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Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

My only experience with offshore teams is quite bad. Lot of communication issues (I know we French are viewed as rude in professional settings, but at least you don't have to know how to interpret our 'no'.), lot of duplicated positions and infrastructure, and offshore people were treated poorly, so high turnover (4 month on average) on a difficult stack.

Recruitment also left a lot to be desired, or was downright awful, but in the onshore pure dev teams we also had idiots who couldn't read or even open a log file, so it might have been a global issue.

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Chances are, and don’t take this personally, the turnover was due to the fact it’s not easy to work with the French businesses and their management. There’s a lot of looking down and overconfidence combined with micromanaging and patronizing, and the communication issues oftentimes stem from your lackluster English skills. This is based on mine and my friends’ experience as a software engineer/software house. Some software houses outright refuse to work for the French, through unofficial policy.

Totally agree on the management, it was horrible. In fact, the only good manager my team had was the Indian manager (who also had to deal with turnover and training there, and considerably less power than the other ones), the France and Canada-based managers were just either too absent and useless to remove blockers, or too present and micromanaging, depending on the time of the year.

Concerning communication issues, i think i disagree, this has little to do with english skills. I've had working relationships with Serbian, Germans, Dutchs and portugese, and we could communicate well enough. I think its cultural, east Asian and to a lesser extent Anglo (barring Australians and Irish who are more direct) have different expectations of what is acceptable to say directly and what should be hidden behind words. That's stuff i expect from the management here, not ICs, and i really dislike that. I've talked last year quite extensively to a Norwegian oil rig engineer who worked with Koreans, he said he had the same experience with them (and that each time he could work with Scottish engineers he would do so)

I agree with your points, but as a side note, I've noticed that French companies have never been too excited about offshoring and remote work in particular.

I've been freelancing remote/hybrid in Europe for years now, and on the recruitment side, I recall always turning down recruiter calls primarily because the company was adamant about 100% onsite. Maybe freelancing is not that popular, either. Is this the case?

I think it really depends. 100% onsite is rare now, there is a lot of hybrid, and some company give a lot of leeway. Theoretically i should be 40% onsite, pragmatically i'm 10%, and the rest of my team is 10 to 20% onsite, to give you an example. I also know a company were you will be onsite 100% for the first years, but after that, you can go work from wherever you want (I know they had people in Brasil, India, Japan, China, malasia all with a French salary as if they were onsite)

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