Why I'm grateful being an outsourced developer as my first job.

The beginning and why it's not as bad as you think

Like the title says, it's not as bad as you think. It was my first real job as a developer, and I am still treated as a normal employee. I personally don't feel any difference in treatment. Actually the big reason would be that half of the team is outsourced. But the internal employees were kind and guided me a lot. My direct superior is also a great mentor for software and soft skills.

Of course, working for a corporate, it feels quite slow and rigid due to the amount of red tape. As a junior, it's more of a blessing than a curse, simply because you get more leeway to make mistakes since the deadline is not as tight. We focus solely on development, with dedicated roles handling everything else.

Our Scrum Master manages deadlines and handles product owner communications, Business Analysts translate requirements into technical specs and Figma designs, and Quality Assurance teams handle testing. We don't even handle releases ourselves - that's managed by DevOps engineers. We just need to be on standby for any data patching, database dumps, or API calls that might be needed during deployment.

Learning on the job while still getting paid

I was not an internal employee, so technically I didn't have KPIs. More room for mistakes mean I learned a lot more than I would have if I was an internal employee. I was not afraid to do stuff that I thought was correct. Some of them resulted in a lot of learning, and some of them were just a waste of time. But I learned a lot from both.

I did all that while still getting paid.

No politics and no one will take advantage of you

In a corporate, employees will do their best to get promoted. As an outsourced employee, I wasn't a part of the company, so I didn't have to worry about that. The internal employees were the ones that had more responsibility due to KPIs, so I was on the backseat when bad things happened.

Another good thing is that they viewed us as tools to get the job done. It felt like a transaction, and I was ok with that. Using my time to develop their applications for a fixed price.

Big name clients can be a stepping stone to bigger things

Working at a big company teaches you their ways. Having that name on your resume makes landing jobs at other big companies easier.

Even if you don't move to a bigger company, you can use this experience to get better pay elsewhere.

On your resume, you'd list the client company, not the outsourcing firm. Recruiters won't know you were outsourced, giving you an edge when applying to bigger companies.

This experience gives you plenty to discuss in interviews.