| I have worked remotely each day for the last 3 years with both programmers and testers at one of the largest IT consulting firms in Ukraine. I have no perspective on the cost of doing so, but I do have some on the team work and quality of outsourcing over there. Like everywhere else in the world there is a shortage of high quality professionals in Ukraine. And specially now that more and more companies are outsourcing their work over there. My team has had abysmal programmers & testers come in (who we simply had removed from the team as a result) all the way up to fantasticly professional and capable people. It might take some time, and may cost you above the going rate, but there are certainly gems to be found over there. The main problem has been the culture. In our experience there is a lot of rigid hierarchy over there, that in the first few years kept team members from speaking their minds.
Junior developers would never speak their minds, and blindly do what their seniors would tell them to do. And similarly, the seniors would never take any input from anyone who wasn't either a senior, pm/po or architect. And lets not get into the sexism that is deeply rooted in Ukrainian society and culture. This is all very different from what we are used to here in northen Europe, as each team member is expected to speak their mind completely (put professionally ofc) so as to leave no stone unturned.
Once a decision has been made this way, the team can move onto something actionable as a unified front without unmentioned trepidation arrising later on (or such is the thinking at least). It has taken us three years of moving people in and out of the teams, figuring out the best composition of what people to have together and where. And even bringing outside contractors in to replace people within the contracting firm we use. So it is no silver bullet, but it can be done. I do wonder though if all that time and effort, with the cost incurred, would have been better spent simply hiring locally and building the best team we could here. |