I've had lousy outsourcing experiences and I've had good ones. The best outsourcing experience I've had involved a very technically adept CTO, some solid pre-th

I've had lousy outsourcing experiences and I've had good ones. The best outsourcing experience I've had involved a very technically adept CTO, some solid pre-thinking about architecture and scalability, and (most importantly) an API-first, Microservices first mindset. This meant we could write API specs and test cases, define max-execution times and then hand the problem to the freelancer and let them figure out the solution. Of course we did a few other things right: Good onboarding, an open Slack, excessive communication / code review / feedback for the first few weeks. We also lucked in to finding a couple of great Ukrainian developers just at the time the Ukrainian currency took a nosedive, so we were getting $50/hr engineers for $30/hr rates. (Final thought - I went to try and poach one of the freelancers a year or two later - His rate had roughly tripled as a result of having gotten all the good experience working on a 'modern' app stack (React + Express + AWS Lambda + Microservices architecture).