I work remotely from Europe for a North American company, so here's my two cents on this topic:
Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless of where they live.
While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area, you're most likely not hiring only the best.
I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." - most would trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies.
If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs, don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.
I think this is a really valuable perspective. Would be curious to hear from more folks on “the other side” about their experiences. I’ve often considered doing the expat thing and trying to work in or setup such a shop.
My experience is that it is pretty easy to find a remote job as a single developer/freelancer, but a lot harder to find a decent project for a small, well-knit team. I now live in Eastern Europe (EU) and I easily find offers at EUR 450-600 / day for consulting gigs (e.g. on-site + remote work). However, I often struggle to find a project for a team of 3 Java/JavaScript/Python/PHP developers, event at rates as low as EUR 250 / day.
I guess lots of recruiters are only interested in hiring individual contractors, but not teams.
Managers want to expand their little empires, by adding people who report to them. They're less excited about spending their precious budget on a service from an external vendor. There are exceptions, such as managers who learned that managing software development is HARD and want to outsource the headaches (with the naive hope that the outside company will do a better job).
If I hire an employee I am constrained by employee-employer regs. Those can sometimes be onerous, and the remote thing adds a few wrinkles -- are you liable in your state/province/department, or theirs?
But you also have the power, and it's far easier to plug them into your existing work structure.
Hiring a small team is effectively outsourcing a component or subsystem to a foreign coding company, the laws change -- B2B contract vs hiring -- and there are communications and workflows to deal with.
> If I hire an employee I am constrained by employee-employer regs. Those can sometimes be onerous,
Undoubtedly, but compared to hiring through an outsourced company, you do get more control over how these employees are treated, and can thus remove the risk of the operation being run as a sweat shop under your own nose, assuming that's something you wish to care about.
> -- are you liable in your state/province/department, or theirs?
In most parts of the world you should be able to set up the equivalent of an LLC in order to minimize your risk, though of course, this will mean some extra bureaucracy to deal with.
Interesting, in my experience getting a team that really works together instead of a bunch of people cobbled together with varying levels of competence and opinions on what's good is what is really puts a drag on a project.
Basically: the 10x developer is the same developer unhindered by people that build sloppy shit or broken procedures that need to be integrated.
Yes, a team is indeed more valuable than a bunch of people, but there isn't an abundance of marketplaces to sell a team. Just the usual crowd of recruiters that are looking to fill up individual positions and take their commission. Virtually all team projects that I've found so far have gone through a friend recommendation and direct contact with the customer. Never through a recruiter.
If you guys know better way to market a small team of devs at EUR 250-300 day I'd be glad to hear about it.
I am currently trying to transition to remote work/consulting and was wondering can you share some details on how you find offers like that. I am also based in Eastern Europe. Do you have an email I can ping you at?
Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless of where they live.
While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area, you're most likely not hiring only the best.
I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." - most would trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies.
If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs, don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.