Whoopsie!

Hmmm... yesterday I mentioned a potential new project?

Well, it turns out that the consulting company's year is starting out with a bang; it was just on a one-week fuse.  Looks like I'll be plenty busy.

So, I guess I need to come up with a list of reasons it's better for the company I was talking to yesterday if we handle their project as a consulting thing, with their people doing most of the work, rather than as a farmed-out subsystem.

Let's see... they spend less money (assuming they already have a junior engineer and a CAD person available to do the work); the expertise ends up in house, instead of walking out the door with me; the CAD files will naturally be in their preferred formats... sound convincing?

Actually, the second and third items are, in my experience, good reasons for not farming out subsystem development if you can possibly avoid it.  Too many opportunities for ending up with a design that you can't manufacture nor maintain.  (Not that you have those problems if you farm a subsystem out to me, but in my time on the client side of the business, I saw enough cases of wrong-format CAD files, CAD files not matching the hardware in use, clouded rights to the design, and so on, to make me leery of the whole idea.)