What may go wrong? What is good, except the cost?
How do you manage a team? How do you hire them? Any challenges?
Will appreciate any help.
There are at least a hundred valuable tips I could give you on how to be a great remote manager but if I had to give one, it would be this:
Be a mastermind. Remember first and foremost that variance is your enemy. Give detailed requirements. Hide information to keep your contractor focused. Avoid abstract directives like the plague. Instead, break off an atomic well-defined piece of work and give it to your remote worker to work on over a short time frame. Either do the integration engineering yourself or give that to a highly trusted, proven lieutenant. Iterate.
To summarize, until a relationship is well developed, imo micromanagement is basically correct.
Question for you - have you met remote teams versus solo developers? Do you think there might be a team which had an experience in being remote and may save while we are doing our baby steps?
> We talk/chat a lot with them, as if they were in the same place.
> Cut tasks to smaller pieces to minimize the risks
What may go wrong:
- bad understanding of the tasks, that's why we communicate more
> and we always allow a little more time (than usual) for every task just in case something was misinterpreted and needs refactoring
> people located "offshore" hire them according to our requirements (English language is a must-have anyway, even if we're French)
What else scares you?
As long as everyone has some sort of calendar scheduling tool, with their normal work hours clearly listed, it's usually not too hard to schedule meetings and chat with people on Slack -- doesn't have to be real time chat.
This covers most of it. I would focus on giving some small pieces of work to see how collaboration works.