In my experience, my Sri Lankan colleagues are some of the most reliable, responsible and dedicated professionals that I have ever worked with.
If you value technical soundness, tenacity, and creativity, that is. For everything we say about how the modern education system educates creativity out of our children, I’ve found local talent to be some of the best when it comes to getting the job done. Good programmers know how to follow documentation and put things together, but great programmers look at what’s in front of them and figure out ingenious ways to build something totally new. The latter is the common thread which binds every great programmer the world has ever known.
Tech – The great catalyst for Sri Lanka
While the country awaits a deal with the IMF, I believe tech can be a powerful tool through which the economy can stage a rapid recovery. Sri Lanka’s IT industry doubled between 2015 and 2020, both in terms of revenue and the size of the workforce. By 2030, the industry could very well generate over US $ 6 billion in revenue, if it plays its cards right. Also, consider this: The total investment to produce a graduate amounts to nearly LKR 1.6 million (i.e. the cost of a bachelor’s degree from a private institute). But, the value each IT professional can generate in a single calendar year alone is many multiples of that. Not many industries can boast of such great investment dynamics (Source).
Imagine how much better things could be if we could reduce the cost and time taken to produce a tech grad, so that they can at least have a foot in the door?
The two choices before us
Now, there are two ways to get things moving in the right direction. You can push for top-down change (i.e. at the policy level), or get things going at the grassroots level. The former is necessary though time-consuming, but the latter is very much doable. And if the results are good enough, pushing for policy-level change will be so much easier.
Springboard is a 12-month, fully-funded coding bootcamp we’ve put together to support talented students get into tech. Calcey’s own engineers and industry leaders will guide them while they learn from a globally recognized curriculum of MOOCs, and they will be tested each semester by us. Students will be able to attend weekly mentoring sessions, and will get the chance to meet and interact with accomplished tech professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds (and a lot of interesting stories). Once they graduate, they can seek out an internship at any company they like!
We chose to put together a curriculum consisting of MOOCs simply because they’re proven, recognised, and are of a high standard. We’ve vetted them personally and can vouch for their quality. Sometimes, we even use them to train our own people on emerging technologies.
Why are we doing this?
The way we see it, we are simply giving back to society and doing our part to widen the pool of tech talent in Sri Lanka. We owe a debt of gratitude to Sri Lanka’s public education system which produced the awesome people who built Calcey into what it is today, and this is our way of paying back our dues.
Now that you know the what, the why, and the how behind Springboard, I have one more favor to ask you. We want to make sure we can award as many scholarships as we possibly can, and would be really glad if you could spread the word. Applications close on November 30th, which means whoever wishes to apply has 15 more days to do so.
Pete Deemer needs no introduction among the Agile software community. A key member of the Scrum Alliance who served as its chairperson in 2017, Pete has over 25 years of experience in guiding product development teams. He is the lead author of ‘The Distributed Scrum Primer’, a guide to multi-location Scrum and ‘The Scrum Primer’, one of the most widely read introductions to Agile development. Pete shared some insights and lessons from 20 years of product ownership with us recently, and here are some key takeaways:
How to speed up a development team
Asking a development team to simply work harder and faster, while giving them words of encouragement does not have a lasting impact. As the pressure increases and the team works longer hours, although output may increase for a while, burnout sets in soon after. Recovering from this is extremely difficult – quality reduces drastically while output rarely goes back to the same level it was.
When a programmer rushes, they make more mistakes. When a tester rushes, they find fewer mistakes.
Smart product owners therefore should identify ways in which to increase output without the risk of burnout. They can do this using the Agile methodology ‘Lean’: improve efficiency by eliminating waste. A key part of this is to reduce impediments. Pete defines an impediment as ‘anything that gets in our way, interrupts us, distracts us, causes mistakes, creates rework, causes waste, hurts our motivation or stops us from being as good as we can be’.
