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Why Would I Hire A Remote Developer?
"Why would I hire a remote developer? All they do is... stay at home, sleep til noon (best case scenario) and write a couple of lines of code every now and then to make it seem like, you know, they actually get the work done. Completely undisciplined. Money sinks!"
Do you agree? I'm not sure if I do. Like many things in real life, this is definitely not a boolean statement. To better illustrate what I'm talking about, I'm gonna tell you a story about one unusual app:
I've once had the pleasure to manage a small in-house team of software developers. A team of three to be exact. Alex (senior dev), John and Dave (junior devs). Every day at 9 AM they clocked in and started working on our ambitious project.
Picture this: a relatively small office room with me sitting right in front of the window – tête-à-tête with Alex, John and Dave. All three working on the laptops that our company bought them. Personal assistants, daily stand-ups, reports, paid project management tools – the perfect setup.
Now on to the app itself. It's a small tool/bot that can be activated in any group chat of one very popular social network. The tool was called "Dumbass of the day". Basically, it works like this: imagine a group chat of, like, 30 people. The chat admin can activate the "Dumbass of the day" tool and it will randomly select a chat member who will receive the status of – you guessed it – "Dumbass of the day". Neat app, isn't it? Albeit a bit questionable in terms of ethics, but who am I to challenge the Grand Vision™? Except for the fact that our company was in the banking and finance sector and we were developing an app for instant bank wire transfers.
As you might have already guessed, every day at 9 AM Alex clocked in, sat in front of me, and worked on his personal masterpiece "Dumbass of the day" until 6 PM. And then clocked out. Why? Well, because apparently, he could. And neither me, nor the junior devs had any clue about it. Man, if "Dumbass of the day" could be activated in a real-world scenario, I would get this status every day of my work there.
How did Alex manage to get away with it for so long? Well, for starters, he wrote a couple of lines of code every now and then to make it seem like he actually got the work done. Completely undisciplined. A money sink, if you will.
Plato once gave the definition of man as "featherless biped". So, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold, here is Plato's man". By that logic, Alex was a remote developer.
What I'm trying to say is that your ability control stuff is overrated. Even better, it's not the control itself that makes for an efficient software development team – it's your ability to find the right people right off the bat. If a developer doesn't have the motivation or necessary soft skills to be productive, it doesn't matter if they work from home or right in front of you. And the same goes for developers that enter your company, show consistent results and stay with you for years to come. It just doesn't matter. But there definitely are some key differences:
The most obvious benefit of hiring remote software developers is pricing flexibility. Say what you will, but it's just more cost-effective to hire overseas. With no drop in quality whatsoever. You'll be surprised how much untapped coding talent there is in countries that you haven't considered hiring from yet. There are plenty of software developers out there that charge 30% less and yet give any local developer a run for their money in terms of code quality, motivation and efficiency. So why not pay a bit less to get the same value or even more?
This one's not obvious at all. On the contrary, it's pretty much counterintuitive. There's a common misconception that managing a remote team is more work, but the reality is that having no "physical", in-house team to oversee every day gives you more freedom and time to focus on the important stuff (instead of flapping wings and not getting anywhere) – sprints, project roadmap, product strategy and so on... In other words, it lets you see the big picture.
Another interesting observation is that hiring a remote software development team "obliges" you to structure your work in such a way that makes for a very quick onboarding process. When you hire remote, you also invest time in learning better project managing tools, automating tasks, developing and maintaining a knowledgebase. All that can make the onboarding process as quick as one working day. And don't forget that if you were to replace a developer, having everything set up beforehand can make this process as quick and painless as possible.
The ease of replacing a developer coupled with an all-time-high competition makes for a naturally high level of motivation amongst successful candidates. When you know that any day can be your last day, you start to really put yourself into work. I'm exaggerating of course, but still – these are real stats with real numbers.
It's never a good idea to go into something new with little to no knowledge about it. I mean, it's a great approach if you like to learn on your own mistakes, but sometimes you just need to get the work done. And the best way to achieve this is to talk to someone who knows their business (e.g. us) and to investigate the topic. There are a lot of "pitfalls" even in the most straightforward of tasks, and hiring remote is no exception.
Having educated yourself on remote hiring, it's time to set clear expectations for your future developer. You may encounter difficulties, it's normal. There are a lot of options, so a good way of approaching this task is to think of these "expectations" as a sort of a compass that will help you not to get distracted by great candidates that just don't align with your strategy.
Hiring remote is pretty quick. In fact, at Match.dev we can find you a successful candidate within as little as 48 hours. So you've got to be prepared. Prepare the work environment, find someone in your development team who you will assign as a "mentor", compile the relevant documentation...
Being overly humble has never been one of our strongest qualities. Our strongest quality is finding you a remote developer who seamlessly incorporates into your team, is exceptionally productive and, you know, actually stays with you instead of leaving after two months.
So I'm just gonna be as blunt as possible – start with Match.dev. It works like this: we do a quick intro call on which you tell us about your project, we prepare a list of pre-vetted candidates that align with your strategy, and in less than 48 you'll be signing papers with your new developer.
You can drop us a line at team@match.dev
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