What to ask your agency about background jobs

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on background jobs, these questions are worth asking early.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Anything slow should happen outside the request cycle. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Monitor the queue depth or failures pile up unnoticed. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about background jobs before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Jobs need retries, because networks fail — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.