Identifying any and all impediments that the team has or foresees as early as possible, and figuring out how to navigate them or reduce them is greatly beneficial to the overall productivity of the team. It allows output to increase and stay at a high level for longer periods. Teams work the same hours but at a more sustainable pace, and are therefore less exhausted as they encounter fewer hurdles. Additionally, the work the team produces is often of high quality in this situation. It’s important that product owners create an environment of openness for the team to express themselves and be honest about all impediments they have – even if certain impediments are caused by the product owners themselves!
How to handle new requirements or – half of what you think you want, you don’t need, and a lot of what you actually need, you haven’t thought of yet!
A fundamental reality of product ownership is not knowing exactly which direction a product is heading. It is therefore vital to be able to adjust and change the sails and change course without causing disruption or panic.
During a Scrum Kickoff, the product owner identifies the product goal and creates a product backlog that consists of features or stories – things of direct value to customers or users. These are known as product backlog items (PBIs). PBIs are then broken down to smaller features, and organized into sprints to work towards the final release. However, a product owner may think of a brilliant idea for a new feature that will greatly enhance the product halfway through product development. Simply adding this new feature in without making any adjustments to the existing PBIs will cause a delay and disrupt the process as the overall product backlog increases.
There are four key factors that come into play when thinking about products – scope, schedule, cost and quality. These are interlinked, and a change in one aspect often results in a change in one or more of the others. Eg: If the product owner tries to increase the scope but not adjust the schedule and cost, the quality may see a drop.
It is important to note that, if the product owner and team do not willingly change each factor to reflect changes in the others, the changes may occur in unplanned and unexpected ways. This will often have a negative impact on the overall progress of the product.
Therefore, to make allowances for new PBIs, the best option is to find PBIs or features that are of lower value and replace those with the new features. The overall scope stays the same as it is being balanced, and the value of the product increases (as your new addition is likely of higher value than the PBIs that were removed).
Flexibility is key in good product ownership and Pete reiterates that ‘we have not had our best ideas yet. Our best ideas are still to come. And we need to be prepared to respond to that.’
You don’t pick when your good ideas come. They come when they’re ready to come.
How to structure a product backlog
To be able to remove and replace PBIs, it is important to realistically evaluate the true value of each. Sorting PBIs by priority and value allows room for any adjustments to be made – such as if the team finds they need more time to fix a high value feature, or the product owner needs to add a new feature halfway through. This also allows the team to make any adjustments based on user feedback from beta testing. Similarly, if due to some reason the release date has been reached but some PBIs are incomplete, it will have only a minor effect on the overall value of the product as the items left out are of relatively low-value.
Pete recommends having a ‘Scope Buffer’– PBIs that can be dropped, or postponed to a later release. This way, even if they remain incomplete by the release, a high-value product can still be delivered without delay. The ‘MoSCoW prioritization’ can help product owners prioritize their PBIs. It groups PBIs into the following categories – ‘Must have’, ‘Should have’, ‘Could have’ and
‘Won’t have’. ‘Must have’ items should be placed high on the PBI list, followed by ‘Should have’, ‘Could have’ and finally, ‘Won’t have’ items. This method ensures that no matter what, a minimum viable product can be created within the planned time frame.
One certain thing product owners should know – things won’t go as planned!
How to work effectively with remote teams
Establishing connections with people you haven’t met, and who are in a geographically separate location is not easy. However, with remote work becoming the norm, there are ways to navigate some of the oft-encountered barriers. Pete believes that trust is what enables a product owner to get the most out of a team.
Trust is a force multiplier
In a low-trust environment, developers don’t ask questions, hide mistakes, ignore concerns, cover up problems, and pretend all is well until it is too late. However, in a high trust environment, developers are open and honest – questions are asked, thus fewer mistakes are made, and concerns are brought up, ensuring that problems get tackled early. An environment that promotes trust and values honesty (even if that honesty brings up things the product owner doesn’t like to hear!) is vital when working with remote teams.
Some ways through which trust can be built:
Establishing real, human relationships at the start: Pete encourages any product owner to take the extra time, spend the money and meet the development team at least once at the beginning of a partnership. This helps the team see the product owner as a real person, and helps establish a connection between all parties. If it is not possible to physically visit the team, engaging in online icebreakers and team activities that encourage people to share information about themselves, their interests outside of work etc. help to promote the relationship between product owners and their teams.
