Using freelancers is dangerous. It starts innocently enough with just a single developer experienced in your chosen tool. But soon, you’ll be hiring a few more freelancers to fill positions you couldn’t hire anyone to do. Suddenly you wake up to the fact that the only people who know how to use half of the cloud services in your product are freelancers, who will be gone next time there is a funding squeeze.
I’m in favor of temporarily using freelancers to augment your team – I’ve been an external consultant most of my working life. But use them responsibly. Freelancer.com showed a 40-50% increase on a year-over-year basis last quarter for various categories, while postings for permanent employees on other sites grew only 12%. That sounds like many organizations are becoming dependent on freelancers. So ask yourself if you can maintain and run your systems without freelancers.