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Ask HN: Outsourcing front end?

2 points by fedeisas ↗ HN
I hear that many (young) startups outsource their frontend coding. Can anyone give me some advice on how they integrate those frontends? I'm interested in the workflow between frontend devs and the backend app.

They work on different repos? The frontend guys work directly with the template engine? Or they deliver pure HTML and a backend dev makes the integration? Do the outsourced frontend devs have full access to the app's code?

Any input is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

5 comments

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gamechangr
I don't want to be negative, but I think many horror stories begin with "outsource their front end coding". If possible, do not do it!
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fedeisas
Thanks for replying! Why do you say that? Maybe I'm missing something.
byoung2
I think that should be qualified by saying that is very risky to outsource anything that is your core competency. So if your startup is a data scraping company then your core competency is the code that actually crawls the web for data. You build that in house. If you have an app to all users to create scraping jobs and to surface that data, you can outsource that. If your startup is a new type of social network, then your app itself is your core competency, and it will be very difficult to outsource that because you will need a lot of face time to communicate your vision.
codemonkeymike
I worked on multiple projects where the front end work was out sourced. The kind of work you get back is generally quite detached from modern standards. In the end I have spent a lot of time trying to fix what an outsourcing agency made and would say that any time saved in the short run was lost in the long run. Just remember you spend more time reading code then writing it.