Understand the inherent power differential: There will always be a difference in power dynamics between the team and the product owner, and it is important for product owners to be aware of this when working with the team.
Show respect, and reward honesty
Be mindful of language and communication barriers and biases: Establishing a common language for communication is important but it is equally important to be aware of the biases that come through the use of a language – such as English- that may not be the first language of either the team or the product owner. A key fact to remember is that proficiency of language is not an indicator of professional capability.
Agree on the ‘rules of the game’ and play by the rules: Eg. A product owner should not ask developers to be honest and then penalize them for their honesty.
Scale the communication and be aware of signal-to-noise: One of the main problems encountered by product owners and teams is miscommunication. Depending on how sensitive the matter is, the most suitable method of communication should be utilized. Eg: A text is alright for a quick clarification but an email would provide greater detail, while an audio call or video call would be the most preferable for a longer back and forth discussion. In-person meetings are the best choice for any high priority communication, as richness and fidelity is highest in this instance. It is up to the team and the product owner to determine the best method of communication for the circumstance.
Successful products don’t teach you anything, it’s the failures that do!
Building an exceptional and valuable product is no easy feat—both product owners and development teams have a responsibility to each other. Pete hopes that by sharing lessons learnt and knowledge acquired, he may help others avoid pitfalls while incorporating practices that benefit the team and product owners alike.
Also, if you want to learn more about how to build great software and digital products using a remote team, go check out our Remote Team Playbook. A complete recording of Pete’s webinar is available here.
A few days ago, our client Upflexannounced raising a round of Series A funding from a collective of strategic investors which includes WeWork, Newmark, Cushman & Wakefield, and the Silicon Valley Bank 🎉
Of course, we are really happy too. As Upflex’s engineering partner throughout, we’ve directly been involved in helping Upflex get to where it is today. We’ve navigated the ups-and-downs of building a startup together, including that fire walk every founding team has to endure—finding product-market fit.
In the five years since inception, Upflex has signed up names such as American Express, Richemont, Trinet, FlexJobs, Stella Connect, and Schneider Electric as customers, and Colliers International as a partner. More recently, the company partnered with Anarock to expand operations in India, and its digital platform covers more than 5,500 office spaces in 75 countries. All in all, the future is looking bright for Upflex, but the seeds of this growth were planted a long time ago.
In 2017, We Got A Call…📲
…from Upflex’s co-founders, Christophe Garnier and Ginger Dhaliwal. That’s when it all began. At the time, Christophe and Ginger had a rough-around-the-edges idea to build a digital platform that allows companies to book flexible workspaces. In their possession was a partially completed MVP and a small budget which they had managed to put together by themselves.
Being non-technical founders, they were looking for someone to help complete the MVP and handle all end-to-end engineering duties if the MVP succeeded in gaining traction. We said yes, but on the condition that completing the MVP and taking it to market was going to be treated as a pilot project. We believe this is a better approach to developing software, as it allows both parties to understand whether they’re a good fit for each other. It’s also a very fair way of doing things, in our opinion.
The MVP garnered positive interest and we also liked working with Upflex, so we agreed to become Upflex’s engineering partner. In order to accommodate their limited budgets, we agreed to provide our services at a discounted rate. Not only did this unique agreement allow Upflex to continue working with us, but it also allowed us to perfectly align our incentives with those of the Upflex team.
That’s not all though. we even decided to become seed investors in the startup. To us, Christophe ticked all the boxes as a founder. He was passionate, resilient, and had a lot of experience in the industry. Being a founder-led company ourselves, we knew what it takes to build a thriving business, and in our eyes, Christophe had it all. Therefore, the decision to become a seed investor in Upflex was an easy one to make.
Pivot, Pivot, Pivot
Between what it is today, and how it was first conceptualised, Upflex has gone through many pivots in response to market conditions—as startups do. In 2018, Upflex operated as a marketplace that allowed anyone to book a shared office space with ease. The company targeted business travelers who wanted a nice office space to work out of, and long commuters and remote employees who didn’t want to work from home but also didn’t want to spend hours on the road everyday.
