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Remote vs in-house dev teams: I finally switched back after 2 years of remote-only contractors
Was running a team of 5 remote contractors based out of San Jose for about 2 years. Cheap labor sounded great on paper. But the communication lag and constant context switching ate up so much time. Finally hired 3 local devs here in Austin and the difference is night and day. They just get what I'm saying without needing 3 Slack messages and a Loom video. Anyone else find the async thing gets overrated when you actually need to build something fast?
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ellis.faith1mo ago
Skip the fancy hiring altogether and bring teams closer together or keep them local. Honest to god, I learned this the hard way with a remote team in Ukraine. The async thing sounds great until you're stuck explaining a simple fix through a ticket thread that took 3 days. When I switched to Austin-based devs, I could just walk over, draw on a whiteboard, and have it done by lunch. The local guys also caught my bad assumptions before I wasted time writing them up. If you can't afford local, try hiring in the same time zone and overlapping 4 hours minimum. That alone fixed most of my breakdowns.
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wren6381mo ago
Yeah the "they just get what I'm saying" part hits hard. Had a similar setup with three remote guys in Bangalore and I spent half my day writing detailed tickets and recording short videos just to avoid back and forth. Even then something would get lost in translation and I'd find out about it three days later. When I hired local here in Denver one of the first things that changed was I could just walk over and point at a screen. That alone cut my feedback loop from hours to seconds. Async is great for certain types of work but for anything that needs quick iterations or shared context it's a killer.
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