The church is the corporation of religion, using religion to bend the will of man and keep power. I know it sound harsh, but I spend a lot of time in the Philippines where the church has way to much power and people suffer because of it, contraception, sexual education, divorce etc. Families do it tough here, but some dude at the front of an alter decides a lot of the rules.
However on the other hand even though I am not religious myself, I see nothing wrong with faith. Especially faith which someone challenges themselves.
My point of view with this is that it is more of a problem with government rather than a problem with the wealthy. If a government is bought off by the rich, it isn't a government for the people in the beginning to start off with.
> It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either.
Although I do not live in the US, I gather that like many countries I have lived in is the view is that training is no longer such a large responsibility of the employer and is rather costly.
However in my travels and work in Asia, there is a concept of bonding in many countries where an employee is offered a job and training and in return agrees to work for a company for X amount of time or pays the employer. This reduces the overhead in regards to the cost of training.
They bought a massive customer base in developing countries, and they manage to secure all of those users who use a messaging app without probably doing any deals with any telcos.
Not only that, they gained a potential advantage in the payments space. Potentially turning their users into being able to make payments within the facebook & partners networks.
Look at what is happening in China with companies turning their chat apps into taxi booking apps like WeChat.
The majority of these points relate to all outsourcing development whether if it's onshore or offshore. In fact it applies for in house development.
Cheaper does not mean bad code and bad practices, and more expensive does not mean better code and better practices. The simple fact is that someone has to take responsibility and implement stuff right.
> 1. It’s extremely difficult to judge the quality of outsourced work without your own local engineer
It can be difficult measure any quality if you do not have the knowledge to do it. As this article is aimed at the "non-tech" founder, I have to question how that person would know good quality code or bad quality code without a technical advisor.
> 2. Prepare to work some odd hours and deal with communication issues
Some outsourcing companies work the hours of the client. If not then planning just needs to be done to organise communication. Even in the US (I am not in the US), there are different time zones which need to be compensated for.
However I do realise a 12 hour difference can be difficult.
> 3. Things will get lost when you transition to a permanent local team
Bring on any new developer to an established codebase and they are going to need time to catch up.
> 4. Each feature can become a line item in your technical debt
This point does not even make sense. Technical debt is not related to offshoring it is related to poor design and implementation.
> 5. Hiring and retaining local engineers could be more difficult
Well this might be true, but then again it would probably be true of any bad codebase whether developed in house or outsourced. I am sure there are in-house projects with massive God Objects also.
> so I can't see advertisers being too interested with "targeted" advertising being so current
Gary Vaynerchuck had an interesting point in one of his many many interviews. Basically SnapChat is instant focus, you cannot see an ad and file it away for later, you must act on it before it disappears. That functionality may be important to some advertisers.
Me I joined SnapChat and have never received one naked selfie so I never use the app. I guess that use for it created a lot of the user base. I do not know how much I would value the app because of that and how scalable their user base is, and their tech is easily replicated.
However on the other hand even though I am not religious myself, I see nothing wrong with faith. Especially faith which someone challenges themselves.