
Ask HN: Poland vs. Ukraine for choosing a dev shop? - codegeek
For our company, I constantly get linkedin requests from either Poland or Ukraine based companies for outsourcing dev work to them. Would love to hear any stories&#x2F;anecdotes from HN on working with these types of dev shops in Ukraine or Poland. Are they worth it in terms of cost vs benefit ? Compared to US developers, how competitive are the salaries&#x2F;cost for a mid level developer there ?
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garethsprice
If you have the technical/management chops to know what work can be offshored
successfully, package up the work, evaluate the shop, ask very specifically
for what you want, assess the quality of what comes back and push back when it
needs to be fixed, they can be a great option.

Don't know specific salaries but in my experience work is 30-50% cheaper to
have done offshore on a project scale (imagine savings are better if you are
paying salaries for full-time engineers). Those savings quickly evaporate if
something goes wrong or takes longer than expected ( _very_ common due to
communication issues), then rapidly become multiples of the original cost if
you need to throw it away and have it re-written. This isn't necessarily
because the offshore developers are bad, but because communicating software
requirements is hard enough even without cultural/language/time barriers.

Offshore shops are a tool in a toolbox, one with a more specific use than most
people think, that when deployed can be incredibly powerful but when deployed
wrong can be catastrophic to a project.

As with all service relationships, building a partnership over time is the
best way to get good work from vendors regardless of their physical location.

Never start with a large, mission critical project - give a small piece of
work to a vendor and see how they do, and ramp up from there. Even consider
giving the same small project to 1-3 vendors and see who does well - the
redundancy is a sunk cost but a small price to pay for long term success.

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ethanpil
As the owner of an offshore shop, I think you are right on the nose!

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ethanpil
I run an offshore dev shop (web/mobile) with over 15 developers based out of
my Ukraine office.

I don't think the base country will make too much difference. The biggest
issues I had (that would not have occurred in the US) were with cultural
barriers.

No matter the country, language can mostly be addressed with the right process
and managers, but the attention and service that US customers expect is not
something culturally that exists in many other places.

Getting that right, so that my team leads and PMs meet customer expectations
was the hard part. I think that is where many offshore projects fail.

If your team is committed to delivering quality, and you, as the end client
know how to communicate your needs and check the deliverables, things usually
progress very well.

If your offshore team doesn't understand or care about this (many just don't
get it, because customer service is NOT a thing in most countries outside of
North America and Western Europe) then you will have frustration no matter
where you go.

My clients are about 75% US based and I would be happy to talk with you
directly if you have more questions or want to discuss a project. Reach out to
me here: ethan [at] abovebits [dotcom]

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codegeek
Sure I will reach out for more questions. One important question for now: do
you provide dedicated developers to a client or you prefer allocating 1
developer to multiple clients for risk purposes ?

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ethanpil
Great, would love to hear from you.

In regards to full time, we do both. Typically we start small and build up to
ensure we are both happy with the initial work and can work well together.
Once a client is ready to commit to one more more full time developers, we go
month to month and the only issue would be scheduling the start time. If a
developer was shared with another client/project part time, we would want
him/her to finish up that commitment before pulling them off.

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Imlus
What I've encountered - Poland teams are usually way bigger than they are
required, not sure why though; e.g. a project that would require a scrum team
of 6-7 people, will usually be done by 10-12 people. But Poland pricing is
quite good, there are a lot of people, only downside that I encountered is the
English language, it still seems that people are not that interested in it :).
Ukraine on the other hand, seems more pricy; maybe due to multiple big USA
corporations being opened there.. But it seems people are willing to work for
international companies than to internal ones. Have you ever considered the
Baltics (LT, LV, EE)? As they are way smaller, they have no choice, but to be
international (when it comes to language and tech stack) as the internal
market is too small. However, pricing is extremely different per companies, so
probably your negotiator skills would be tested there.

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Jugurtha
It depends the field. Some companies in some locations will charge north of
$250 an hour for some profiles, and more for an end to end product custom
software. We shipped custom ML platforms for large organizations as part of
our activities. The applications allowed their marketing and sales department
to train models or load models on their data according to their workflow.
Custom made. Some solutions allowed them to send personalized offers to
millions of subscribers.

For some clients, on call 24/7\. Going to the client. Meeting their people.
Handling regulatory paperwork for some projects in regulated fields. Even
taking care of importing the hardware for them. Interfacing with their data
people and learning their third party vendor's billing systems.

As with everything, it depends on the domain, the service, the support, and
generally speaking what they're going to do for you, and which part or parts
they're tackling.

Repeat business is common as when these organizations like the outcome, they
want more. So that's my two cents from the vendor perspective.

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codegeek
Are you saying that offshore shops in Ukraine/Poland charge $250/Hour for best
candidates ? In that case, why would someone offshore it and not find devs in
the US directly ? I am genuinely asking because the premise of my post was
about finding the balance between cost savings and getting projects/work done
effectively for companies that cannot afford to hire expensive devs in US.

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Jugurtha
No experience with Ukraine or Poland, we're based in Algiers and Paris and
focused on ML. Our clients are in France and Algeria.

My point was that it's not automatically cheaper as many people I talk with in
Algiers assume that our clients in France come to us because we're "cheap
offshore services" and we're not.

Our clients come to us because we hold their hand from the moment they want to
understand the value of this, to ideation on where in their business this can
have an impact, to working with them to execute in that space learning their
systems and all, to making sure they have good results. We've shipped products
for banking, telcos, energy, rail transportation, and other domains.

We're a tiny company so we're very flexible and can make decisions very fast
and clients seem to like that enough to come back and refer people to us.

So, that's the context for us. Not sure how it goes for dev or Web dev or
mobile as it is something we did for our clients, but not something the
company is focused on. As in, sure, we'll make a mobile application if the
client needs it, but it is a vehicle of ML capability. I'm saying this to give
more info from someone in such a company, on another continent, albeit in a
field and a budget that may not be what you're talking about.

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ethanpil
This makes sense. ML is also a high value specialty right now. I believe that
general web/mobile development services are a totally different ballgame due
to the proliferation of talent, free (and good) tools, etc.

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badpun
Mid-level developer (3-5 years of experience) in Poland makes probably up to
$3000 net (after taxes) per month. Dunno about Ukraine.

