Programming Company v/s Freelancer Programmer

Every business needs a website to inform their customers and leads about the products or services they offer and to offer present customers timely assistance through their website. A website also serves as a powerful marketing tool helping a business maintain its competitive advantage in an ever-expanding market.

If your organization is not in the business of web development and programming, you are more likely to hire a vendor for your programming needs while you focus on your core competencies. The key question facing small and often medium sized businesses is whether you are better off hiring an individual programmer or a programming company.

Benefits of hiring a Programing Company:

• One of the main advantages of hiring a programming company is that you can take advantage of the many skilled professionals that the company already has on its staff.
• With a programming company you can assign multiple projects to the company and expect to get them completed within a reasonably short period of time. For example, your business website may have many components – the front-end design, the back-end coding, online marketing and so on.
• Each aspect of the website requires a different skill set and a programming company will often be able to provide you with all services under one roof. Further, even after the website becomes operational, you may want regular changes to it so that your website stays updated and your business is ahead of the competition.
• While you may not be able to communicate with each individual programmer working on your project, you may be assigned an on-site representative or account manager whose primary job is to understand your requirements or concerns and convey these back to the programming team.
• Finally, a programming company may find it easier to quickly replace a team member who is proving inefficient or is no longer with the company, thereby ensuing that your project is delivered on time. Hiring a programming company protects you from turnover risk – to an extent.

Benefits of hiring a Freelancer Programmer:

• The biggest advantage you can get from hiring an individual programmer is that of complete personal attention to your project. If you hire an experienced professional with the right expertise to work on your project, even though the person may be a little limited in terms of the skills that you want, you can be sure that your project will receive the person’s full attention.
• Unlike in a company, where a programming team works on many simultaneous projects, an individual programmer usually works on just one or two projects at a time. This ensures that quality is not compromised.
• You can stay in constant touch with the programmer and provide feedback on the parts completed, which the programmer can immediately act upon. While there is a certain element of uncertainty involved when you hire an individual programmer, you will find that most professional programmers are more than willing to put in extra hours if needed so that the project is completed on schedule or even ahead, if your business demands it.
• Finally, you are always likely to find the payment terms for an individual programmer to be more flexible reasonable compared to what a company charges. An individual programmer may also turn out to be cost effective depending on the demand of the skill sets and experience of the programmer you have hired.

A quick guideline for hiring managers to the Pros and Cons of hiring a Programmer or a Company for your businesses IT needs:

	Programming Company	Individual Programmer
Pricing	Often very high due to overhead – company needs to pay salaries to the entire staff, maintain infrastructure, pay utility bills and so on	Flexible and potentially low depending on skill sets – many individual programmers prefer working out of their homes and tend to have low overheads.
Timeliness risk	Low – A well managed programming company will be able to quickly replace an absent or inefficient programmer without much impact on your project.	Medium to High – may be difficult at times to enforce an individual programmer, particularly an offshore one, to stick to deadlines
Communication risk	Medium – difficult for a technical team of diverse skill sets to speak in one voice; depends a great deal on the communication skills of the project manager or account manager	Low to Medium – easier to communicate with an individual programmer, even an offshore one, except when he or she becomes unavailable.
Skill sets	Wide range depending on organization – a large project requiring the implementation of a diverse set of features will benefit from such a wide range of skill sets	Focused and vertical – a small or medium project requiring the design and implementation of a specific set of features will save time and money