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Comment by throwme_1980 | Hacker News Reader

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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```it takes dedication to manage an offshore team, a daily standup is not enough, you need to communicate effectively.```

Think about it this way: Any project is composed of the business domain knowledge and execution skills. It's relatively easy to find off-shore dev teams with ok to good technical skills. It's a lot harder to communicate what you want built, how it should function and all the business rules that should be incorporated to a group of strangers who have different cultural contexts and cues and who most likely speak English as a second language. Off-shore dev teams are missing a whole lot of context that you or I may take for granted. Are you going to be able to manage a dev team without that context the same way you would manage a on-site dev team? Probably not.

Some things that will help significantly in transferring that knowledge are requirement documents, technical specs, wireframes/mockups (all that documentation that startups neglect). You should probably be looking for demos on a regular basis. Managing an off-shore team is often a full-time job, especially when getting the project off the ground.

In my experience, your points about communication and onsite visits are key. Also, communication should be centralized and managed on both sides so there is not only a communication channel, but also clear lines of responsibility. Of course, communication is not just phone and email, but also well defined specs.

However, getting involved in another company's hiring process is rarely a good idea. Most offshore projects are results oriented, so getting involved in hiring is too low level (i.e. micro-management). In other words, manage the output, not the process.

With the above said, involvement in hiring can be effective when 1.) you're using the offshore firm to acquire very specialized, high-end talent, and 2.) you're paying a substantial premium above local market to ensure hiring is a rare event.

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!

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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