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I think it would be a much more positive indicator if they had chosen to learn the skills necessary to create their product.

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I agree. I mentioned a couple of times that they should learn the platform, or at least the underlying language. If not enough to code, at least enough to do quality control (code reviews).

However, they are both working apart from the startup (I believe) so it's tough for them to pick up one more thing.

That's a great point. It's one thing to be able to program it yourself, and another to understand enough to ask the right questions about the code to learn how it works.

If they had the ability to QA the outsourced team's work at a semi-granular level, I'd imagine there would be a lot less disconnect between the work done and expectations.

And one suggestion I offered was to find someone (some uninterested third party) to spend a few hours a week doing code reviews, so at least they have some insight. Of course, it'd be better if it were one of them, but some technical insight is better than next to none.

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