Last Updated on 2024-10-11
Let’s be honest. Most developers don’t like working with offshore software developers. Either they have heard horror stories about it. Or they had a bad experience working with them before.
Working with offshore teams commonly fails for the same reasons:
- Language and communication barriers
- Time zone differences
- Low-quality output
- Ineffective team structures
“It was easier just to do the work myself.”
That is how most developers feel when they have to work with offshore teams.
It’s understandable because if I had to work with bad developers, I have to rewrite most of their work. Double the trouble, so I don’t want to work with them. That sounds like a nightmare.
However, 90% of software developers don’t live in the United States. There simply isn’t enough local talent. The talent is everywhere . . . except where you live. And as we all know, tapping into global talent is critical for any tech company.
So these are the key questions you have to consider:
- How does your company make offshore work?
- What are the benefits to your local developers?
How to Make Offshore Development Work
We have written a lot of articles about how to make offshore development work, how to manage remote teams, and other related topics.
Ultimately, it comes down to talent. There are bad and good developers all over the world.
Finding good software developers in the USA is also hard. We all want to hire mythical 10x developers exclusively. We especially want to avoid the developers who just distract our senior developers and create more work to fix all the bugs they create. They are a negative help!
Since we know it comes down to talent, how do you find good offshore talent?
The easiest way is to find a good offshore development partner that you can trust. You need a partner to whom you can give your job requirements, and they deliver good talent.
Benefits of Offshore Development to Your Local Developers
Have you found a good offshore development partner and sourced good talent? Good, but it doesn’t end there. You still have to figure out how to get your other developers excited about it.
Let’s discuss some benefits to your other developers. And how you can get them thinking positively about working with offshore developers.
Getting Help
It starts with getting some help so the team can get more done. It feels great to have more developers to fix some of those bugs in the backlog. Do that big framework upgrade and build that new feature. Or simply have some time to breathe.
No matter where you live, there are not enough local developers. Especially quality talent that is skilled in your specific tech stack. And accessing global talent helps you find the people you need.
Every team wishes they had a couple more people to get more done. And leveraging offshore is a way to afford to make it happen. Offshore talent can save more than 50% of typical software development costs.
Delegating Some Tasks
Speaking of getting help, how about delegating some tasks to these offshore developers? This way, your team can work on higher-priority projects.
You can hire a couple of offshore developers to do maintenance and fix bugs. Doing so will free up some of your more senior developers to build the next big thing. Think of hiring an offshore developer, like getting an assistant for your lead developer.
Higher Local Salaries
When I hired offshore developers at my last startup, I told my senior developers two things. First, they can now help lead these new teams. Second, I could only afford to pay their super high US salaries by dollar-cost averaging them down with the offshore resources. How so?
Local developers can easily cost $150,000 to $200,000 a year. So, with developers making $50,000 to $100,000 a year, dollar-cost averaging makes it much easier to pay high US salaries.
Opportunities for Growth
Ultimately, it creates growth opportunities for the rest of your team. It gives them an opportunity to be team leads, architects, product owners, and other key roles. Between AI and offshore development, the coding part of offshore is getting easier and less expensive.
It is a bigger opportunity for local talent to focus on management and leadership tasks. And that is extremely valuable to your business.
On-Call Support Help
What’s one of my favorite things about leveraging offshore developers in the Philippines?
Have them handle on-call support and any overnight tasks that need to be performed. Most of my team shifted their schedule to overlap with USA hours. We also leveraged the team’s 14-hour time zone shift to help cover on-call at night for the USA-based team. With this advantage, the US team doesn’t have to worry about on-call.
It was a huge win-win situation for the team and my business.
The 24-Hour Dev Cycle
Another favorite thing about working with an offshore dev team is waking up every day feeling like it is Christmas morning. Since the team in the Philippines is working while I sleep, I wake up to a flurry of work they already accomplished.
It is awesome to end the day needing to get something done, delegate it, and wake up to it actually being done already! This works super amazing for QA as well.
Making Offshore Development Work
Offshore development can have its challenges, but it definitely works. What’s my proof? I have helped over 100 companies build offshore teams.
It all comes down to having the right offshore development partner and getting the right talent.
There are highly talented software developers from all over the world. You just have to find the right ones.
Some developers will groan and dread working with other offshore developers, especially if they have had previous bad experiences. That is totally understandable. And a lot of people have had a lot of bad experiences, trust me.
Hopefully, some of the benefits I mentioned are benefits that your team will get excited about.
The key is having quality talent that is a net positive to the team, not a net negative. Nobody wants to babysit bad developers and rewrite all their work.
Remember, there are good developers all over the world.
Full Scale can help you tap into high-quality talent from the Philippines.
Talk to Us Today!
Matt Watson is a serial tech entrepreneur who has started four companies and had a nine-figure exit. He was the founder and CTO of VinSolutions, the #1 CRM software used in today’s automotive industry. He has over twenty years of experience working as a tech CTO and building cutting-edge SaaS solutions.
As the CEO of Full Scale, he has helped over 100 tech companies build their software services and development teams. Full Scale specializes in helping tech companies grow by augmenting their in-house teams with software development talent from the Philippines.
Matt hosts Startup Hustle, a top podcast about entrepreneurship with over 6 million downloads. He has a wealth of knowledge about startups and business from his personal experience and from interviewing hundreds of other entrepreneurs.
