Hiring Overseas Developers

As a freelance software developer, one of the most common questions I get from clients/startups is if hiring an overseas team is a good idea. It can work - in fact I manage two overseas devs myself - but it can also go very very badly. Issues arise when the entire team is based overseas and there is no one in charge other than a non technical founder.

Generally, bad outcomes happen when a founder(s) espouses a "magic bullet" mentality in which he hopes an overseas dev can build a fully functional, beautiful, complex SaaS SPA application deployed on AWS using Docker Containerization with Redis caching layer blah blah blah - it's not realistic. The idea should be to effectively delegate tasks to overseas devs that fit their skillset. For example, plugging in a basic web template and reconfiguring the content to describe the startup features is simple assignment that can be handed off to the overseas team. Setting up a scalable server architecture with high fault tolerance probably isn't suitable for the overseas team. This means it's best to have at least one person "by your side" as you manage developers.

Done properly, this arrangement can save your startup a lot of money and increase efficiency. Here is a much more in-depth blog post covering the topic and certain specifics such as where to find overseas developers: https://www.vertex360.co/post/hiring-overseas-developers-yfuwv5