Show HN: Get insider info about your offshore software contractor – for free
My name is Yura Riphyak and I'm the co-founder of Contractor Intelligence(https://thecontractorintelligence.com/). We help you make a more informed decision when choosing an offshore software development contractor.
With demand for software engineers reaching 14 jobs per candidate and CS graduate salaries starting at $120,000, many Bay Area startups consider hiring part or all of their engineering team abroad.
Yet outsourcing remains a risky endeavour. Due to the intrinsic conflict of interests (a dev shop maximizes their margin if they manage to sell you their lowest-salary developer for a maximum price), the offshoring industry suffers from the severe adverse selection problem. The dev shops can become very creative in selling you 'lemons'. I personally observed a video interview of a junior developer in Ukraine by a US client, with a senior colleague writing answers on a whiteboard behind the laptop :).
I'm from Ukraine, where IT outsourcing contributes to over 3% of GDP. Working for over 10 years in this industry, I have worn both the clients and the service providers shoes - and experienced their distinctive pains myself. As a result in 2017 I co-founded YouTeam (https://youteam.io/)- a platform for building offshore dev teams, that got backed by Y Combinator a year and a half later. Our routine evaluation of service providers includes comprehensive background check, legal due-dil, insider info gathering, and verification of individual devs skills.
In total over 400 dev shops and IT consultancies from 32 countries have passed this examination. Yet this still didn't feel like a solid enough step towards "making outsourcing great again".
This is why we decided to turn our internal process into something that can be described as 'vetting-as-a-service'.
Looking forward to learning your thoughts on Contractor Intelligence and how we can improve it.
Thank you!