Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity, published by Darmani on LessWrong. Epistemic status: The accumulation of several insights over the years. Reasonably confident that everything mentioned here is an informative factor in decision-making. Carl is furiously slicing and skinning peaches. His hands move like lightning as slice after slice fills his tray. His freezer has been freshly cleared. Within a day, he will have a new bag of frozen fruit, and can enjoy smoothies for another month. Stan stands in the kitchen of his college dorm. His hands are carefully placing ingredients on pizza dough: homemade tomato sauce, spiced pork, and mozzarella cheese from a nearby farmer's market. "I don't know why people will pay a restaurant for this," he muses. "So much cheaper to do it yourself." Michelle is on her way to her job as a software engineer. She tosses a pile of clothes into a bag, and presses a few buttons on her phone. Later that day, someone will come by to pick them up, wash and fold them at a nearby laundromat, and return them the next morning. Less time doing laundry means more time writing code. Her roommate calls her lazy. An alert flashes on Bruce's screen: "us-east-prod-1 not responding to ping." Almost like a reflex, he pulls up diagnostics on his terminal. The software itself is still running fine, but it looks like his datacenter had a network change. A few more minutes, and everything is functioning again. Hopefully only a few customers noticed the downtime. His mentor keeps asking why he doesn't just run his website on AWS instead of owning his own servers, but Bruce insists it's worth it. His 4-person company has been profitable for 3 years, and keeping server costs low has meant the difference between staying independent and being forced to take outside investment. The four characters above each take a minority position on outsourcing a task. In the past, I saw the decision as simple: if your time is valuable, then be like Michelle and delegate and outsource as much as you can. Not to do so would be an irrational loss. I silently judged the people I met who inspired Carl and Stan. Years later, I've found myself cooking daily during a pandemic and appreciating the savings, and just finished arguing online in favor of running one's own servers. My goal in this post is to share the perspective shift that led to me wholly or partially reverse my position on paying a person or company for a good or service (collectively, "delegating" or "outsourcing") in a number of domains, even as I continue to pay for many things most people do themselves. I've noticed hidden factors which mean that, sometimes, the quality will be better if you do it yourself, even if the alternative is offered by an expert or company with specialized tools. And sometimes, it can be cheaper, even if you value your time very highly and the other person is much faster. The Internet is full of articles on the generic "buy vs. build" and "DIY vs. build" decisions Though some are written from the corporate boardroom and others from the home kitchen or workshop, the underlying analysis is eerily similar: that it's a choice between spending time (or "in-house resources") or money for a similar value. More sophisticated articles will also consider transaction costs, such as walking to a restaurant or finding your kid a tutor, and costs from principal-agent problems, such as vetting the tutor. In fact, as I've come to realize, the do-or-delegate decision is often not about two alternative ways of getting the same thing, but rather about two options sufficiently different that they're best considered not as replacements for each other, but entirely separate objects with overlapping benefits. These differences can be obvious for specific examples, as every home baker can give you an earful abou...