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When it comes to hiring contractors, you want TLC. Too often, you think that means “The Lowest Cost”. What you actually want might be “Tender Loving Care” instead.

Let me start out by saying I don’t mean to give a blanket condemnation of contractors. I know many diligent, attentive contractors; I’ve been a contractor myself and like to think I fit into that category. But there’s the other kind of contractor, too, and that type crops up more often than you’d want.

You know the story: the company has a big initiative to do. Doing it in-house would take away resources from other projects, and would cost more. “Let’s hire some contractors! We’ll save money!” Six months later, the contract is done, the project is up and running – but your full-time geeks are now untangling snarled-up code.

The catch, of course, is that contractors don’t have a vested personal interest in the long-term success of the project. They have a vested personal interest in the success of the contract. If all those terms are met, the contractor is all set. Now, you’d hope that the contractor would give full attention to detail, and many do – but only if they have a sense of pride in their work. It doesn’t affect their bottom line.

(Well, it can, indirectly, in that contractors with sub-par work can get a bad reputation. But to be honest, the people a contractor is going to give you as recommendations are not people who are going to bad-mouth his/her work. It’s hard to get an honest sense of a contractor’s full work history.)

Full-time employees, by contrast, know that they not only have to build it, but also maintain it, update it, and improve on it. They don’t just want the car to run, because they know they’ll be back under the hood time and time again. Full-time employees will put TLC (Tender Loving Care) into their code. Contractors might do so. Doing the project with full-timers might cost more up front, but may also save you money afterwards.

What’s the solution? Never hire contractors? Quite the contrary. Contractors can save you money, if you take the right steps.

1. When you’re doing budget estimates, don’t assume that a contractor-built project will have the same maintenance costs as one built in-house. If the cost to maintain is 1.2 times normal, will you still save money? The answer might be yes, but you should make sure you know for sure. (1.2 is a number I created ex recto; I don’t have a real metric here.)
2. Make sure contractors have oversight and periodic review by the folks who will take over the code when the contract is done. Keep the contractors on-track and adhering to your company’s standards. Consider giving the contractors a personal interest in quality: for instance, instead of offering them 1X as pay, offer them .8X with a .2X bonus if the project’s code complies with company standards. (When I was a contractor, I’d have happily gone along with this.)

You want TLC. Make sure you’re getting the right type.

Last week, when bored, I pulled out my iPhone, opened up the YouTube app, and decided to see what the most downloaded clips were for that day. Amidst the teen blather about Twilight and non-English clips of soccer goals was that day’s episode of The Philip DeFranco Show. There’s a lesson in that show.
(Warning: DeFranco’s show is not always SFW.)

DeFranco’s show is a three-minute monologue on the day’s events, sort of a late-night show monologue for the YouTube crowd, complete with more frank language. DeFranco knows how to play to the crowd; he’ll frequently mention some starlet, even if just in passing, and then work her name into the show’s title and use a photo of her as the show’s thumbnail. But that’s not the only thing contributing to his popularity; for that, you need to watch the editing.

View any episode and you’ll notice there’s a cut after practically every sentence (and sometimes cuts in the middle of sentences.) This makes the show not only fast-paced, with each line coming rapid-fire after the one before it, but also makes the show shorter. By removing every half-second of dead air, DeFranco shaves seconds off of his clips.

The savings are undoubtedly minor, but there’s a psychological value. Sure, that $3.99 item isn’t really much cheaper than the $4.00 alternative, but it feels that much cheaper because of the 3 instead of the 4. Similarly, a YouTube clip that clocks in at 3:18 isn’t that much shorter than one that’s 3:24, but it feels it. In an era of short attention spans (especially on YouTube) and lengthening download times, trimming off six seconds can translate into more page hits.

Does it work? Again, shaving off time is far from the only thing contributing to DeFranco’s success, but it’s at least a contributing factor: one of his clips from last week got 2.5 million views. That rivals some major-network TV shows.

What’s the lesson, not just for YouTube clips but Web development in general? Bandwidth still matters. Broadband might be widespread, but people still don’t like waiting. Unless they’ve clicked on something where they expect a long lag (like a video clip or mp3), users will drop off pretty quickly. Major sites like Amazon and Yahoo saw pretty startling dropoff rates when they increased their page sizes by small amounts.

So before you add one more 20KB banner ad or that 10K of analytics JavaScript, consider the tradeoff. Is it worth it? Will the added value outweigh the lower traffic? Or are you better off, like DeFranco, going leaner but with more hits?