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Ask HN: Why will companies hire you, but not buy code from you?

1 points by erdos4d ↗ HN
I run a little consulting business that makes bespoke software. I also get headhunted a lot. When I tell the recruiter that I am not interested in working for them, but I would be happy to sell them the same deliverable I would make for them as an employee, they are not open to this. Why do companies operate this way? Why do they want to pay you 10X (or whatever multiple it is) what that deliverable would cost in salary, rather than just paying you X for the thing itself? This makes no sense to me.

8 comments

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uberman
They would own the IP rather than you and thus prevent a competitor from also getting access to it. they would also control where, how, and what you work on rather than you.
erdos4d
But I would have no trouble offering them the IP, I do that for all my clients anyway. You buy code from me, it's your code. Same with my work, if you hire me to write some code for you, you are getting me working on your thing. I'm just going to write it at home anyway (all of these jobs are remote). If you want me to work on another thing you just hire me to do that too.
jaclaz
>When I tell the recruiter ...

You are anyway talking to the "wrong" people.

A recruiter is generally an external consultant that has nothing to do with the actual company, he/she is tasked to find candidates for a role (and nothing else, and they are paid for providing these candidates only).

And they won't give you a contact to the company, let alone to the people inside the company that can overrule a taken decision "let's hire someone to do this" with an alternative.

If you manage to get to know the company they are recruiting for AND you manage to speak to its CTO (or whomever takes this kind of decisions) then you might have a chance to propose the alternative of just buying the code.

erdos4d
This is insightful, thanks. Do you have any tips for getting in touch with people in companies who can actually buy from me? I find that I have far less work than I would like just letting clients come to me. Appreciate it.
jaclaz
No, I don't have any tips for this, sorry.

I believe that the decision process - generally speaking - is not "let's think how to solve this problem":

1) let's see if anyone already invented a solution and is willing to sell it to us

then if above doesn't produce results:

2) let's hire someone to solve this problem

It is directly "let's hire someone to solve this problem" or directly "let's see if a recruiter can find someone to hire that can solve the problem".

jd_illa
Even if you sell your IP, the fact that you developed it outside of the company (i.e. on your own laptop, using third party software with your personal account) poses some risk for them. Whether this risk is justified obviously depends on what you're developing, etc.

For their IP, companies like "clean" assets -- stuff developed by employees on company systems. This is also true from an operational standpoint (if they want to customize or integrate with other in-house systems), they'd rather be able to do that in-house.

I worked in-house for a company that would literally spend waaayyy more time/money on building tools than licensing or buying them from somewhere else just because they didn't want to deal with the risk/headache.

scombridae
It's a rare and crappy company whose software needs are so discretizable that it can fire-and-forget a work assignment without confidential access to its existing infra/data, and without longer term handholding.

If your bread and butter is implementing projects for dishonest cs students, that would make a lot more sense.

erdos4d
> If your bread and butter is implementing projects for dishonest cs students, that would make a lot more sense.

Ok, I'll be honest, I never thought of that. Thank you.