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My company uses Eastern European contractors for certain projects as "staff augmentation". Overall, I would say our experience is positive. There are indeed man
by spamizbad 5y ago
My company uses Eastern European contractors for certain projects as "staff augmentation". Overall, I would say our experience is positive. There are indeed many experienced devs who do great work. But it does have some drawbacks:
1) 10-hour time difference between West Coast US and, say, Kyiv is pretty big. It's easier on EST people, but on the US side you're going to have to plan on jamming your calendars full of meetings between 7:30-10:30am.
2) Because you have fewer "business hours" between two, you need product, project, and engineering management to operate in a fairly well-oiled manner with more stuff spelled-out up-front, otherwise your team across the pond is stuck until the next day for some answer. Also, if your org even attempts to adopt "agile" this communication breakdown will murder your velocity; you're better off doing Waterfall.
3) They cannot be on-call to troubleshoot product issues during US business hours. This makes the business-side uneasy
4) Higher churn-rate than domestic engineers. Mostly over salary; this falls squarely at the feet of the "middleman" who undercuts their engineers. We attempt to ameliorate this by giving them feedback on employees who they should focus on retaining but IME they just view their talent as widgets rather than craftsmen. I've seen several good devs leave over money we'd have gladly paid them but their contracting org refused.
5) Speaking of higher churn rate: Onboarding can be more painful, again because of the TZ difference as well as certain cultural issues.
None of these are deal-breakers. But it's easy to understand why a company might be willing to pay 50-100% more to avoid these concerns.
- atlasunshrugged 5y agoSomewhat unrelated but just a side comment, many Ukrainian folks are really trying to move away from the spelling of Kiev as you did, instead they prefer Kyiv (I was corrected several times for this by Ukrainian friends/colleagues when I got to the region so just thought I'd share). https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-kiev-why-spelling-matters-in-ukraines-quest-for-an-independent-identity/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/kyiv-not-...
- spamizbad 5y agoNoted. Thank you!
- bkovacev 5y ago1) Absolutely - I have been working for the US companies as an FTE (remotely, but C2C, essentially a contractor), and sometimes the hours do make an issue. It's a 9 hour difference with the West Coast for me, but Central / Eastern works well, if the expectations are properly set. 2) Spot on - Agile does not work well in such environment, I have seen it first hand twice. I feel that with senior/staff level devs, you can expect and should get higher level of autonomy and less hand-holding, so in a solid project oriented company, I do feel that fewer "business hours overlap" would impact much. I do feel that at least 3, preferably more hours should be reserved for meetings / overlap. 3) I'd argue about that one, haha. I have been on-call troubleshooting production at 2-3am my time, not once, but multiple times. For a great employer, with proper compensation and benefits, you'd be surprised what devs from this area would do! 4) YES! Companies are greedy. However, they do have to pay pension/insurance on the hourly rate they give to the dev, think 50-60%, but they don't want to give away their cut at all, it seems to be non-negotiable flat fee, which is deal breaking. Another point is that Microsoft and other big brand outsourcing names are coming to EE and stealing away the workforce. Disclaimer - I work as a senior/staff level dev with high base salary and equity, so my experience may be a bit skewed.