If you're considering offshore development because it looks like a great way to get more done for less money, you're not alone. Most companies go down this path thinking they've found the perfect solution to their capacity and budget constraints.
The math seems simple: pay less per developer, hire more of them, ship faster. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, quite a lot. The hidden costs and complications of offshore development often end up making projects more expensive and time-consuming than if you'd just hired fewer, better developers locally. And the partial offshore approach that's supposed to fix these problems? It usually just shifts the burden around without solving the core issues.
The Offshore Development Promise
I can't tell you how many times I've heard from a client, "We had an offshore team working on the project. Nothing works now, and nobody is answering the emails."
Purely offshore development teams can provide competence and expertise, but are often oversold on the type of quality they will, in actuality, deliver.
Cost and capacity are the driving factors that bring companies to leverage offshore talent. Hiring in-country costs a lot more, so an organization can get a lot more capacity for a lot lower price by going overseas.
That makes the stakeholders happy - they can deliver the product at a lower cost on a faster timeline.
Or so they think.
The Hidden Effects of Offshoring
Going offshore presents some offsetting factors that make many of these deals go bad:
- Language and context barriers are real. Communicating the business needs may not translate well to a developer's local context, which makes understanding the development requirements themselves a lot more difficult.
- Cost projections are based on quick development cycles. Something may be done within the timeframe specified, to be sure. But will it have passed QA? Will it be built according to industry-standard development practices (for example, with solid architecture or a well-developed test suite)? The company buying the capacity will not know until it is too late, the money has been spent, and the product doesn't work. Building a product can devolve into endless cycles of seeing something new, seeing it break, requesting fixes, seeing something new break, requesting more fixes, and rinse and repeat.
- When navigating overseas contracts, there is always a risk that the entity providing the capacity will go dark. When they do, there is no realistic recourse on the contract. Then, you need to find a new source of development capacity, rebuild a team's collective context of the code, and recast the product vision.
All of these factors waste cycles, which adds to the cost.
Where the expenditure was to have been less, more is required in terms of time and money from the client organization to manage the development process. Usually, no one in the client organization has managed developers before, much less to a high level of efficiency, and so the entire process slogs on.
Is Partial Offshoring a Good Compromise?
Because of the quality concerns, a recent trend in software development management has been to pursue a hybrid model of partial offshoring. In that scenario, the project management and tech lead are kept onshore, with the assumption that the above factors are mitigated accordingly.
With the partial model, project owners still believe they're getting a bargain on the price, even though they have to pay more for the management pieces. And the intent is to make any onshore developers happier as well, because on paper, they still have quality control over the codebase.
That sounds good, but does it work out?
The Reality of Partial Offshoring
Well, having the onshore project management solves one problem: the project owners don't have to manage the project directly. Aside from that detail, though, the same factors end up playing out in practice.
Work increases for the onshore developers standing in the tech lead role. They want to stand up for quality, but doing so requires they spend more time reviewing and re-reviewing proposed code changes. Each new feature may require several review cycles. Depending on the project, QA may also fall to these resources, consuming more of their time.
Motivation can become an issue for developers in that situation. They see the lack of quality and spotty attention to detail, and they know they are capable of doing better. But if their time is consumed by managing the output of outsourced resources, they can feel trapped in a situation where they are not able to demonstrate their true talents.
Timelines can also miss. The stakeholders in these cases will generally project resource hours the same way they would for a fully onshore team. But the more iterations of the development/review/qa cycle for each feature, the longer delivering those features takes. Efficiency is also lost in the churn for the offshore developer, as they've already moved onto other tasks before the world turns far enough that the managers can review in their timezone.
The pressure of the timeline will also decrease the manager's motivation. They know how crucial best practices in development are, and they know what happens to projects that don't get them enforced. But they also feel the impending deadlines. This presents them with a problem they can't solve with the resources they've been provided.
Of course, the hiring organization could iterate on the offshore resources to find those who will embrace western ethics, adhere to modern development practices, and provide the attention to detail needed. Arguably, though, the process to find such a resource will require a lot of iteration, repetition of corresponding onboarding, and eventually cost nearly what it would to find good onshore capacity in the first place.
The Better Alternative
With all of that in mind, partial offshoring simply moves the goalposts of who manages the development capacity. While the managers may be more practiced in attempting to bring quality out of a team of developers, that's not likely to overcome the inherent problems that will surface.
The principle remains true that every member of the team needs to be a multiplier and contribute to overall quality. Best practices must not be left to a single manager - everyone on the team needs to own it. In particular, vision transfer needs to be seamless, not a process where excessive cycles are spent.
It's better to hire a couple of 3x developers than several 1x (or sub-one) resources. Projects staffed with motivated multipliers will shine.
Conclusion
Here's the thing: offshore development keeps looking attractive because the upfront math is so appealing. But once you factor in all the hidden costs—the endless review cycles, the communication overhead, the quality issues, the management burden—you often end up spending more than you would have with a smaller, higher-quality team.
The partial offshore model doesn't really solve this problem. It just moves the pain around and creates new bottlenecks.
If you want a project that actually ships on time and works when it's done, hire developers who can multiply your efforts rather than drain them. Yes, they cost more per person. But when you don't need three rounds of fixes for every feature, when you don't need to re-review every pull request, when the code actually works—that's where you find your real savings.