With digitalisation drives high on the agenda for CTOs, CIOs, and other IT decision makers — elite-tier software engineers are in high demand. Driven by the desire to place software central to strategic objectives, more and more tech leaders are realising that the skills they need to scale fast simply aren’t available locally.
When they are, they’re monopolised by enormous tech giants, leaving smaller organisations in a fiercely competitive seller’s market for talent.
So, alternative models for building tech teams have risen to prominence in response, and we’ll be taking a closer look throughout this piece. But first, a brief summary. An in-house team when it comes to software development is your own internal engineering team, working solely on your products and services.
This is different to outsourcing, where developers are assigned to your project while simultaneously working on projects for other clients. A remote team is where a group of individuals work collectively from different locations.
Sometimes this gets confused with outsourcing or offshoring, but there are some differences that we’ll address later in the article — particularly when exploring the benefits of an offshore dedicated development team.
In-house team model
An in-house team can be built locally, with engineers in the metropolitan area that the business is based. This is the first choice for most CTOs and other technology leaders, as the engineers are full-time employees and it’s easy to ensure cultural fit within the business.
However, with fierce talent and skills shortages restricting the ability to hire and scale at the speed desired — more and more tech leaders are looking to augment their local team with developers from abroad.
Often their first idea is to outsource. In other words, to work with a third-party vendor who assigns engineers to their business on a project-by-project basis.
Their other option is often to go offshore — building an in-house extension of their tech team in a talent-rich location, and one that’s composed of full-time employees opposed to outside support.
With an offshore dedicated development team extension, your organisation is able to keep knowledge and capability in house — as well as upskilling the existing setup — without relying on a third-party for this expertise.
Potentially losing it should the partnership end for whatever reason. You can add to your existing set of local developers with global talent, and the right offshoring partner will make sure they’re all on the same page. Fully aligned operationally, as well as culturally.
Why is this important? Developers that are collaborative colleagues and full-time employees of your business are more invested in the products and services they’re working on. And, more invested in the mission, values, and strategic objectives of the business over the long term.
Remote team model
The pandemic saw the rise in remote working, where individuals work collectively while not being based in the same location. Tools such as Slack, Google Meet, and Zoom — not to mention the plethora of collaborative workspace platforms are key to making this kind of model work optimally.
Sometimes, the term ‘remote team’ is used interchangeably with other kinds of global talent leverage — like outsourcing or an offshore dedicated development team — but it’s not strictly accurate. In software engineering, a remote team would be some developers based in the company’s HQ, with other employees in the team based in a distributed fashion in different locations — often working from home.
This is of course possible, and it’s an application model that’s proved successful for business in both software development as well as elsewhere. However, it’s certainly not as easy to align new employees culturally to the business if there’s no face-to-face interaction at all.
So, if you do decide to adopt the remote team model it’s important to try and organise team building events so that your distributed employees can meet their colleagues in person.
This could come in the form of visits to the company headquarters or even a workation where all the organisation’s people come together to work and socialise in an exciting location.
Offshore dedicated development team model
The offshore dedicated team model isn’t particularly different to the development team extension we discussed earlier. It’s essentially leveraging deep pools of talent from engineer-rich locations such as India, the Philippines, Poland, or Ukraine. Ideally, you partner with an offshoring expert in the location you choose, and they source developers based on your company’s unique needs and technological requirements.
The dedicated team model and a development team extension are the same in their application — an augmentation of your in-house local talent with elite-tier skills from overseas. Fully integrated and fully aligned operationally and culturally.
This gives businesses the ability to scale quickly with skills that are potentially hard to find at home, given the fierce competition for top talent in places like Western Europe, North America, and Australasia.
As discussed earlier, this means knowledge and expertise is kept within the business, and the ability to upskill existing engineering capability isn’t reliant on a third party.
While an offshoring partner in the chosen team location will source and test potential recruits, you’ll have the final say on who gets hired. This is because unlike outsourcing, your new engineers are full-time, long-term employees as opposed to outside support.
Comparing the in-house, remote, and dedicated team models
In summary, an in-house team is hiring locally. This is the typical first step for a company that wants to place software central to their strategic objectives.
A remote team is a group of employees dispersed around different locations, often working from home or in co-working spaces. An offshore dedicated development team is an extension of a businesses existing engineering setup.
Which one is the right choice for you depends on what you aim to achieve. For organisations that seek to have a holistically aligned engineering team without a clear delineation between their ‘home’ team and their ‘global’ team — then going offshore with an expert team building partner in the location they choose to leverage talent in is often the way to go.
