Encora | Nearshore

Nearshore

Finding the right software engineers for a job can be tricky in today’s market

The demand for people with technical skills and talent is increasing worldwide. Companies are taking a variety of approaches to meet their individual faculty needs. Since the people with the technical skills and the organizations who need them don’t always overlap geographically, companies are being creative in their approach to hiring the talented software engineers that they need. Some companies are outsourcing their engineering overseas or looking at people who live in the same country but in a different part of the country. Telecommuting is a popular option, but it may not be practical depending on the needs of the project. Many companies working with the H-1B visa program to get the staff of software engineers that they need. Whatever strategy you choose, gaining more information about your options is a good place to start. In this article, we’ll look at nearshore, offshore, and onsite faculty options for software engineers and the pros and cons each model offers to better educate you as you make faculty decisions in the future.

What is Nearshore Hiring?

The nearshore approach to hiring software engineers is a good compromise between having onsite staff and outsourcing staff halfway around the world. With the nearshore model, the technical staff you’ve hired is in a time zone close to the one your company is in, with no more than a three-hour time difference.

Pros: When hiring nearshore, there is likely to be a greater fluency in English, which will allow your current team to work more easily with the nearshore team than they would necessarily be able to with a country halfway around the world. The greatest advantage, of course, is that the communication lags that happen with teams working many time zones apart are lessened.
Cons: This can be more costly than other outsourcing options. Also, even though the new team is in a timezone closer to yours, there may still be a timezone difference to contend with (e.g., the difference between Eastern and Pacific timezones). It is important to clarify core shared working hours to ensure the team's optimal productivity.

What is Offshore Hiring?

When hiring provisional workers offshore, these are teams located halfway around the world or so from your company. For example, a software company in Arizona might outsource some of its workload to a team in Eastern Europe or Russia.

Pros: There is more engineering talent available overseas in places like India and China, so this widens your options when it comes to hiring for a specific skill set. This is especially beneficial if you need an engineer, or engineers with a special talent to work on a specific project. One of the other benefits of hiring offshore is that the costs are generally lower than onsite or nearshore options.
Cons: There are two main cons to this option, the first being that there is likely to be a significant language barrier, which can lead to miscommunications, and tension between your onsite staff and the offshore staff. The other main issue is the significant time zone differences will limit how often the teams can be in contact with each other, which, in addition to being frustrating, can slow down progress on projects.

Encora Can Help with Your Engineering Needs

As you work to expand your company and develop products, Encora is here to help with product architecture design to help you have the best design possible. If you need agile product development, Encora has skilled product engineers who can help. Whether you need product deployment support or product testing, validation, and verification on the back end, Encora has talented engineers who can walk your company through these processes.

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What is Onsite Hiring?

When you need to hire software engineers to help your full-time employees, a simple and convenient way is to use the onsite option. This means that you’ll hire technical staff to work at your office for a set amount of time. It is, in short, outsourcing your faculty needs, but they’ll be working out of your office for the period of the contract.

Pros: Your enhanced staff will be working from your office and able to work face to face with your current staff. This allows for easy communication and eliminates the time delays that can be an issue when teams are working in different time zones. It is also easier for your staff to work with people who are onsite with them, which eliminates some of the potential tensions that can arise when your current team is working with people offsite.
Cons: There are costs associated with onsite hirings, such as the physical space needed for additional workspaces and all the equipment involved with bringing on more staff. There’s also the learning curve issue, since all the new staff will need to be educated about how your company works.

Nearshore Engineering Services