Farming out the work vs doing it yourself

I had a conversation with one of my coworkers yesterday with the difference between building equipment on your own or having an outside company do it for you or buying something ready made.

I am the kind of guy that likes to build things up on my own, especially if it's something likely to be expensive. For example, I'd much rather buy a few cheap chips and put together an electronic circuit to do some data logging or motor control instead of buying a full blown system that would run into a few hundred or thousands of dollars; especially for a personal project.

Working in a company, however, it isn't unusual to just go out and buy the equipment you need to get what you need done, freeing time up for yourself to stay focused on what you really need to do. But I find that there is a problem with this way of thinking however, especially when it comes to understanding the possibilities of what you can do with the right technologies or equipment put together.

Most people in my research group aren't technologically savvy. They know how to use the machines and the basic principles behind using them but that's about it. They don't know much about electronics or programming that might make their lives a whole lot easier. I have proposed in the past, cheap tunable circuits that could be used to drive some our devices while hooking up the outputs to a data logger to allow us to take detailed data. The circuits themselves would only cost about $10 each to make.

Unfortunately, some other person took over the project and elected to purchase a multi-channel driver circuit that costs about $100 to drive a single device. We are taking about an entire difference in magnitude in cost and massive parallelism is not possible because the driver circuit is the size of a brick where as mine is the size of a cell phone pad (and I can have several driving circuits on there too!). The system will also take a few months to procure too. I simply had to just shake my head at the whole ordeal.

The co-worker of mine has been needling me from time to time that it would be more expensive for the company, money wise to expend the cash for the development time of whatever I would be building instead of purchasing it.

For cheap devices, sure I can understand that of course, but when it comes to custom programs or equipment to help speed up the work I and others do, that kind of equipment just doesn't really exist as a prepackaged system and it's going to have to be assembled from the ground up. Having the work farmed out to an external company will at least costs in the $10,000 range if not in the $100,000 range and this is the kind of stuff that I would have a hell of a time getting approval from the higher ups for. I could do the whole thing for much cheaper, on my own without the excess bureaucracy. The problem is finding the time and the resources to pull it off, which sort of has me stuck.

The one other thing that I didn't like with my colleague's thinking is that I should let "pro's" handle work (ie circuits) that is outside one's expertise. I fully believe that that kind of thinking is wrong. This is coming from a guy that has ribbed me on making programs is "easy" and that if he wanted to, he could pick it up pretty fast. To put it honestly, I think he's full of shit.

I realize that having specialized skills is important, but having a lack of good understanding in different fields of knowledge is a fatal mistake. I've seen this plenty enough when researchers here screw up their spec sheets and they're not getting the expected response times from the custom made machines. I've had to step in a few times to devise work-arounds for whatever problems they were having.

Having a poor understanding of different fields is also a recipe for creative disaster and I believe it shows with the kinds of products I've seen from this company versus other companies. They've been off the ball when it comes to anticipating future teility to summarize my thoughts has gone to the crapper since my hiatus from writing. Ichnological trends and often plays catchup with other companies.

Anyways, it's been a while since the last time I did any sort of writing and my ab am going to have to rebuild these skills because I definitely feel that my cognitive skills have been in decline since stopping. Here is hopping that it gets better after I get back into the swing of things.