AI: “the divide between freelance and in-house developers can be damaging”

• AI
• Deep learning
• Machine learning

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What questions should CIOs and CTOs ask themselves before calling on freelance developers?

Before taking on freelance developers, it’s vital that they recruit motivated people who will stay on the in the long term so as to build up a strong in-house technical culture. Thereafter, they can take advantage of added flexibility and agility by calling on freelancers to deal with temporary workloads, speed up project cycles and contribute skills that they don’t have in-house. However, to properly onboard freelancers for a project, you need to have a lot of discipline and routines in place. Limited communication is often an issue that affects relations between freelancers and in-house developers. In-house developers may not know how long freelancers are going to stay. They may also wonder about the help freelancers will provide and the extent to which it may encroach on their work. It can lead to a divide that undermines the technological culture that CTOs and CIOs want to instil in a company.

How should freelancers be onboarded to ensure that they are operational as soon as possible?

Before hiring out-of-house, companies need to set up the right toolset to enable freelancers to do their jobs properly. At Bodyguard, we decided not to use freelancers until we already had the tools and infrastructure required to give them an optimal working environment. The last development project I worked on dealt with large language models (LLMs), which were new to us a year ago. We decided that we would take care of setting up the service architecture and scalable infrastructure ourselves (monitoring, observability, performance tracking, etc.). The aim was to use the skills we had in-house to give the freelancers all the tools they needed on a turnkey basis. It was essential, because freelance developers can’t spend three months getting accustomed to a new environment. They need to be up and running in a matter of days.

Knowledge management is a crucial concern in companies that use freelancers on projects

If you put yourself in a freelancer’s shoes, what are his or her main needs for the successful completion of an assignment?

Freelancers’ efforts should be solely focused on getting to grips with the product and there should not be any issues with tools or the workplace. Their point of view is that they want to be operational very quickly and they don’t want projects they are working on to be bounced around. In other words, if the customer is chopping and changing, or if certain decisions are not clear or not implemented, then freelancers are put on hold. When companies call on external IT consultants, all too often they only spend a sixth of their time actually working. In an ultra-competitive environment where they have to cope with constraints in terms of time and money, start-ups paying rates of 700 euros a day should expect a high level of performance from freelancers and empower them accordingly.

What happens internally when a freelancer has completed a project?

Knowledge management is a crucial concern in companies that use freelancers on projects. Out-of-house developers contribute skills, expertise and network connections that reinforce knowledge bases in companies. If they are poorly organised when freelancers finish their assignments, companies run the risk of losing these benefits. And, even if knowledge transfer arrangements have been defined, companies still need to find a way of appropriating the new expertise. They should aim to avoid situations where they have to call on a freelancer again only a month after he or she has completed an assignment, or where they are unable to derive any long-term benefit from a freelancer’s expertise because they lack the necessary in-house knowledge.