Upflex’s value proposition in 2018, as described on its website. Source: The Wayback Machine
12 months later, Upflex realised that lots of companies were very interested in setting up distributed offices around the world without signing up for expensive leases. As this was a lucrative market that could provide a more stable revenue stream, Upflex decided to double down on it. We worked with Ginger, who by then was running Upflex’s product team, to roll out a slew of new features to support the company’s new direction. Among them was a portal that business customers could use to add team members on to their subscriptions and allocate usage limits on an individual basis. Once added, team members could book workspaces under the company’s name. At the end of the billing period, the company would be sent a single invoice to pay, sparing accountants from periodic headaches.
Launching SafeSpaces™
Then came COVID-19, and it necessitated another pivot. While the world collectively embarked on the single largest remote working experiment it had ever seen, many predicted the death of the office as we know it.
But Upflex correctly sensed that post-pandemic, there will be a significant subset of workers who wouldn’t want to work from home, but also would not want to put themselves through the misery of a long commute as before. Companies wanted to become as asset-light as possible (Why pay for office space that you don’t need?), but at the same time had to provide employees with a safe and hygienic office to work in. The latter contradicts the former, as you can’t vouch for safety and hygiene when you don’t actually have control over the upkeep of the building that houses the office. There was also another side of remote work that was becoming more apparent with every passing day. New employees to 100% remote workforces were finding it hard to build social bonds with coworkers, and as a result, collaborative cultures carefully nurtured over time were at risk of falling apart.
SafeSpaces™ is Upflex’s answer to this trilemma. Under the SafeSpaces™ program, companies can provide employees with flexible workspaces that meet CDC and WHO standards, thus providing them and their families much-needed peace of mind. Employees can choose from any of Upflex’s 5,500+ workspaces around the world and make bookings by themselves.
Late nights, deadlines, and disciplined iteration
Driving rapid iteration and hitting every deadline is no walk in the park. Things become even more complicated when you consider that our team in Sri Lanka has to work around a 9.5 hour time difference with NYC, where Upflex’s team is based. But we never shied away from the challenge, and simply found ways to adapt.
On some days, that meant scheduling calls at odd hours for both sides. It’s not easy (They have their own lives too!), but we trusted our teams to find a balance that worked for them. It also meant investing a lot of time and effort into building trust with Ginger and the product team at Upflex, as that is the bedrock of a strong working relationship.
Anticipating customer needs
In keeping with Upflex’s pivot to adapt to a post-COVID world, our product engineering team worked tirelessly to introduce a ton of new products and features. For instance, we built a set of white labeled apps that can be used by third party real estate brokers to sell workspaces to their own clients. We rolled out intelligent local currency billing to eliminate currency conversion hassles, and introduced QR check-in. Each and every product and feature was carefully built to complement the existing mobile app, which again, was built by us. We understood that in a future where work will be distributed, customers would rate singular, convenient, and zero-contact experiences very highly. It was also a good way to differentiate Upflex’s value proposition from its competitors.
Upflex’s story shows what happens when you deploy software smartly to solve real world problems. Of course, it also helps to have a proactive engineering partner like us 😉
Looking to build a cutting edge digital product of your own? Talk to us to find out how we can help!
Calcey has been again recognised as one of the country’s 10 Best IT/ITeS Workplaces by Great Place to Work® Sri Lanka. The award is based on extensive ratings provided by a company’s employees in an anonymous survey conducted by Great Place to Work® in Sri Lanka during the study 2021 – 2022.
The Great Place to Work® institute assesses all awardees using the Great Place to Work® Framework, a proprietary model. According to the 2021-2022 Study, the key drivers of employee perception in the IT/ITeS Industry are Manager Reliability, Management Role Modeling, Mental Health, Good Facilities, Managers Keep Promises, and Egalitarian Treatment.
“Receiving this award, particularly for the second consecutive year, is an immensely satisfying achievement as it proves that the Calcey Way—the set of guiding principles behind Calcey are functioning the way they should. As an exporter of knowledge-related services, our people are our most important asset. This award will inspire us to raise the bar regarding what a great workplace can be,” said Mangala Karunaratne, founder and CEO of Calcey.
