of our customers even spend substantially less than that.
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Skillset: Were you able to hire two people that know all of your software stack? Can they work on your CRM/inventory system and do your website? Can they troubleshoot issues with your Windows Active Directory setup? Are they senior developers with a decade of experience? Or did you have to hire junior developers who need to train up on your project?
When you’re working with an End Point team, you’re able to get expert advice on the parts of your system that you need. For example, you might not need a full time DBA, but we can provide you an expert database resource for a few hours a week. You might not have enough work for a full time network engineer, but you do need someone to help with your SSL certificates, domain names, and caching layer. In that case, one of End Point’s DevOps engineers can offer you help for a few hours a month.
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Team resources: What happens if someone doesn’t know something? Do they have a resource to turn to or are they trying to figure it out with a Google search or Stack Overflow article? End Point has 40+ engineers on our team and we work in a collaborative way to solve problems, giving you the benefit of a very wide diversity in technical skillset.
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Hiring: Do you have the technical expertise to vet new employees? Hiring, testing, vetting, and onboarding new developers can be really tricky and End Point’s technical management team takes care of that for you. All of our developers have been through a rigorous skills test before employment. Upon joining the company, developers participate in our technical bootcamp to ensure they understand all of our internal procedures for data handling, security, client management, code verification, teamwork, and many other important skills.
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Resource changes: If you’ve hired your two software developers, you still have to replace them in the event of an illness or job transition. If a developer leaves, End Point takes care of resourcing your project with new personnel and getting them up to speed. You don’t have to worry about the hiring or replacement of employees. We assign new team members with the appropriate skills to tackle your project, and our employees have our broad and deep team to call on and consult with to leverage their effectiveness.
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Staffing up for a big project: One of the challenges faced by any business looking to do a big project either with an internal application or a website is how to staff up for all the work and then figure out what to do with their staff once the big project is over. Hiring a consulting agency lets you put 2, 3, 4, or even more people on a project for a big push and then back off to fewer people once your development is over. You don’t have to worry about temporary employees or a situation where you have to let one of your employees go due to lack of work or budget for development.
Summary
Hiring consultants can reduce cost for your project development, eliminate the stress of hiring knowledgeable staff, and provide you deep technical experience from a team of professionals.
End Point has some verified client reviews at Clutch.co so read about how we’ve helped our clients!
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