Ben Buckman.net

Following up to my post the other day, Experiment in Outsourcing, part 1, here's an update:

The insurance-research lady did a nice job, sending me a report of 5 providers (excluding Liberty Mutual, which I'm trying to leave), a breakdown of each estimate by coverage item, who she spoke to, and other details. I'm not sure how close the coverage she got estimates for were to the policy summary I sent her, though. I'll call the cheapest two (Geico and Progressive) to follow up, taking the first one that matches the quoted price for the coverage I'm looking for; the rest (Traveler's, AllState, MetLife) I won't waste my time with.

The guy that was interested in the plant research never got back to me with an estimate, though, so I declined his bid, and asked the first lady if she wants that task, too.

Apart from this experiment, a client of mine is outsourcing the data entry for a site I'm building for him to a woman in the Philippines. He found her through ODesk.com, she charges $2/hour, and has put in thousands of records in a few days. There was a funny economics-of-outsourcing moment the other day, though, when I realized she was putting many of the titles in all CAPS. It didn't look good. So there were two options: I could work for 20 minutes to write a script that fixed all existing and future all-caps titles (excluding single-word acronyms); or she could spend a day fixing them by hand. The latter option was a little cheaper. But my client reasoned that manual fixing could cause typos, and it was worth having some all-caps prevention for the future (since the content will be primarily user-generated after launch). So "skilled" won over "unskilled" for a brief moment. I wonder for how much of the economy the calculus works out that way.