What developer outsourcing actually looks like
The word has baggage
Nobody likes the word outsourcing. It's been attached to so many bad experiences — tickets ping-ponging between time zones, CVs that don't match reality, engineers who disappear mid-sprint — that most CTOs flinch when they hear it.
We do it anyway, because the underlying problem is real. Hiring is slow, expensive, and sometimes the work that needs to happen is too specific or too temporary to justify a full-time headcount. Developer outsourcing, done well, is a legitimate answer to that. Done badly, it's the horror story everyone has heard.
The honest version of what we do is closer to "senior engineers, short notice, in your stack, reviewed to your standard." Here's what that looks like day-to-day.
Week zero — the scoping call
Before anyone is assigned, we want to see the repo (or a representative slice of it), the tools your team uses, and the specific problem you want solved. Not a roadmap. One problem.
We push back hard on engagements where the client can't name a concrete first task. If we can't tell what the first PR will be, the engagement is going to drift — and drifting engagements are how outsourcing gets a bad reputation.
Week one — joining the team, not replacing it
The engineer we assign is already senior. They don't need onboarding in the "read these docs for two weeks" sense. What they need is:
- Repo access and the README you hopefully have
- An assigned reviewer on your team, ideally someone who cares about code quality
- The Slack channel where your engineering team actually talks
- A point of contact for product questions
That's it. Within 48 hours they're opening PRs. The first few PRs will be small on purpose — we want your team to see the code style, get comfortable pushing back, and build the review muscle.
Weeks two through twelve — the engagement's normal shape
After the first two weeks, you stop thinking of the engineer as "the outsource person." They're in your standup. They're in the on-call rotation if that makes sense. They're pushing back on your PRs the same way any senior engineer would. Their commits are indistinguishable from the rest of the team's in git blame.
This is the core thing about how we do it. The engineer is embedded, full-stop. They're not running a side Jira board. They're not waiting for a PM to hand them tickets. They're a member of your team who happens to be paid through us.
What we don't do
- We don't bill by the hour. Every engagement is a fixed monthly fee, paid in advance.
- We don't swap engineers mid-engagement. The person you interview is the person who ships.
- We don't escalate above the engineer's head. If you have a problem, you tell them, and they tell us. The person doing the work owns the relationship.
- We don't oversell. If your problem isn't a good fit for outsourcing, we'll say so and send you to a full-time hire instead.
The quiet reason it works
The reason outsourcing works for us is that we only do it with engineers we'd hire full-time. We don't have a bench of subcontractors. We don't have a recruiting arm. Every engineer on an outsourcing engagement is one of the four of us, or someone we've worked with for long enough that they're effectively a fifth.
That's a constraint. It's the reason we can't take every engagement we're offered. It's also the reason the ones we do take consistently outperform what clients expected.
If you're thinking about it
The question isn't "should I outsource." It's "is this specific problem small enough and well-defined enough to be solved by a senior engineer working embedded inside my team for a known time window." If yes, outsourcing — the good kind — is probably the cheapest way to solve it. If no, you need a hire.
We're happy to tell you which one you need on a 20-minute call. We'll do it even if the answer is "hire someone, don't work with us."
