You have started your tech company and it goes well and you want to scale it or maybe you plan to start a new venture? Great, but now you have to grow your development team as well. Yet developers are hard to come-by, costly and business timelines are ever so pressing. The dilemma that many tech leaders and CTO’s face should they hire entirely in-house or start working with contracted remote development team or development agency.
While keeping everything strictly in-house has many benefits in this article we would examine some overlooked details that may tip the scales otherwise
Cost and Flexibility
Working with remote contracted team offers better cost optimization and flexibility. A full in-house group requires significant overhead, including salaries, benefits, office space, equipment, training, recruiting, and more. Hiring development agencies or contractors could be expensive. However, most of the time you will pay hourly, meaning that you’d pay only for the productive time. Not to mention, you would have access to a broader range of specialists from design to QA. If things do not work-out, usually contracts could be cancelled rather painlessly compared to the labour law.
Result Driven Mindset
Sometimes in-house developers and employees operate on pay-roll mode. That means that you rely on internal politics. You show up every day for 8 hours, the boss likes you so even if you do not deliver he won’t necessarily fire you. Remote contractors and agencies, on the other hand, have to bring results otherwise their invoices may not be paid or the engagement with the company prolonged.
Less Micromanagement and distractions
In our conversation with technology managers and CTO’s, the one point they always bring against working with an external development team or having remote employees is the notion of control. How I would be sure you do the work you are supposed to do? Controlling the results is very important but is often misunderstood for meddling and micromanagement. Checking in with your developer every day could be counter-productive and sometimes contradicts the agile principles. Having remote developers could help you focus on the bigger picture and the results. After all CTO’s job is half technology and half management.
A leader is best when people barely know he exists when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. Lao Tzu
Now you could argue that working with external and remote people could bring more overhead to communication. This could be true but if you have a well-established and tried process it shouldn’t be a problem. Agencies and external teams have a lot of experience in working remotely so they have devised processes for effective communication.
On the other hand, in the modern open space office often time there a lot of distractions and useless communication. For example, a simple question could turn into half an hour long discussion involving all the people around. It usually drifts away from the topic and adds no value to the company.
Scaling development teams is hard and requires a lot of time and effort. Working with agencies or remote development team poses some challenges and risks, it also provides benefits. At Payapars we have worked with clients from multiple countries and if you are on the look-out to add some ad-hoc dev resource give us a shout.
