Hiring Offshore Developers in 2022: How To Know You’ve Found The Right Partner

To get to the bottom of the question about how to start offshore development let’s start from the very beginning and clarify what offshore programming is. Offshore software development is the practice of hiring an external company or team to build software outside of the customer’s country. Hiring a team of software developers for your project is a challenging task, especially for businesses from the United States or Western Europe. It usually takes a lot of resources to find a perfect candidate for a reasonable price, especially when you’re a startup and cannot afford to overspend. However, to speed up the process and avoid unexpected expenses, you can hire an offshore software development company.

Outsourcing and offshoring concepts are often used interchangeably. However, offshoring is rather a part of outsourcing. Offshoring involves partial relocation of a business to a distant country. The business can also be transferred to a nearby country – this is called nearshoring.

Where to look for offshore software development services?

The leading outsourcing destinations are some of the Eastern European and Latin American countries as well as India and China. Some of the benefits you can get from the top outsourcing software development companies are deep industry expertise, a proven track record of effective and innovative work, and most importantly, cost-effective offshore software development services.

Read more: The overview of the outsourcing industry in Ukraine, and the best software development firms to hire.

What is the best approach to outsourcing software development to offshore companies?

• Outsource all of the activities that are related to development and maintenance, so the offshore software development company will take over the building, implementation, testing, and support of the application.
• Outsource only specific modules or parts of the application.
• Hire a dedicated team of developers or find skilled UX designers, for example, and manage them.

No matter what you decide eventually, it is important to make sure you have planned your due-diligence process properly. It may seem time-consuming and of low priority, but the truth is that if you skip this foundational step, you will face difficulties with implementing the remaining measures in your offshore application development.

Advantages of outsourcing software development

So what are the perks of hiring an offshore software development company? Here are some “pro” arguments:

• Reasonably lower costs. If you deal with an offshore software development company, be aware that the cost of living for the employees in their home country can be much lower than the cost of living in the country where your company is based. Therefore, a local developer would cost $100 to $150 whereas a developer in another country would cost 1/3 or 1/4 of the cost of the local developer. According to our estimations, you can save up to 34 % when outsourcing than hiring in-house staff. However, the average cost of offshore software development services still greatly varies from country to country. Additionally, the rates may depend on the offshore development company itself. Still, offshore devs is a good option for a startup in the US that cannot afford local talent just yet.
• Greater flexibility and lower operating expenses. You do not need to purchase equipment or other supplies that are required for software development. Besides, there is no need to rent office space in order to house your software development team.
• Saved time. While the offshore software company will be taking over the development, business owners will have more time to concentrate on marketing, design, content, new ideas, and other business-related activities. Besides, with offshore software outsourcing, you will not need to spend time and resources on hiring and training new employees.
• Covered lack of in-house experience. Offshore development outsourcing is profitable for countries that experience the lack of companies that work with the same technologies as you do. Offshore software development firms can offer expertise that is absent in your region. For instance, you’re looking for a PHP developer or a mobile Android developer in your town. But your town isn’t that big, and all the good guys are already hired by the leading IT firm. What should you do, if you cannot compete? Or, for instant, you’re living in New York, and the average salary of a senior Java developer is so big that it would cost you 1/3 of your angel investment if you hire someone for a year. That is also a case when dedicated developers from abroad can help you actually build your product. 
• New talents. Outsourcing software development companies provide you with access to a wide marketplace of talents all around the world, from Eastern Europe (e.g. Estonia or Romania) to South-Eastern Asia (e.g. Philippines). You can find a pro in app development who has built almost exactly the same thing that you need but for Russian market. Such unique expertise can bring your product closer to release by months if you do not hesitate to hire remotely.
• Fewer long-term risks. You will definitely not think about social packages and a lot of legal things if you hire from an offshore company. They will take care of it, and it will be included in the price. Then, you’re also flexible with letting people go if you find out they’re not good enough for your project, or if the workload is done. “So, do I risk hiring a wrong person?”, you’ll ask. You can avoid risks by choosing an offshore development company that has a good reputation, a high-quality project management system, and a time-tested development process. Also, it is extremely important to quality guarantees in advance and save the outsourced development cost.  

Working with an offshore development company means you will need to deal with remote working, which may seem difficult in terms of management. However, the benefits definitely outweigh potential offshore software development risks and can bring your software development to a new level from a short-term perspective.

Following some basic rules on how to avoid confusion while working with remote developers will help you structure the offshore software outsourcing process and make it less complicated.

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Important points to consider when hiring outsourcing software development companies

What is the methodology for making a choice of a partner to give away a part of your backlog to? Consider these key factors when working with outsourcing software development companies: technology stack, skillset, and roles. Make sure that your software outsource team can demonstrate the tech skills that you need for your project. It can sometimes happen that a remote team claims to be able to do everything but in the end, you get low-quality code. Try to check Linkedin, Facebook, and other social profiles of the development partner, make sure they are to be trusted.

If you decided to hire a freelancer offshore, make sure it is someone you can be trusted, has a lot of recommendations, and so on. Freelancers developers that are really good are not easy to find, so don’t risk your project’s quality and deadlines by jumping to the first freelancers you find. Working with an established full-time dev team from an outsourcing agency (dev shop) is always a safer option. One level safer option is to work with the marketplace that ensures the process safety and gives guarantees, or establish your offshore development center through a trusted partner (meaning, you will have to hire people for your project, not just rent).

How to evaluate the outsourcing partner: a check-list

1. Track record and rankings. Before you start working with your offshore developers, you need to collect as much information about them as possible. This includes their past projects and client reviews.
2. Language barrier. Make sure the team you’re planning on working with has a good level of English language to avoid any misunderstandings throughout the progress of the project.
3. A country where the offshore development team is located. The location where an offshore software development company is based is important because of time zone differences, cultural differences, and price/quality ratio. Eastern Europe and Latin America are regions where we at YouTeam source local talent from vetted dev shops. And while Eastern European engineers are more often hired by Western European clients, we’d say that when you see the right talent, you care less about time differences, so many of our USA customers ended up hiring a dedicated development team from Poland, Moldova, or Belarus instead of Argentina or Brazil.

In the age of globalization and technological progress, offshore software development services have become a key to success for many companies. If you want to increase your profits within a small amount of time, hiring an offshore development company can become the best option for you.

How to build effective communication with the dev shop partner

• Establish what kind of communication tools you’re going to use (Slack, Skype, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, email);
• Establish what kind of task tracking tools you’re going to use (Jira, Trello, Asana, etc.);
• Establish time zone overlaps that you will use to communicate;
• Write everything down, especially meeting summaries;
• Trust your team and ask questions if something is not clear, speak of all the product development concerns that you have;
• Some companies assign project managers to the team working for a customer, if you are not tight on budget, you might want to explore such opportunity (usually project managers are people with the best communication skills and the highest level of English language, their job is to make sure your project is delivered on time and according to requirements).

We at YouTeam make it easy and safe to find a perfectly matching team of engineers for any type of project. Only a trusted offshore software development company can become our partner, and only vetted developers get to our talent pool. All available to start next week.

If you were to go to Clutch in order to find a development partner, it’d take you up to 2 months to begin with the actual development started, as you have to source the agencies and do your research. It will take weeks before you actually meet the developers you’re offered to hire. If you contact YouTeam, you’ll have CVs of available software engineers in 48 hours, all ready to hop on the interview the next day. So you can hire developers in a matter of week.