Would you recommend a startup to hire engineers from a non-local location?

When looking to build a technology business, you need great talent. Whether it’s a startup or a large-scale enterprise, it can be extremely challenging to find premium technical talent. However, while looking to hire the best developers, 2 things must be considered – cost of hiring and time taken to hire. Often, people try to hire in-house initially and discover that it is expensive and time-consuming. And even if talent is successfully hired in-house, the effective hourly rate of that person when vacation, sick time and other benefits are factored in can be higher than that of a contractor.  However, outsourcing through freelancers and development agencies (especially with overseas developers) presents its own challenges and pitfalls. Here are a few situations when it makes sense to go overseas: Short Term Projects: Outsourcing is a good option when it comes projects that are simple to implement and can be done with a few resources. Great for micro-tasks and non-core short term projects to reduce overhead and increase speed to market. If your business is completely dependent on your site, I would recommend having a strong in-house team with  a few offshore developers rather than outsourcing it completely. Strong Leadership: It’s important to have a strong leadership team (in-house or offshore) to guide the project i.e. experienced project managers, CTOs, architects, growth hackers that have track records, provide quality results and act quickly. Having leaders helps keep your project transparent, lowers risk and guarantees success. Same Time zone: Outsourcing is easier when your developers work in the same time zone. One of the major issues when it comes to outsourcing a project is communicating with your developers. You want to make sure there is maximal overlap in time spent between teams Strong internal project guidelines & tools implemented: If you are collaborating with an offshore team, it’s important that strong project guidelines and tools are in place that enable teams to follow agile. Teams should be designed to function autonomously while tools should be present to enable freer communication. Experience from the same region: Developers/ designers that that have experience in product design and development in the US that can help you lead to an effective solution better. Offshore programmers must have strong communication skills: Good communication skills directly correlate with good development skills. A great developer is able to understand problems clearly, break them down into hypotheses and propose solutions in a coherent manner. Great offshore developers usually speak 2-3 languages coherently and are very comfortable with documentation in english. Make sure a developer’s communication skills are rock solid. A good way to assess communication skills is to simulate a scrum meeting or give them a problem/scenario and see how they communicate. Depending on your budget, length of project and type of technology solution, there are multiple resources out there to find programmers overseas: Premium Market Places: If you are looking for pre-vetted premium technical talent, here are some examples: Toptal: Toptal is a platform that offers vetted freelance software engineers to companies in need of developers. Toptal employs a screening process to evaluate freelancers has an acceptance rate of 3% for applicants. Based out of Silicon Valley, Toptal has freelancers from over 50 countries with over 2000 clients. You can directly hire developers directly for short term and long term projects. http://www.toptal.com/ Scalable Path (Disclaimer: I’m a partner at Scalable Path): We are a group of strategists and technologists with a network of top talent in North and South America. We offer over 1000+ premium developers along with on-demand leadership that can guide you through the product development process. We are a hybrid model of some sort. It works well if you’re looking to augment your staff for long term projects as premium freelancers can be added on demand. http://www.scalablepath.com/?utm_source=Quora&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Quora+answers. Crew: Crew is a relatively new platform that offers the best designers and developers for all your software needs: website building, branding or app development. Crew has a network of handpicked, vetted professionals who are ready to be matched and they make sure the process goes smoothly on both ends. To learn more about how it works, check out https://crew.co/how-it-works/. http://Gun.IO It's a good site to find high quality developers. You submit your job to them and then they hand pick 3 top choices out of their pool of 15,000+ developers and provide them to you. More info at https://gun.io/ Final notes: make sure that you're hiring individual team-members, and not "black boxed" teams in remote locations (where you can start with team A and then switched to team B or C). Include individuals as team members, and enable them with a sense of belonging; treating them as outsiders will make it harder for them to be effective at their job.