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Comment by yomkippur | Hacker News Reader

I'm a CTO and looking to outsource to India, Middle East, Ukraine, Latin America. Is there a one stop shop for this? Or are you just manually hitting up people on upwork or freelance.com?

I also think that the barrier to entry is so low that anybody that can read English documentation, have intermediate-senior level experience, can get the job done. It's just that in some cultures, there is clearly some effort to make themselves indispensable by increasing technical debt and not caring about security with the end goal of they being the only devs who can keep the lights on at your company.

Curious as to what part of Latin America has the talent, in my experience of hiring Brazilian developers, they've been just awful, much more so than Indian devs but they've also been known to play "games". I don't know who to trust right now.

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I've done all of my hiring via UpWork and will continue to hire via UpWork. After about 2.5 years at this, I prefer talent in Ukraine and Vietnam. Post a project description with good details and pay and you'll have all the talent you can handle. I don't think being in the same timezone matters at all. I have no idea why you'd hire American technical talent when you can get the same talent at 5 - 10x less the cost.

can you share more details? how are you getting 5x~10x discounts and for which tech stack and roles? im still surprised at how expensive ukraine devs are compared to vietnam or india.

I'm a technical architect by trade. I write clean, concise and discrete product requirement document artifacts. If you can do this and you're able to convey clear parameters of what needs to be done, you can easily score senior developer talent @ $30/HR.

My back-end developer writes Serverless IaC with Python Lambdas for $40/HR. Our app developer writes Swift for $25/HR.

We manufacture a proprietary IoT sensor. I pay $30/HR for an embedded developer to write C in TI CCS. I pay a fixed rate for board layout / schematic / BOM edits.

A hard truth is coding skills are commodity if you know how to modularize and write spec. You don't need perfect English to write beautiful Python / Swift / C. I don't need you in the same timezone because you're pushing to a git repo and we review it when we wake up.

For permanent talent, they're more than happy with $40/HR. They like working with people who know what they're doing, they like that I write a PRD and leave them alone until deadline, and they believe in what we're doing.

Fascinating. I was always under the impression that Upwork was filled with low skilled workers.

How do you get your BOM to production? I've always wanted to create my own circuit boards but have no idea where to start or how the process works.

Absolutely incredible the information I'm walking away here. I'm definitely going to look into outsourcing on Upwork now, especially I'm hearing you are actually having consistent success.

You need a local partner you trust. Your partner is going to get a cut, and a big one, but otherwise you won't get good people.

I'd disagree here. "Your partner is going to get a cut" is the exact issue. I feel like if you're the CTO, you're going to want to own the relationship between you and talent. You can find very good people on UpWork at $40/HR across all technical disciplines.

You've had many issues that violate trust, and you're still looking to outsource?

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