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I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. The "catch" is that we have to do over-documentation, lots of screenshots, and consistent routine communications. My CTO and cofounder speaks 4 languages. The talent has to be managed. Within 12 months of being with us, a Pakistani developer has massively increased their value. We also don't bring anyone into core leadership team onshore unless they speak at least 2 languages or more or they have a serious edge in terms of talent. The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually: - Unilingual - have been over-resourced in every position they've ever been in - poorly travelled - are used to working with onshore talent that has context - find the time difference to be abhorrent Right now, our core "mission critical" team speaks 4 languages. I fully hope to add 10-20 languages as we expand. I'm hoping for Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese in that order... You cannot expect someone who has 10-14 times less electricity/capita to suddenly have the context of an American. It takes time. We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc... remote now is a core part of our tech biz.

kirubakaran 6y ago
> We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc Good post, upvoted, but why the cameras?
- kumarski 6y ago
  Oh for video conference calls so the video resolution is high/kosher. Not for "surveillance."
danpalmer 6y ago
Thanks for this, it's a great counter to the common thinking here. It seems that most of the market just does it wrong when they outsource. They either assume that the outsourced resource is a black box that produces finished products/closed tickets/etc, or they assume that the people on the other end are like a western developer in terms of background/education/culture/language/career path/goals. What it seems you've done is treat these engineers as first-class employees in your company. For a new starter you'd provide training, context, you'd have ways to get them up to speed, you'd invest in processes and communication to make a separate office or timezone difference work. Congrats, well done. I'm not surprised that you're finding the results to be so good! It's a shame more companies who outsource don't recognise that this level of effort is necessary.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually: Unfortunately, the list that follows describes the managers of literally every US-based company. If this is the requirement for successful offshore consultancy, then engineers here can rest assured their jobs will never actually be at stake. When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) understand their culture, customs, holidays, and 3) worry about time zone differences, then engineers here should start worrying about offshoring.
- iamcurious 6y ago
  >When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) understand their culture, customs, holidays, and 3) worry about time zone differences, then engineers here should start worrying about offshoring. You have just described most offshoring to latin america.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  LOL! No. Engineers should be afraid of offshoring, when they stop learning and take their job for granted. Also - missing the "next big thing" is something that people do all the time. One thing that one of my former colleagues told me - "Our job, as engineers, is to make our jobs obsolete in the end".
chris11 6y ago
> are used to working with onshore talent that has context What do you mean by this? Context is really important in programming. I'd say offshore devs are at an actual disadvantage if the offshore team always has less context than the onsite devs.
woah 6y ago
Your comment sounds very hyperbolic in the description of your team's skills, and yet you still focus mostly on how cheap your developers are, and the importance of your expert management. I don't think that I'd be able to write good code if my primary attribute was cheapness, regardless of whether or not it was good money for my location. I would be trying to do my time as a developer and work my way out of the disposable zone and into "management" as soon as possible.
- kumarski 6y ago
  My cofounder's expert management.* I myself do not build or code outside of Matlab. Developing talent and picking dark-horses is hard work.
theflyinghorse 6y ago
Forgive my skepticism > I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. SV is a hotbed for a ton of international talent, not just American. Indeed, SV pays the most out of anywhere on the planet and therefore has an incredibly strong pull for the best and brightest from across the world. I sincerely doubt that one country's local talent is strong than a clustered talent center like SV. Is Pakistani talent flying under the radar? Are we simply not aware of the amazing research and development being made in Pakistan vs US or China?
- novok 6y ago
  The good ones eventually end up in SV or work for the international offices of SV or work at local superstars like flipkart and such because of the pay differential. %40 of SV staff being some form of 'asian' is a testament to that.
  - oa335 6y ago
    It's much harder immigrating from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.
  - oa335 6y ago
    It's much harder immigrating to U.S. from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.
- kumarski 6y ago
  Pakistan is on an FATF grey-list. Every employee we work with is highly vetted. The level of untapped talent and work ethic in Pakistan is extreme.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    Define "work ethic"? It's a highly subjective term. And I'm 100% sure that a country of 212mil will have a lot of talent. But engineering isn't singing or contortion - you need appropriate education and right conditions.
demadog 6y ago
You have great ideas on Twitter! Your website doesn't show any specific projects you've done, and I totally understand client NDAs, but is there anything you can share to help understand your perspective and experience? I'm genuinely curious and not trying to call you out, you seem brilliant and your team sounds like it, but it's hard to verify because there's no public projects from what I can see on your website or Twitter.
- kumarski 6y ago
  Financial institutions, hedge funds, family offices, and PE all have restrictive NDA's. The blog will be updated at some point, I'm just busy.
  - demadog 6y ago
    Gotcha, I guess it remains a mystery, a lot of hype and no examples!
    - firstfewshells 6y ago
      Reminds of magic leap
chris_wot 6y ago
The vast majority of comments here are from people with first hand experience of the level of incompetence from large I find consultancies. I have personally witnessed a major Indian IT consultancy cause problems with a file server migration. They had no idea that you needed to propagate permissions from the base folder. This took out production for 8 hours. In the end, an on-site employee took over and fixed the issue in 5 minutes. It was pathetic to watch. One day there will be a reckoning for these large consultancies. On that day, virtually no onsite IT employee will be unhappy.
- kumarski 6y ago
  Recruiting is a skillset. If you do it wrong, things will always go bad.
Bombthecat 6y ago
I completely agree with you. Most managers can't even manage remote work from people in the same city, not to speak about same nation. Those managers fall apart with people from offshore. Because they have no idea how to communicate and how important it is to document, document and document everything and set targets.
- novok 6y ago
  That just sounds like employees that have a high management overhead compared to employees that do not require that. Which directly translates to organizational scaling cost and more management employee $$ cost.
novok 6y ago
I've worked with good and bad offshored indian developers. Usually the good ones are hired directly by the company and they're great to work with and they have a passion for software. I've also worked with clueless ones very early in my career and the cluelessness gap is stark. Working with local year 1 university students worked far better. Also big timezone gaps are horrible for everyone involved.
razster 6y ago
May I ask what your going rates are for C# programmers? ($USD)
PedroBatista 6y ago
> I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. Easy there eloquent soldier! You might create a blackhole with that much talent.
meddlepal 6y ago
You've just shifted the cost from onshore developers to hiring incredible management and developing complicated process to deal with the a heterogeneous staff. That's not necessarily better allocation of money... just a different one, with a lot more variables, and vastly more potential for failure for the majority of companies.
- kumarski 6y ago
  Nope.
blueblisters 6y ago
Kumar, how do you manage time-zone differences? I understand that for day-to-day updates, you either need to delegate to someone onsite or have one of you work at odd hours to communicate with your team. If time-zone issues can be fixed, I think the geographical cost arbitrage will become much easier to exploit in the coming years.
oa335 6y ago
India devs =! Pakistani devs. India has many large consultancies providing services to mega corps, where sub par talent can hide out for years. Pakistani devs (and other devs in countries that don't have similar dynamic as India) don't have that luxury, so they are on average more highly "vetted".

