Ask HN: How did you find that offshore dev team you work with? - amorphid
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matart
I have made a decent living for a couple years cleaning up offshored projects.
I do not have any suggestions but carefully screen them for communication
skills, responsiveness to emails/calls, ability to track completed work, and
overall skill. Too many people put blind faith that everyone can develop
software equally and it just is not true.

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amorphid
> Too many people put blind faith that everyone can develop software equally
> and it just is not true

So true.

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twunde
1) Someone already has a pre-existing relationship (usually former work
buddies) 2) The dev team works with other companies in the industry 3)
Recommendation from someone in your network (often a VC or angel investor) all
in that order.

When choosing your off-shore dev team, you should be looking at communication,
track record and skill in the particular technology/industry. In particular
for communication, I look at how many hours of overlap do they have with my
current work hours. Being from the East Coast I find India and New Zealand
difficult to work with as at best I have an 1-2 hours of overlap (and often
they may ask for two meetings, one in your morning and one in the late
evening).

Track record. Can you talk to some current and former clients who have had
comparatively complex technology built? Are those clients happy, were the
projects built on time, did they have any frustrations with the process, did
they need a dev team to clean up the code? What was documented?

One last thing to check for is the turnover rate (India can be especially
bad). How often do they need to off-board/on-board new resources? I've had
teams where every 3 months someone is going and someone is coming.

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throwme_1980
you can easily find a good offshore team with good work ethics, usually better
educated and more experienced at a reasonable price.

i have seen more hapless managers than poor offshore developers, it takes
dedication to manage an offshore team, a daily standup is not enough, you need
to communicate effectively.

if you're a small shop than you will find yourself doing the management out of
necessity (you can't be burning cash and seeing no return). if you're a big
company however (and i mean top end of Fortune500) then definitely ask your
boss whether you can vet and get involved in the hiring process ( i say this
because big companies have contracts with offshore consultancies and don't
really look at small things like individual developer's experience when hiring
the consultancy)

Communicate, Trust and organise physical visits (both ways)

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amorphid
Interesting perspective. What I'm hearing you say is that it's more often a
crappy process and poor relationship management that leads to suboptimal
results. That's kind of like saying hiring good people and investing in them
in always a solid strategy, if you have the resources to do so. If your
resources are too tight to hire good people, or you neglect the good people on
your team, you're gonna have a bad time. It's hard enough to build good
software when your team is capable!

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throwme_1980
Exactly how teams fail, they skim on what's important, i am not saying you
should be hiring A players from the start all the way, in my personal opinion,
90% of commercial software can be built with a bunch of honest average-joe-
follow-instructions developers who will _execute_ a sound idea/vision, this is
assuming that YOU are the A player and you know what you're doing.

Once the revenues start to come in, feel free to go through the pain of hiring
of A players, which is only half the journey, you need to also retain them by
ring fencing piles of cash (bonuses, perks etc...) through out their time in
your company, it is not for the faint hearted

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bkovacev
Being part of an offshore development team and a consultant I can tell you
that clients mostly find us/me through networking and referrals. Mutual
acquaintances, word of mouth and weirdly LinkedIn gave us most work.

But, as solomatov said previously, best way to do it is via a middleman. The
middle man is from the offshore country and has most likely been in the US for
a couple of years and has created a wide network of potential clients. These
were by far our best clients. I know at least 4,5 eastern european
consultancies that started this way.

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sheepmullet
Internal or outsourced?

If it is outsourced keep in mind you are most likely going to be hiring just
for the coding side of dev work.

You will still need to handle requirements gathering, design, specs, wire-
frames, quality assurance, project management, project vision, scope, etc.

I'm pointing this out because most of the time an internal dev handles a
decent chunk of these tasks.

I'd always recommend at most a 1:2 ratio of internal to outsourced.

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solomatov
As a person who came to the US from country which project are offshored to
(Russia), I can say, that the best way to offshore, is to find a person in the
US who came from the country where you want to offshore to and who has right
connections. Without this, being successful in such an endeavor might be
tricky.

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fapi1974
Could some of this risk be improved by actually going to Russia and working
side by side? I am a non-technical founder but I've been impressed with
quality I've gotten from Russia-based developers. It seems to me if I spent
time there with them we could move much faster. Thoughts?

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bkovacev
If you have those same developers willing to allocate time and their resources
- sure, go for it. With most eastern european countries it's important to have
them dedicated to things. Your costs will be lower, your production will be
higher (ymmv) and if funding is not a problem you should definitely try that
out. Remember they are all "mercenaries". You will learn a lot just being in
another culture. Most friendships you create there will last you a lifetime.
YMMV though, as with anything.

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amingilani
If you're looking to work for or with freelance talent I can't recommend
Toptal enough.

[https://www.toptal.com/#contract-just-respected-software-
arc...](https://www.toptal.com/#contract-just-respected-software-architects)

They screen their talent which makes everyone in the network an expert and
they screen their clients which makes them a joy to work with.

Disclosure: I'm part of their network and recently joined their team.

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zpatel
what are you looking to implement ?

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amorphid
More of a general inquiry, but that's a fair question. I've worked at a few
companies using an offshore team, and I never asked how that relationship was
established. Most of those teams were building some sort of web or mobile app.

