5 ms·

I have worked at a number of places that relied heavily on off-shoring and my observation every single time was that while individual developer costs are genera

I have worked at a number of places that relied heavily on off-shoring and my observation every single time was that while individual developer costs are generally much lower, you incur a lot of other hidden costs due to things like language barriers and asynchronous communication cycles. But the biggest factor preventing a mass transition to off-shoring is that off-shore devs are always contractors since very few orgs can handle the logistics of international employment. As someone that did contract work for 5 years, contractors do not engage the same way that employees do. We are generally immune from the client's political bullshit and if things get too messy we are much more likely to waltz to another contract rather than help fix your org's fundamental problems.

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) company. I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work. When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.
- dntrkv 5y ago
  The differentiating factor in your case is startup vs mid-size company. Not contracting vs FTE.
cornel_io 5y ago
Contractor vs. employee is not as huge a logistical nightmare these days if you are confident you really want to pull someone in and they're amenable, you can always pay companies like remote.com to be the employer of record and handle the international stuff for you. It's expensive but not egregiously so compared to tech salaries, and they really do handle most of the time-consuming and messy stuff involved. You are still going to be constrained by the more or less business-friendly laws that various countries impose, in terms of it potentially being difficult to fire people, having long notice periods, various taxes and benefits that are mandatory, etc., but at least you don't have to actually incorporate. I definitely agree re: language and async headaches. I won't work with shops that route all comms through a PM anymore, that usually means that the devs don't speak much English and the code quality is going to suffer due to poor naming conventions and lack of quality tech documentation.

pcthrowaway 5y ago

I'm contracting for a startup right now, and find myself much more engaged than when I was working full-time on salary for a mid-sized (~1000-2000 employees) company. I had a really hard time being motivated for the mid-sized company, because it felt like there was very little impact to my work, and a lot of time was spent bikeshedding and yak shaving, the work I did do was not very interesting, I wasn't being challenged, and I wasn't learning new things. I was basically a glorified button-pushing monkey. In my last year working there I started tracking my time for my personal analysis, and found that I was doing ~15 hours per week of work (which included >5 hours of meetings, some of which were large conference calls which I would fall asleep during). I ended up quitting to take 6 months off work. When I started contracting for a startup (working on interesting things), I found I have much more ownership over the tools I work on (I've sort of become 'in charge' of several applications that I'm the only developer on), and I'm billing per hour also. I still struggle to get more than 30 hours per week, but I've probably turn out more code in a month here than in the last year at the last place.

dntrkv 5y ago
The differentiating factor in your case is startup vs mid-size company. Not contracting vs FTE.

cornel_io 5y ago

Contractor vs. employee is not as huge a logistical nightmare these days if you are confident you really want to pull someone in and they're amenable, you can always pay companies like remote.com to be the employer of record and handle the international stuff for you. It's expensive but not egregiously so compared to tech salaries, and they really do handle most of the time-consuming and messy stuff involved. You are still going to be constrained by the more or less business-friendly laws that various countries impose, in terms of it potentially being difficult to fire people, having long notice periods, various taxes and benefits that are mandatory, etc., but at least you don't have to actually incorporate. I definitely agree re: language and async headaches. I won't work with shops that route all comms through a PM anymore, that usually means that the devs don't speak much English and the code quality is going to suffer due to poor naming conventions and lack of quality tech documentation.