Calcey is a Gartner-recognised technology consulting and software product engineering services provider based in the United States and Sri Lanka. For more information visit www.calcey.com
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and recognition programs, including Great Place to Work-CertifiedTM, Best Workplaces™ lists and workplace reviews, Great Place to Work® provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures. Follow Great Place to Work online at www.greatplacetowork.com or www.greatplacetowork.lk
A few weeks ago, we gave our people the opportunity to have their salaries pegged to the US dollar. It turned more than a few heads, and lots of people asked us why we did so.
I also saw a fair share of criticism from some people. I don’t know why, so my knee-jerk reaction would have been to respond with something like this:
However, now that I’m older and (hopefully) wiser, I slept over it, and decided to write this blog post instead.
Why did we peg salaries to the dollar? Simply because it was the right thing to do.
“To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing” – Elbert Hubbard
Sri Lanka is home to our development center. The country’s economy is going through a really rough patch at the moment. And with inflation hitting all time highs even in the US, I don’t need to tell you how a frontier market like Sri Lanka is doing.
Raghuram Rajan, (Economist, Professor at Chicago Booth, and one time RBI Governor) once said that inflation is a tax which affects the poor the worst. He’s right. Inflation reduces your disposable income while you sleep.
As a founder, I don’t want our people to feel the heat of rising prices, just because a central banker or politician miles away is bad at his job. And companies with unhappy people don’t stay in business for too long either.
As an exporter of services, Calcey benefits from a depreciating rupee as we bill in dollars and pay in rupees. By giving our people the option to peg their salaries to the US dollar, all we’re doing is sharing the benefit we gain from a depreciating currency with our team so they may sleep easy at night. Our salary pegging scheme is entirely voluntary, and we went so far as to offer it to all current employees who originally didn’t opt-in to the pegged salary scheme. We let them opt-in even after the Sri Lankan rupee was devalued overnight. At Calcey, we absolutely love the talented rock stars who work with us.
Calcey has a flat hierarchy and a no B.S. culture. The request for inflation-protected salaries first came from our own employees, and we acted fast to respond. We take so much pride in buying fair trade products, so why shouldn’t an employer show that same sense of fairness to its people? After all, they’re the reason we’ve been in business for the last two decades.
The main reason why we opted to peg salaries is because local labor laws prohibit us from paying people in other currencies. Even if we somehow found a way, those funds will still be subject to mandatory conversion rules. By pegging salaries, people will still get all their statutory benefit payments while their incomes are protected from inflation. Win-win!
We’re proud that we’ve been able to do this at Calcey, and we will gladly shout about it from the rooftops. If all employers in Sri Lanka decide to do this, we will be overjoyed about being able to blaze a trail in our own little way. We hope all peers who follow our path apply the pre-devaluation exchange rate to calculate base salaries in the interest of fairness.
If you’re reading this, and you don’t work at Calcey (yet), I invite you to come join us. We’re hiring! If you join us before May, your base salary (for pegging purposes) will be calculated at the pre-depreciation rate of 198.50. We will also let you work on multiple awesome projects in a flexible, remote-first work culture, and much more ✌
-Mangala
Mangala Karunaratne is the founder and CEO of Calcey.
We are officially rolling out a USD-pegged remuneration scheme for all employees. The scheme is being implemented to safeguard salaries from exchange rate-induced inflation.
“Our employees raised concerns about the impact currency depreciation may have on domestic price levels, and we devised this scheme in response to ensure that their living standards don’t take an undue hit due to exceptional macroeconomic factors,” said Gehan Dias, General Manager of Calcey. “The scheme is entirely voluntary and operates on an opt-in basis” he emphasized.
“Our people are our most valuable asset, and we’d like to actually walk the talk when it comes to treating them so. That’s the key motivation behind implementing this policy in its present form, and is just one of many other things we do to keep Calcey a happy and great place to work” concluded Ishara Walpola, Calcey’s Director – People and Culture.