kirubakaran 6y ago

> We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc Good post, upvoted, but why the cameras?

kumarski 6y ago
Oh for video conference calls so the video resolution is high/kosher. Not for "surveillance."

danpalmer 6y ago

Thanks for this, it's a great counter to the common thinking here. It seems that most of the market just does it wrong when they outsource. They either assume that the outsourced resource is a black box that produces finished products/closed tickets/etc, or they assume that the people on the other end are like a western developer in terms of background/education/culture/language/career path/goals. What it seems you've done is treat these engineers as first-class employees in your company. For a new starter you'd provide training, context, you'd have ways to get them up to speed, you'd invest in processes and communication to make a separate office or timezone difference work. Congrats, well done. I'm not surprised that you're finding the results to be so good! It's a shame more companies who outsource don't recognise that this level of effort is necessary.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually: Unfortunately, the list that follows describes the managers of literally every US-based company. If this is the requirement for successful offshore consultancy, then engineers here can rest assured their jobs will never actually be at stake. When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) understand their culture, customs, holidays, and 3) worry about time zone differences, then engineers here should start worrying about offshoring.

iamcurious 6y ago
>When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) understand their culture, customs, holidays, and 3) worry about time zone differences, then engineers here should start worrying about offshoring. You have just described most offshoring to latin america.
JAlexoid 6y ago
LOL! No. Engineers should be afraid of offshoring, when they stop learning and take their job for granted. Also - missing the "next big thing" is something that people do all the time. One thing that one of my former colleagues told me - "Our job, as engineers, is to make our jobs obsolete in the end".

chris11 6y ago

> are used to working with onshore talent that has context What do you mean by this? Context is really important in programming. I'd say offshore devs are at an actual disadvantage if the offshore team always has less context than the onsite devs.

