Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere.<p>I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling.<p>The "catch" is that we have to do over-documentation, lots of screenshots, and consistent routine communications. My CTO and cofounder speaks 4 languages.<p>The talent has to be managed.<p>Within 12 months of being with us, a Pakistani developer has massively increased their value.<p>We also don't bring anyone into core leadership team onshore unless they speak at least 2 languages or more or they have a serious edge in terms of talent.<p>The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually:<p>- Unilingual<p>- have been over-resourced in every position they've ever been in<p>- poorly travelled<p>- are used to working with onshore talent that has context<p>- find the time difference to be abhorrent<p>Right now, our core "mission critical" team speaks 4 languages.<p>I fully hope to add 10-20 languages as we expand. I'm hoping for Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese in that order...<p>You cannot expect someone who has 10-14 times less electricity/capita to suddenly have the context of an American. It takes time.<p>We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc... remote now is a core part of our tech biz.