Working from home was not a novel concept to Calcey, but Covid-19 saw our teams having to strategize and set themselves up for long-term virtual work. Upon feedback from employees, Calcey made the informed decision to become a remote-first company in April 2021. We reached out to a few people, some old hats and some new to Calcey, to find out how it’s been going so far. Here’s what they had to say!
The good
The general consensus was that remote work was much preferred over working full-time from the office. For employees such as Dhanura, it allowed him to live at home instead of having to stay in Colombo. ‘I love that I can be in my hometown, with my family and still work for Calcey. I used to travel every Friday to come back to Anuradhapura and working remotely saves me all that travelling. In terms of flexibility also, Calcey is way ahead. Everyone on the team is friendly and can be contacted at any time. I get to know my teammates through little chit-chats we have while waiting for pages to load or uploads to finish.
For new parent Hasaru, working from home allowed him to be a hands-on father to his now ten-month-old daughter. ‘My wife and I take turns with the responsibilities, depending on our schedules. Some days she watches the baby more and other days I do. It’s an amazing thing, to be able to watch your child grow up and be there for the important moments. I’m happy I get that chance’.
For Sahan, who left Calcey in 2019 and rejoined in September this year, it was an interesting change. ‘The work-life balance, as well as productivity, is good when you work from home. Not having to commute daily from Panadura is also a huge plus‘.
Those new to Calcey too, had mostly positive things to say. ‘So far, so good’ says Avindu, who joined Calcey in February this year. ‘Having been in the industry for a while, it isn’t overly difficult to work remotely.’ Avindu also enjoys the freedom of being able to have a personalized and comfortable workspace, which affords him maximum productivity.
Adjusting was a bit smoother for long-term employees like Sasanka, an SSE who has risen up the ranks at Calcey. ‘Working from home is less distracting and I find I can focus more. It also allows flexibility – if there is something urgent at home, you can plan your work day around it. I’ve also found that people on the team are quite independent and don’t need constant supervision- everyone does their work well.’
Some bad, and the occasional ugly
The main downside of remote work for most people was the lack of human interaction. ‘Everyone used to know everyone when you were in the office’ says Sahan. ‘Now you only know people within your team. We also used to have a lot of fun at the office and joke around and would randomly go out after work. But these days meeting up takes a lot of planning’.
When asked if they felt there was a culture shift along with remote work, Hasaru, Sasanka and Sahan all agreed that there was, but that it wasn’t necessarily in a bad way. The ‘work-hard-play-hard’ motto of Calcey still persisted, just in a different way. ‘It takes new joiners a while to realize that Calcey has a chilled-out work culture. They tend to overwork at the start but then, with time, realize how to balance things’ says Sasanka.
For those who do not have a dedicated workspace, concentrating and being on video calls proved to be a tad challenging. This was remedied by Calcey supporting its employees in building their own workspaces at home. People also found that reading one another and sensing whether or not someone needed help was tougher to do virtually. Coordinating with a number of teams simultaneously now required more effort and bad connectivity, especially during adverse weather, would occasionally lend to the frustration.
The way forward
The current hybrid arrangement of being able to work from the office or work from home is one that seems to please everyone. ‘It’s good to have the option of going to the office and I do this whenever I need to be in Colombo for anything. The resources in the office are great so work can be done fast’ says Hasaru.
Calcey’s office space at Trace Expert City, Colombo 10 is maintained at Covid-19 safety standards and allows employees to pre-book a slot for the day they would like to come in (a maximum of 20 slots are available in keeping with regulations). Teams have used this system to meet in person after months, and bond for at least a few hours. Most found that, once this initial contact was made, working together felt easier.
‘Remote work is all about managing yourself. If you make sure you have a routine, work to a schedule and do things the right way, then it’s easy’. These words of wisdom from Sasanka certainly hold true. Calcey prides itself on well-managed teamwork while placing the utmost trust in our employees to do nothing short of their best. Adaptability is part of the ‘Calcey Way’ and we are confident that we can make the best of any situation that comes our way in the future.
We’re proud to announce that Calcey has been recognised as one of the best workplaces for Millennials by Great Place to Work® Sri Lanka. We won this accolade based on extensive ratings provided by our employees in an anonymous survey conducted by Great Place to Work® in Sri Lanka during 2020 – 2021.
