wondering if I could hire a whole software dept from here

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I'm talking to this "software as a solution" company about managing some software development for them as a consultant.

I'm pondering whether I could hire the developers as sub-contractors, and actually hire an entire development team of people who are really good at programming, but not social situations, and make it work by just running a separate office. Sort of a hacker hub for hire thing.

I'm also wondering if this is a recipe for disaster and what the potential dangers might be.

Do a lot of people here do software development?

You potentially could, but...

1) You don't want to hire someone based on their Asperger's. Either a person is qualified for the coding job you have, or they're not, whether Aspie or NT.
2) More quirks, weird schedules, people who don't like working with other people...

Weird schedules of different staff from home makes it harder to interact with your staff and monitor their performance. Do-able, but more of a pain than a normal office. Remote work means you have to oversee it more, so you don't get a staff member who invoices you for hours they don't work. Obviously in-office traditional staff could screw around on the clock, too.

There wouldn't be a very social person to help you land clients and make sales pitches.

There wouldn't be as many people who are as good at customer service, making client problems harder to deal with.

There wouldn't be "normal" social skills in the "company" to balance people's quirks and help ease interaction.

There's plenty of coders here. Presumably there's at least a few who are good at it...

There's probably some people here decent at accounting and tax issues.

There's people here who like to work on their own, remotely, from wherever they want.

It could work, assuming you're good at landing clients and are good at overseeing your employees.

You'll want to look at potential tax issues and liability issues of remote staff in multiple states or countries. I offer no advice regarding this.

It could work. If you hire them as 1099 Independent Contractors you'd have limited tax issues.

You might have issues though because software isn't usually written by one person. How would you handle meetings between different parts of the project? The web interface team might not be writing the back end database which might be different from the API handlers.

There would be some social interaction; there is always some social interaction in any job.

I wasn't thinking about not having social interaction. I was thinking more about having a project team made up mostly of people with social issues. From my experience, it's easier to communicate with people who have communication problems if you have one as well. Neurotypicals don't usually have to work to communicate as much, so when that is required they often don't try. The idea is to foster a community environment wherein people with autism characteristics are more likely to feel comfortable working, and to have a project team made up of programmers who didn't necessarily complete a higher education degree but still really know how to program. Most of the best programmers I know didn't finish college, so they have trouble being hired by corporations.

Do it. That's the American Dream. Having an idea, making it come to life and making money off of it.

You'd be doing socially just work as well, so a double win.

What type of software dev are you looking at?

I'm supposed to have a meeting on Friday about a new consulting gig for a company that does event and inventory management software as a service. I met with the CEO recently for lunch and the Friday meeting is a brass tacks thing for the contract. They want to do more stuff, so I would be writing a strategy document first. I guess that means I don't know yet. Generally applications for web and mobile that have a lot of database interaction.

Giving the option to work remotely will attract a lot of devs, spectrum or not. The question is can you pay them competitively and manage a remote team? Remote teams typically require more outgoing people (at least in text form) in order for there to be enough communication, at least that's how Jeff Atwood described it.

I said nothing about a remote team.

Sorry I thought that's what you meant. I love programming and working on a team of other Aspies would be great.

I don't think it is any more dangerous than any other start-up consulting team. At least you'll have like-minded people who are obsessed with programming. You may need stronger team leaders to keep everyone on the same page and not lose sight of the big picture.

The job market is quite good for programmers, so although there may be enough programmers here to form a team, I don't know if you could get enough to jump ship.

That's a good point.

If you nice graphics, that's what I do.

www.shrox.com

I've worked on both sides of the divide (programmer/project manager).
The feedback from people managing me is that I'm generally hard to work with, never explain myself properly and don't deliver what is truly needed.
I.E. You ask for a program that does X+Y+Z and I deliver a program and X+Y+Z is performed, nobody mentioned a GUI...

The feedback I consistently got playing project manager was that I delivered the best briefs people had ever worked to; exact, extremely detailed and unchanging. When working with honest, competent professionals things couldn't have been better, but when working with dishonest liars or 'creative' types things went badly.

I only ever met 4 out 30 odd companies that I commissioned work from and found it much more comfortable, convenient and easier to keep to track off things by email & IM & desktop sharing than to deal with real live fleshy people. The biggest problem I had with coordinating work being done by people on several different continents was trying to organise times for online meetings where all the people needed to be involved.

I think autistics need managing by someone that understands how they think but also has enough patience and social skills to put up with their personal traits. You will probably get better work from aspies by letting them work in their own little cocoon at home and installing a set mechanism to ensure they are actually delivering work and not ripping you off.

If you passionately want to employ people on the spectrum to code, I salute you for efforts and recommend you have a long talk with Specialisterne and Aspiritech, they are both software companies that exclusively employ people on the spectrum.