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Should you hire remote or in-house development team?

Key considerations when hiring remote versus in-house development help

So, what’s today's “hot job”? Is it in Marketing? Sales? Client success? Surprisingly, no. If you visit any popular job board site like LinkedIn, Built In, Glassdoor, the most prevalent roles you’ll see are software development gigs. On Built In SF there are over 1,000 software engineering roles open today. Meaning, if your company is in the process of hiring for various tech roles, you’ll see the competition is pretty steep.

While there’s a talented pool of tech experts ready and willing to help you build the next best thing, quality can come at a cost. To save on expenses, tech entrepreneurs often consider software outsourcing. Nevertheless, deciding whether you should hire an in-house development team or use a third-party software company can be a tough decision. Hence, it is crucial to examine both of these options to find the best solution for your business.

If you’re thinking about hiring programmers in-house, you’re probably asking yourself the following questions (and if you’re not, you should be!):

• How long is my development project going to take?
• Do I need a full-time salaried team to support this product moving forward?
• What does my budget look like (short-term and long-term)?

To dispel some myths associated with in-house hiring being the ‘safer choice’, we’ve broken down the advantages and disadvantages below:

• Peace of Mind: Who doesn’t want control? Especially when it comes to the development of your product. Most CTOs, Founders, CEOs feel as though having an in-house team provides them with control over the total project resulting in peace of mind.
• Quality Control: You can meet your team every day in the office, which gives you the ability to act quickly when any problems occur or changes arise.
• Collaboration: While there’s still plenty of opportunities to foster a collaborative environment with an outsourced team, many C-level executives feel as though “facetime” is better for the company culture. If you’re in the office every day working directly with your team there are fewer limitations and boundaries.

On the other hand, the in-house development has its own cons:

• Costs: In-house development can be incredibly expensive. The mere comparison of in-house hourly rates versus paying to outsource will not give you a clear picture, as there are various hidden costs when working with an in-house team (i.e., hiring, turnover, insurance, PTO, rent, payroll taxes, and more).
• Limited Talent Pool: Also, it can be incredibly difficult to find someone with the exact type of technical expertise you need to support your initiatives. Due to the fact that you’re potentially limited to a local (U.S.) talent pool, finding a skilled programmer can be hard and time-consuming. Especially nowadays, when the popularity of remote working grows every year and attracts the best talent.

Considering today’s world of accessible technology, everything you can achieve culturally and quality-wise in-house, you can most certainly achieve with a remote team as well. That’s why it’s important to examine a scalable alternative - software outsourcing.

In this case, a third party service provider, like VentureDevs, takes care of your project and manages all of the tasks on your behalf while working in conjunction with you to achieve your goals and objectives. So, why should you consider this alternative to in-house development? A few critical reasons include:

• Cost-effective solution: Going back to the questions we identified above, it’s important to ask yourself how long will this project take? Hiring a full-time, salaried employee is a long-term (often costly) option. If you need to build a product within 3, 6, 9, 12 months, outsourcing is a quick and cost-effective way to accomplish your goals. According to Classic Informatics, outsourcing can help you cut down the business costs by 20-30%.
• Accessibility to top talent: Instead of competing with other companies who are trying to recruit the top local talent, outsourcing allows you to tap into an extensive network of the industry’s top technical experts at a global level.
• Streamlined process: If you’re working with a trusted development partner (with substantial knowledge building products and cultivating best practices for how to approach software development) you can count on them having established development processes (i.e. user testing, product mapping or choosing the right technology) to streamline the entire project, therefore, reducing your time to market as opposed to if you were to hire in-house.
• Scalability: One of the most impactful advantages of outsourcing is that it’s scalable - outsourced technical teams take a flexible approach to quickly adapt to your ever-changing business and technical needs.

Of course, there is the possibility of ‘feeling like’ you could be losing some control when you outsource since you won’t physically see the contractors on a daily basis. However, if you find the right outsourced development firm that can work and serve as an extension of your existing team, it doesn’t have to feel like you’re relinquishing control.

As you can see, both in-house development and outsourcing have their own pros and cons. Making the right decision depends on your business needs - the best way to make that choice is to think about your budget, estimate your project time-frame and decide whether you need a full-time in-house team to manage the project moving forward based on those objectives. Nevertheless, in most circumstances, software outsourcing seems to be a more efficient, cost-effective option for most businesses and entrepreneurs.

At VentureDevs, we are a one-stop shop for all of your tech needs - from product development to team augmentation to in-house recruiting, we offer technical solutions to help you scale quickly. Contact us to learn more. In the meantime, check our infographic on outsourced software development below.