“As a millennial myself, I always try to look beyond the pay slip and venture more into what this company can offer, whether this culture will embrace me like one of their own, whether it has a clear purpose that we can be proud of, and whether the company invests in the growth of its employees. And Calcey easily ticks all these boxes. We have a vibrant culture. Everyone is very helpful, and that’s why I love Calcey as a millennial”, said Chomal Miguntenne, an Associate Tech Lead at Calcey.
“It is indeed an honor to be recognised as one of the best workplaces in the country for a cohort of employees who are now entering their prime years as professionals. As employers, we have a responsibility to invest in them, as they are going to be the drivers of our future growth” said Mangala Karunaratne, founder and CEO of Calcey.
Commenting on the award, Gehan Dias, our General Manager said “The millennial generation of employees are different from those before them in that they are driven to harness their talents to the maximum, and possess a strong sense of ethics. They demand more of themselves and their employers, which motivates both parties to aim to continuously raise the bar for excellence”.
Calcey is a Gartner-recognised technology consulting and software product engineering services provider based in the United States and Sri Lanka. For more information visit www.calcey.com
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and recognition programs, including Great Place to Work-CertifiedTM, Best Workplaces lists and workplace reviews, Great Place to Work® provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures.
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Developing an app? Here’s how to choose between an in-house and a remote development team
When building a tech company every founder and CTO needs to decide how they will structure their tech team. The options available are fairly well established.
Hire developers that work with you in your office (in-house team)
Hire developers who will work from home (remote team)
Hire a team of developers provided by an external software development agency. Often such agencies would be off-shore and hence work remotely with you
What’s best for you? The short answer is – it depends. The cost will play an important role in this decision, but there are several non-quantifiable factors you need to consider too. If you’d like to compare the likely cost of an in-house team vs a remote team provided by an agency we’ve broken down the costs of an in-house dev team in New York here. Here’s everything else you need to consider, other than cost/budgets;
Can you attract the best local talent?
There is a huge difference between a 10x developer vs a journeyman. This is relevant with anything, not just software development. But, software by nature has strong asymmetric returns. For example— a brilliant developer may singlehandedly create an MVP of a product that goes on to become a billion-dollar company, while a mediocre developer may write a lot of code that simply gets scrapped. The time and effort put in may not be different but the end results may vary wildly. In software, as in many other fields with asymmetric returns, the best talent isn’t only a fraction better than the mediocre players. What they produce is exponentially better in value.
The question at hand is ‘Are you going to attract the best talent in your locality?’ If you’re based in a tech hub, your chances of acquiring that top talent will likely be low when you compete with giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. But you shouldn’t be discouraged. Rather than sticking to your locality, make the whole world your hiring market. Go remote.
2. Is speed your priority?
Studies show that “the average hiring time for a software development engineer in 2017 was 41 days“. On top of recruitment time, A typical team needs to go through a process of team development i.e. forming, norming, storming, and performing, before they can operate at peak levels. If you’re in a race against time to get to market ahead of the competition, hiring a ‘ready-made team’ from an external agency will help you avoid these obstacles altogether. When time is of the essence, a team from an agency with a prior working history will always reach the ‘performing’ stage faster and you’ll end up saving months in recruitment time too.
3. Lean and focused teams are in
Auren Hoffman is right when he says that “Almost every company spends over 95% of its time doing what every other company does. And it spends less than 5% of its time on things that are unique to the company. This makes no sense.” It’s a well-known fact that larger teams move slower and are harder to coordinate compared to smaller teams. Simply keeping everyone on the same page (more difficult than you’d expect in the highly dynamic world of technology) becomes an almost impossible task as team size grows. At Calcey we are huge fans of Jeff Bezos’ ‘two pizza teams’ concept and we organize our software development teams accordingly.
So how can you keep your core team lean and focused? You outsource through external agencies for everything other than for the few key core competencies that make your business unique. Surprisingly, software development doesn’t fall into this category even at some tech companies. Sometimes, their core competency may very well be product design, branding, and customer relationship management.
