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Ask HN: How do tight technical specs effect the off-shore dev experience?
I have a background as a developer and product manager. I'm looking to build the middleware and backend for my startup project and considering hiring an offshore dev for the iOS work. I've heard both horror and success stories and I'm hoping, so long as there isn't outright fraud, that tight technical specs and eyes on the code base will mitigate a lot of the risk. I'm hoping to get feedback from other technical folks in a similar situation.
- wislon 12y agoKeep in mind that time zones will also play a large part in your development process. Do you have someone who can do a regular eyes-on code review, to ensure that it's being built properly? If so, why aren't they building it? In my experience, things go really well in the beginning, during the honeymoon period, but as bugs start to crop up and the deadlines creep closer, things start to fall apart when you can't get hold of the people building it because they're asleep in their part of the world, or they refuse to fix something because their interpretation of those tight specs wasn't your interpretation of those tight specs. Make sure you are dealing with someone who speaks perfect English, too. If you can't really understand them in either spoken or written communication, or they can't understand you, don't write just it off, it'll come back to bite you when you have to explain something intricate. caveat emptor.
- relaunched 12y agoI can do some level of review, but I don't have stylistic preferences in a language I don't really write in, nor am I familiar with the nuances of the language / libraries to know what I don't know. For an MVP, I'm hoping that it serves the primary use case(s) without breaking too badly. I'm sure this isn't a great way to do it, but I'm budget constrained and want to get something to market to start getting feedback.
- nsp 12y agoHave you looked at any of the backends as a service? E.g. Firebase/parse or self hosted alternatives like hood.ie? As somebody who writes backends in my day job, I've found them to be a huge time saver on Mvps and reasonably capable. Hit me up at noah@noahpryor.com if you want to discuss the space/your options
- MalcolmDiggs 12y agoI think you're coming at it from the right angle. The offshore devs I've worked with have always built exactly what I spec'd. That's been a good thing when my spec was thorough, and a terrible thing when I was expecting them to 'take this idea and run with it'. So these days I articulate every detail I can think of and chop tasks down to their smallest bite size before shipping them overseas. It's more work up front, but saves to headache later on.