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Comment by sosull | Hacker News Reader

Personal experience: they get fifty bodies on a two-person job. The work is fine, but not good enough to learn from. Which actually makes sense if you think of their company as a machine that can adapt to whatever problem.

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It's the old handyman vs specialized contractor tradeoff (well really it's a tale as old as time; specialists are much more expensive so you want to minimize their use (see healthcare, legal professionals, etc, etc.)) A plumber is a better plumber than your handyman, a cabinetmaker is a better carpenter than your handyman; your handyman changes 1/3 per hour and is available much more frequently. You make the decision who you want to call based on a multitude of factors.

And the added wrinkle is that you need some expertise yourself to make the decision on who to call. That's why lots of people call electricians to change a wall switch or plumbers to install a new faucet. They end up paying 3x what they needed to because they didn't know a handyman can do those jobs very well, and the electricians and plumbers really don't even want those jobs.

I call an electrician to change a wall switch since an unlicensed handyman making a mistake that starts an electrical fire voids my home insurance.

Plumbing is fractionally less regulated where I am and I am allowed to change my own taps washers, but a whole tap assembly falls under similar issues as a power switch.

You can also start a fire by letting your pan get too hot, but nonetheless you make your own eggs.

Because that doesn't void your home insurance, as GP wrote.

And in software that is easily done. Write a whole software suite or spend copious amounts of time on configuration of a behemoth software to fit a tiny use case. Or have scope creep. While all you need is a single shell command in a cronjob.

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