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Comment by fomojola | Hacker News Reader

Having done significant amounts of remote work with teams in India, I will say that the amount of planning required to efficiently use remote developers who have varying skill sets is beyond most startups. If you have got star programmers who are self-organizing and working on completely independent pieces then that's great, but if you are dealing with a complex app and everyone has their fingers in the pie its like (not the best analogy coming up, but give me some credit for the effort) trying to bake a cake with everyone mixing a portion of the ingredients in different cities then flying to the same city and pouring it all together and expecting to create an award winning cake on the first try.

Its a significant management challenge, and as a startup if you can avoid adding yet another significant management challenge by requiring your dev team to be local to the rest of the operation then you should.

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International remote work is a whole different ball game and #1 I admire anyone who can power though it, #2 Ultimately believe it is only beneficial when given very specific conditions. I had one team that was based in Eastern Europe / Russia and they could write code like demons, but explaining business requirements nearly put everyone over the edge. Communication was a serious barrier, not to mention the time schedules. I love the tech talent there but wow, could totally understand not wanting to jump into that kettle.

I like your analogy about the cake and definitely respect your thought process there. The way I have gotten around this is that I (or another team member) always played the role of gate keeper / "integrator" to make sure the merging of branches went as smoothly as possible. Now we also had the benefit of full test suites to run, user stories to compare against, etc. but it seemed to work. The drawback is that as the "integrator" my actual development time would be cut in order to keep timelines met. However the plus was that I could question the dev's intentions maybe make some extra adjustment / cleaner code and ultimately produce a more maintainable code base. I also was never caught off guard about garbage coming in - ha.

Does anyone else use this sort of "integrator" role and seen these challenges / benefits?

Hehe: we finally found a guy to run the Indian team who had worked in the US and he filled that integrator role. It was honestly an order of magnitude performance improvement after he was in place, plus he (partially) solved the time zone issue, which you are right was quite frankly a major pain. If I never have another 11pm or 7am conference call I will be forever grateful.

Communication was a serious issue: even in English it was bad enough, and I shudder to think about what it would be like with a non-English speaking country. I guess ultimately you CAN make it work and there are SOME cost efficiencies to be gained but even in India we see large companies like IBM and Verizon who end up building out these massive facilities (regular power generation comes to mind: Delhi had these huge power outages and we eventually had to buy our team there power inverters just so they could work part of the time between 11am and 4pm) to normalize the development experience: I question if there are any cost savings left after that kind of infrastructure build out.

And yes, it completely destroys your personal productivity, but the hope is that the multiplier effect gets you more value than writing the code yourself: I'm as yet unconvinced that it really works that way, but what do I know.

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