4. How specialized is your business domain?
If you’re in a niche, complex business and your software project requires a deep understanding of your domain, then opting for an in-house software development team makes sense. They can learn and absorb your business domain over time rather than forcing you to spend considerable time and energy teaching an outsourced software development team about your business. You would also not be able to directly control churn within your remote development provider’s team and hence may need to repeat this onboarding process again and again if too many experienced hands leave the team.
5. Are you willing to invest in a team?
What’s the type of team that comes to your mind when you think of developing software? Do you imagine a team made up of 3 or 4 developers? Or a team with developers and other supporting roles such as PMs, Software Architects, and QA engineers? Just a couple of developers might do when you’re starting out and only looking to create a scrappy MVP. But once you need to operate at scale; serve a sizable user base and integrate with 3rd party apps in your ecosystem etc. this bare-bones team will quickly reach its limits. At that point, it would be time to bring in the supporting roles and get your developers who were previously shipping code at abandon, accustomed to industry-standard development practices. This isn’t always an easy transition, and any technical debt created by your original developers would be exposed and will need to be fixed.
If you’d rather avoid these growing pains or don’t want to invest to create a fully-fledged development team, it makes sense to go with a remote development agency that can provide a fully-fledged team that can manage the full software development life cycle from day one.
6. How much flexibility do you need?
Software products often need to change tech stacks as they mature. Furthermore, development may have to speed up and slow down at different points in time. If you opt for an in-house team it’s worth considering how you will manage such changes. Can your team re-skill when you need to change tech stacks? Will you be able to hire quickly when you need to speed up development and have flexible staffing arrangements in place to ramp down the team when you slow down?
Often this is where an external agency will shine. Their business model revolves around managing staffing requests and serving clients using a variety of technologies. So flexibility and versatility are often baked into their mindset and contracts.
7. You don’t know what you don’t know
When confronting a challenge your solutions are typically generated by your prior experiences. It’s very likely that there are better solutions out there, but we can only consider a sub-set of these solutions— those that we know of. So what does this mean? Simply put, the broader your perspective the better.
Having a broad perspective is easier said than done in the dynamic world of technology. The industry evolves at a breakneck pace and new frameworks, libraries, and tools are constantly introduced. How many of these latest and greatest tools we are exposed to depends on how often we are faced with the novel, fresh challenges. Ideally, a highly motivated developer would keep in touch with the latest developments, but given the pace of change in the industry, this is impossible. So necessity is a better driver of learning.
What all this means is that an in-house tech team that is embedded in one business domain and a narrow technology stack will often have a narrower perspective and idea set in comparison to an outsourced agency which is more versatile due to the nature of their business.
Principally, both approaches to software development are beneficial, however, their effectiveness can vary depending on the situation. Remote development comes at the benefit of providing a broader, more versatile team while in-house development gives your developers a deeper understanding of the project. On the other hand, in-house teams come with the headache of time spent on recruiting and finding people with the right ambitions to help the company in their core business functions. The added benefit of having a remote development team is they often have more flexibility which is better than having less. Which option you go with depends on your own unique circumstances, but whatever it is, choose wisely.
Look, we are hiring. And we’ve got lots of openings.
But we know that switching employers is not easy. There is a lot you may not know about a new company. Who will I work with? What is life like at this company?, and so on. These are all valid questions and you have every right to know the answers to them.
The traditional interview process can make it harder to coax the information you need out of an interviewer. That is why we decided to switch things up a little.
#WhatsUpCalcey is a brand new recruitment initiative from us that is aimed at giving experienced developers the chance to understand the Calcey Way by talking to our own senior managers whom you will work with side by side on a daily basis. Moreover, you will be able to do so at your own convenience!
If your profile fits our immediate requirements, you will be able to schedule a call with one of our senior managers immediately. On this call, you will be able to talk to them and ask any relevant question, no strings attached. It’s an exploratory chat after all.
If you come away impressed with Calcey, our no B.S approach to work, and our remote-first operating model, you can let us know if you’d like to join us. We will then fast track your interview and take care of the rest.
What’re you waiting for? Go check out #WhatsUpCalcey now!
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