Discussion on: What is difference of In-house Development Team and Vendor?

Pros of In-house:

• In general, people (should) feel that they are more part of the mission of your company/project, rather than just guns for hire.
• If there are core knowledge/know-how, it is more kept "in house."
• Efficiency of communications, sometimes, the communication channels can be faster and more efficient.
• Generally more longer term, so for this reason, companies are more willing to invest in people who are learning on the job.
• More cost efficient in the longer term. (since the Vendor's management company usually takes 50% cut or more from the money, before it goes to the team members.)

Cons of in-house:

• Takes a lot of time and energy and cost (if you use recruiters) to put together an in house team.

Pros of Vendor:

• Probably quicker to put a team together. Since the vendor most likely have a team ready.
• If you know it is going to be short term, it might be more cost efficient. Or you know you will have a lot of frequent add on people or drop off people.
• Supposedly, there is less training time since the expectation is that vendor's dev team should be experienced, and should not need to be learning on the job on the specific skills (such as a language or framework). But there is still a lot of learning (about the specific project and existing code base) and to be ramped up.

Cons of Vendor:

• Depends on the vendor, sometimes you don't directly control who gets put on your team.
• Quality of vendors (and the individual team members even) varies greatly.