The Potemkin office

I was helping a client sift through a bunch of web agency pitches recently and, after contacting one of them with some questions, was invited to their Brussels office: stately building, expensive part of town, smart, polished, and … strangely empty. I assumed people were on a break or working from home.

After some digging, I figured out the office wasn’t empty by accident. It existed to be toured, not to be worked from. The actual coding took place somewhere else entirely, subcontracted to the global south. A fact that showed up nowhere in their fancy PDF, not even behind an asterisk.

To be clear: outsourcing isn’t the problem here. There are developers in Lagos, Manila or Dhaka that can out-code any European developer, often at a fraction of the price (no guarantee you’ll get those guys though). The problem is the ruse: dressing up a coordination layer as a production facility, so you pay Brussels margins for work done somewhere they hope you won’t ask about. It’s a shell game, or rather, a shell office.

This is just one tell that you should stay away, I’ve seen plenty of others. So, if you’re going to select a web agency from a list of proposals, add this to your checklist: ask who touches the code, by name, by country, by contract.

Colin