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Ask HN: Negotiating with my boss to take on project about to be outsourced?

2 points by tmuir ↗ HN
The company I work for is developing two nearly identical products with a single fixed deadline. We are currently working on the more complex product, and plan to make the necessary changes for the other product near the end of the project. The feature sets are similar enough that the changes are exclusively policy, instead of mechanism, and are just busy work.

Concerned with the limited time remaining until the deadline, management is considering outsourcing the lesser product to a consulting firm. You know, nine women making a baby in one month. But this will require a lot of support to get this other company up to speed, and through out the remainder of the project. Additionally, this will create two parallel codebases to maintain in the future.

How should I, as a salaried employee, negotiate to take on this project for a substantial bonus? I am the only developer in the company that can work across the entire stack involved, and I have proven both my competence and value.

I'm considering countering the consulting firm's offer (currently unknown) at 66%. I know I can clearly lay out all of the advantages of keeping this in house, but what is my leverage? What is stopping them from keeping it in house, and giving me no additional compensation? This will require significant overtime on my part, but like I said, I'm a salaried employee.

3 comments

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macroburno10000
Talk to them early now. I still distrust about the consultants. Understand there may be other reasons for desire to outsource (personal connection, returning favour, step towards more work with consultants in future.) Make your offer not just something that will make you look great and will also make your manager look great and their life easier. Here's an idea: offer to be the point man for interfacing with the consultants. Do you take charge of the interaction, get on their side as well, and then when all things go sideways, step in yourself and clean up the mess. After all, by that time you'll be the only one who knows how to fix it.
tmuir
The push is completely driven by time/resource concern.

The thing is, I'm almost certain that I can convince them to keep the work in house, and it makes everyone look good. Halve the future maintenance required. No time spent on onboarding new developers, no friction in communicating with remote developers. Save the company money. These are all pain points recently felt as well.

The problem is how do I sell the fact that this will be a sizable effort on my end worth additional compensation?

brudgers
My advice as a random person on the internet, let it go.

1. If it is nine women making a baby in a month, then it's doomed. Your boss may be protecting you and your team by outsourcing responsibility for delays and failure.

2. If it is doable, it may be worth the extra cost of bringing it online faster using consultants. In addition, the consultants may be able to get out in front of the similar work in the other project you are working on...a pseudo-spike maybe...and add value to that project as well.

3. Part time consultants for full time projects aren't a good idea. Solo consultants for team projects aren't either.

4. The idea of undercutting the outside consultant's price is a bad one. Consultants are valuable because of their experience and expertise. And anyway, without knowing the structure of the competing offer, there's no way to make sense of reduced pricing. Some consultants low ball and then add extras.

5. The idea of employees negotiating big bonuses project by project probably doesn't feet your employers business model. Awarding you the project means losing capacity on the other one. And as you note, they could just require you to work overtime and not pay you anything else.

6. You simply don't have enough information. There may be many sound business reasons for outsourcing the work or internal corporate politics.

7. Bottom line is that the higher ups have looked at the situation and made a decision. If they had wanted your input they would have asked. If they had wanted to pay you extra to work on it, they would have approached you.

Wait and see what happens and learn. Maybe at the retrospective there will be an opportunity to set up future projects if consulting is really what you want to do.

Good luck.