Ask HN: Is setting up a remote team of developers in India worth it?

Possibly cue South Park Super Cool Ski Instructor meme. If your first-stated reason "to talk" is "more than 80% worth of discounts", then you're going to have a bad time if the work you are outsourcing is at all highly-skilled. For highly-routinized process work by ops staff, sure, knock yourself out; but you're going to find extremely qualified folks for that in the heartland of the US working for wages competitive with the offshore outfits as well.

How logical is it that you will find someone smart enough to hack full-stack or even a Fabrice Bellard-grade hacker, but not savvy enough to sift through sales channels until they command a rate commensurate with their demonstrated delivery capabilities? This is unicorn-hunting. They do exist, you can land them, but in the meantime your competitors are focusing on Getting Shit Done by not wasting time trying to prematurely optimize their expense structure. If these unicorns were so easily abundant, and if it was that easy, then Google would have long since abandoned recruiting at American universities.

You might have better results if you specified in more detail what you are looking for. Generally, my experience is that coding talent is roughly evenly smeared across the global pool; I'm looking generally for devops types that know their OS's, basic data and control structures in an Algol'ish language (scripted and/or compiled), and work well when customer-facing. There isn't enough difference between geographies to alter the basic recruitment search strategy though tactics will differ (the technical culture is relatively consistent across the globe). Not enough difference to yield dramatically better returns at least, so nationality won't determine whether you get "lower quality" or "outdated" coders. In my experience, individuals' personalities and company culture has a far greater impact on code quality than nationality or ethnicity.

In my market space, given how long it really takes to absorb a significant technical base, on the order of 12-18 months, I'm not inclined to "yield chase" by trying to find cheap technical staff with a turnover that is frequently sooner than that spin-up time before truly insightful work from them starts to get traction. YMMV, so please share your details.

I am original from India (now in New York), and I have hired over 40 developers, designers and marketers in New Delhi over the past few years.

You can hire good developers in India for $1,000 to $2,000 per month. It is viable to hire team in India, but hiring and managing them remotely is a nightmare. Remote teams in India are unreliable and not committed.

In India, you need hustle with your team to get shit done. The only way it is going to work is if you have someone one the ground.

Hiring good developers in India is difficult, retaining them is worse. Good developers are constantly bombarded by recruiters with very lucrative offers.

My 2 cents, It can be worth while if you want to go to India and build a development team. Stay away from outsourcing companies, they are only going to sink your time and money.

"quality of their code is very outdated" ??

What does that mean exactly? "Outdated" is not an adjective usually applied to "quality".

Don't forget (and this applies to any outsourcing contract, anywhere in the world), the first people you encounter will be the A-grade talent.

Once the project kicks off the they will one-by-one be moved off to the next deal, and replaced with less experienced juniors and trainees.

You can try to contractually lock in particular people, but that's impossible to guarantee if the team is remote.

It really depends on whether you want to outsource development or actually want a remote (but in house) dev team in India.

Most comments here are already inherently considering the remote team to be code monkeys who will churn out software based on specs. There is no magic here, to get good code, you need devs who are invested in the idea, and not second class citizens in the company.

Invest the same amount of resources into hiring people as you would here, pay not just a good but a great salary, make the Indian office a good place to work, where employees actually have a ladder to climb and have input in the product, and all this can work.

And yes, that most likely means having someone on the ground in the early days.

You can't expect in attract great talent with half assed hiring measures and an intent to get code on the cheap. Those people are happy doing their own startups or working somewhere else.