On outsourcing
via Paul Graham:
During the Bubble, a lot of people predicted that startups would outsource their development to India. I think a better model for the future is David Heinemeier Hansson, who outsourced his development to a more powerful language instead. A lot of well-known applications are now, like Basecamp, written by just one programmer. And one guy is more than 10x cheaper than ten, because (a) he won’t waste any time in meetings, and (b) since he’s probably a founder, he can pay himself nothing.
Then via Jason from 37Signals:
Why toss an app over the pond to a programmer body shop in India when you can do it here at home with one guy? That’s what Ruby on Rails lets you do. And that’s one of the reasons we open-sourced it. Everyone can benefit. We not only want to make software that’s dead simple to use, we want to make tools that make it dead simple to write software.
