Feel free to add to these lists. Remember that these pros and cons will vary if you are a small startup for whom hiring remote devs is the only way out and if you are an international enterprise that can afford relocation of its best specialists.
As with anything in business, you always have two options: do it yourself or delegate it to people or companies with more expertise in the field. The decision will always depend on your budget and deadlines. See other advantages and pitfalls of outsourcing and finding the right candidate by yourself.| Pros | Cons |
| This is much cheaper than hiring a headhunter to find you the right specialist. | Searching and interviewing candidates can take a lot of time. |
| You can start your search without knowing the exact stack of skills you wish your dev had. | In this case, it will take you even more time. |
| You know your project better than any recruiter and hence, can be sure that your candidate understands your expectations correctly. You can also find out if you will be comfortable working with this person in the long run. | On the other hand, if you’re not skilled enough in recruitment, you can frighten up a good match. |
There must be no problems in managing the team that you already know. The practice of pandemic shows that if you have a committed team it’s easy and beneficial to work with it both offline and online. Moreover, some PMs and POs state that their team capacity has increased when they started working remotely.“It all depends on the developer. Those, who needed communication in the first place, will call you on every occasion. Those who needed micromanagement in the office will still need it in their apartments. Those, who used to work on individual schedules, coming to the office by 1 p.m. and leaving by night, will release their tasks at 5 a.m. and that’s fine. There must be no problems in working remotely if you have hired the right people willing to commit themselves to the project.” Iurii, PM in a product IT company, KyivBut what if we talk about managing a team that has never been in your office, lives in different time zones, is paid by the hour, and is less engaged in the project? The organization of the working processes remains almost the same in this case. You as a manager have to establish working methods and procedures for the team and keep tasks’ descriptions as precise as possible. Being a link between software developers, designers, webmasters, sales, and other departments in the company, you have to make sure that expectations of all members of the team are met and that everyone is happy and thus, ready to perform on the highest level.If you have a team of professionals able to estimate and track their work by themselves, there is no need for micromanagement, though it is crucial at the very beginning during the trial period for the newcomers. You can easily control your team remotely with the help of Jira, Zoom, GitHub, Slack, and other well-known tools. On the other hand, when working with the remote team, there is an increased need for one-on-one meetings and scheduled “coffee-breaks” and other team building activities. They are crucial to make sure that every member of your team keeps up with his or her OKRs, and that your people are still a team and not just a bunch of professionals who happened to work on the same project.
The main reason for hiring remote software developers is that the large pool of online specialists increases the competition among them and decreases the average dollars per hour rate. To prove this point, have a look at rates and salaries in different states. Some platforms provide vast statistics on the rates on job offers in crucial tech hubs in the USA:| City, state | Hourly rate |
| New York, NY | $72.72-91.92 |
| Sacramento, CA | $79.87-88.05 |
| Boulder, CO | $66.77-79.98 |
| San Jose, CA | $79.87-88.05 |
| Washington, DC | $65.17-79.98 |
| San Francisco, CA | $87.10-94.28 |
