Dear IT Outsourcing Company

Why we are not going to hire you

Why we are not going to hire you

Every day, I receive around 3-5 cold calls or email inquiries from an outsourcer telling me about their 200-person (sometimes it is 500 or 1,000 or some other number) in some far-off place (India, China and Ukraine are popular locations), and how they want to help provide development resources. These inbound requests often go up stratospherically when we’re advertising a bunch of engineering openings, like we are now.

We don’t outsource development.

Here’s why:

• Truly disruptive leaps in innovation are made by people who work on something they’re passionate about day-in and day-out.

• We love our customers and part of the way we express our love is by making sure that our developers are as close as we can put them to our customers. We think that gives us the best chance of delighting them.

• We’re a game company, which means we create entertainment packaged as software. Technology is entwined in everything we do, and not something we depend on others to do. Culturally, we’re an engineering company and nearly everyone here is at least partly technical and dedicated to absorbing the best practices in the industry.

• We believe our enterprise value is largely a function of how we master technology and conduct our own R&D — not simply our ability to write checks.

• There just aren’t many examples of world-beating, super-successful companies in games or technology who had someone else build their products for them.

• I build companies: not shells that ship their work off to other companies.

It’s possible that some day there will be some IT projects or non-core development tasks that will make sense to outsource—we probably wouldn’t have our developers create HR or accounting systems, for example. But that day hasn’t arrived—and hopefully never will, since there are great SaaS products that we’d be more likely to embrace—and until it does we don’t need the help of outsourcing companies.