woah 6y ago

Your comment sounds very hyperbolic in the description of your team's skills, and yet you still focus mostly on how cheap your developers are, and the importance of your expert management. I don't think that I'd be able to write good code if my primary attribute was cheapness, regardless of whether or not it was good money for my location. I would be trying to do my time as a developer and work my way out of the disposable zone and into "management" as soon as possible.

kumarski 6y ago
My cofounder's expert management.* I myself do not build or code outside of Matlab. Developing talent and picking dark-horses is hard work.

theflyinghorse 6y ago

Forgive my skepticism > I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. SV is a hotbed for a ton of international talent, not just American. Indeed, SV pays the most out of anywhere on the planet and therefore has an incredibly strong pull for the best and brightest from across the world. I sincerely doubt that one country's local talent is strong than a clustered talent center like SV. Is Pakistani talent flying under the radar? Are we simply not aware of the amazing research and development being made in Pakistan vs US or China?

novok 6y ago
The good ones eventually end up in SV or work for the international offices of SV or work at local superstars like flipkart and such because of the pay differential. %40 of SV staff being some form of 'asian' is a testament to that.
- oa335 6y ago
  It's much harder immigrating from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.
- oa335 6y ago
  It's much harder immigrating to U.S. from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.
kumarski 6y ago
Pakistan is on an FATF grey-list. Every employee we work with is highly vetted. The level of untapped talent and work ethic in Pakistan is extreme.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  Define "work ethic"? It's a highly subjective term. And I'm 100% sure that a country of 212mil will have a lot of talent. But engineering isn't singing or contortion - you need appropriate education and right conditions.

demadog 6y ago

You have great ideas on Twitter! Your website doesn't show any specific projects you've done, and I totally understand client NDAs, but is there anything you can share to help understand your perspective and experience? I'm genuinely curious and not trying to call you out, you seem brilliant and your team sounds like it, but it's hard to verify because there's no public projects from what I can see on your website or Twitter.

kumarski 6y ago
Financial institutions, hedge funds, family offices, and PE all have restrictive NDA's. The blog will be updated at some point, I'm just busy.
- demadog 6y ago
  Gotcha, I guess it remains a mystery, a lot of hype and no examples!
  - firstfewshells 6y ago
    Reminds of magic leap

chris_wot 6y ago

The vast majority of comments here are from people with first hand experience of the level of incompetence from large I find consultancies. I have personally witnessed a major Indian IT consultancy cause problems with a file server migration. They had no idea that you needed to propagate permissions from the base folder. This took out production for 8 hours. In the end, an on-site employee took over and fixed the issue in 5 minutes. It was pathetic to watch. One day there will be a reckoning for these large consultancies. On that day, virtually no onsite IT employee will be unhappy.

kumarski 6y ago
Recruiting is a skillset. If you do it wrong, things will always go bad.

Bombthecat 6y ago

I completely agree with you. Most managers can't even manage remote work from people in the same city, not to speak about same nation. Those managers fall apart with people from offshore. Because they have no idea how to communicate and how important it is to document, document and document everything and set targets.

novok 6y ago
That just sounds like employees that have a high management overhead compared to employees that do not require that. Which directly translates to organizational scaling cost and more management employee $$ cost.

novok 6y ago

I've worked with good and bad offshored indian developers. Usually the good ones are hired directly by the company and they're great to work with and they have a passion for software. I've also worked with clueless ones very early in my career and the cluelessness gap is stark. Working with local year 1 university students worked far better. Also big timezone gaps are horrible for everyone involved.

razster 6y ago

May I ask what your going rates are for C# programmers? ($USD)

PedroBatista 6y ago

> I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. Easy there eloquent soldier! You might create a blackhole with that much talent.

meddlepal 6y ago

You've just shifted the cost from onshore developers to hiring incredible management and developing complicated process to deal with the a heterogeneous staff. That's not necessarily better allocation of money... just a different one, with a lot more variables, and vastly more potential for failure for the majority of companies.

kumarski 6y ago
Nope.

blueblisters 6y ago

Kumar, how do you manage time-zone differences? I understand that for day-to-day updates, you either need to delegate to someone onsite or have one of you work at odd hours to communicate with your team. If time-zone issues can be fixed, I think the geographical cost arbitrage will become much easier to exploit in the coming years.

oa335 6y ago

India devs =! Pakistani devs. India has many large consultancies providing services to mega corps, where sub par talent can hide out for years. Pakistani devs (and other devs in countries that don't have similar dynamic as India) don't have that luxury, so they are on average more highly "vetted".