Question: a friend is a great designer and has coding chops. He just got a project with a large company fixing their e-commerce site. The deeper he digs the more farcical the whole thing has become. Nothing works, no one seems able to do anything and the past “agency” appears to be someone who hires developers in a developing market but has no real idea what they are doing. My friend has fixed huge amounts of broken stuff and delivered on time and under budget stuff they just could not get done. But big boss will not give him the big project for coming year because “he is just one guy” . Any suggestions on how to address this? Big boss is looking for security more than performance. But my friend can’t afford to hire 10 people to be an “agency”. Any suggestions on how to crack this?
Agencies do not exist to build great software. I mean sure, it helps if their output is good enough to guarantee more work, but that's not why they exist. Their purpose as a business is to generate billable hours.
Customers do not hire agencies with the expectation they will build great software. They turn to agencies because they don't have the time or skills to do it themselves, and agencies are cheaper than hiring people and they are more dependable than freelancers. By that I don't mean that freelancers are collectively unreliable, but with an agency you have a dozen or more developers and if one falls sick, they can just replace them with another developer. If your product depends on that one freelancer, you are screwed.
So "10x developers" aren't really suited for agencies, where every hour is billable and accounted for, and the output does not have to be great, it just needs to be more or less reliable and more or less on time and under budget (or at least cost overruns are accounted for).
Assuming it can be done by a solo dev, then pull on 10 guys out of body shops in India/Pakistan, seek the cheapest possible credentials that they can be called developers, call yourself project lead/architect.
Bill as a fixed price project with milestones — you want the work assignments to be ambiguous. Plan/budget by your own workload, consider using offshore resources as a bonus (keeping in mind you intentionally pulled them on as just bodies).
