The demand for talented software engineers and general tech workers is at an all-time high, with the unemployment rate for the industry as a whole sitting below 2%–with no signs of abating.
This shortage of tech talent has forced companies, both large and small, to find new solutions for the search of experienced developers. Many American firms are turning to software outsourcing to solve this problem.
Rather than outsourcing to save money, the new generation of executives is looking abroad to expand their access to top talent and add valuable programmers to their team that are not available domestically. The top software services have a wide network of the best tech professionals in their countries, allowing American companies to hire the top 1% of IT workers, no matter where they are located. This article will investigate this industry development and determine why software outsourcing is becoming such a popular solution to the tech talent crisis.
Access Top Talent
The American tech industry has long been known as one of the most desirable industries in the world, able to attract the top graduates in any field. Companies like Google and Apple developed reputations for their rigorous hiring standards and processes. However, the rising importance of tech in other industries like finance, medicine, and customer service has increased the demand for these workers and created a shortage of talented developers that even the most recognizable companies are beginning to take notice of.
Companies in both America and the European Union have begun utilizing outsourcing development services in order to expand their candidate search beyond their national borders. The best outsourcing services in every region should have access to recent graduates from the top universities in their countries, in addition to the most in-demand mid-career developers in their locale. These programmers have the same experience and capabilities as the best American workers, and are typically fluent in English, but have traditionally been overlooked because of the previous limitations associated with international communication.
Management and the Big Picture
Before a company can move forward with a major software development project, one of the first questions that they must ask themselves is: do we have the experience and resources necessary for our in-house managers to supervise this project? For many small and medium-sized businesses, the answer is no. Software development project management is a very unique and hard-won skill-set that is not found among most in-house tech supervisors.
By working with outside consultants with experience tackling a variety of development cycles, managers help reduce risk, increase time and monetary efficiency, and free themselves to focus on their company’s core business and most important clients.
One of the most popular outsourcing models for managers focused on overall strategy is an autonomous, end-to-end delivery team, which will take a company’s ideas and constraints and use those to create a professionally developed, user-friendly piece of software.
Alternatively, management can choose to simply augment their existing staff with outside software engineers, filling in their weaknesses and boosting their capabilities where needed most.
Start Projects Immediately
One of the most frustrating parts of any software development project is getting the process started once stakeholders and the development staff have agreed on a concept. Most companies maintain lean in-house programming staffs to reduce costs.
However, creating a piece of custom software is a labor and time-intensive job which requires a specialized skill-set. Recent job statistics show that it takes a month and a half or more to hire a mid-level employee in the tech field.
In an industry where just a few months can allow a competitor to reach customers first and dominate an emerging market, such a delay can have major consequences.
Rather than spending more than a month searching for new candidates, companies can turn to staff augmentation services to bolster their team immediately, or hire a delivery team to develop the software independently.
While traditional in-house recruiting teams must begin developing a list of candidates once directed, full-time outsourced development services have a long list of experienced software engineers ready to begin a project on-cue. The ability to instantly find and hire the perfect candidate is simply invaluable for time-sensitive projects such as these.
Remain Flexible
Another reason that many American firms are outsourcing development is to maintain a small permanent staff so that the company is ready to react to, and capitalize on, market developments as they occur.
Businesses which hire a large permanent staff have the advantage of accumulating institutional knowledge and can start new projects quickly, but these benefits saddle those same companies with huge salary commitments, a bloated tech department, and hinders their ability to rapidly reconfigure their staff when the business demands it.
Executives who are focused on the future and maintaining a lean core staff turn to software outsourcing companies to rapidly expand their staff during major development projects and ensure flexibility once the product is brought to market. Staff augmentation allows managers to fill in key gaps within their development team, such as bringing in an experienced Software Developer Engineer in Test and manual testers during the quality assurance stage of the development cycle, without committing to a long-term salary.
Increase Software Security
The single most important issue facing the software and technology industry is the rise of data breaches and the increasing sophistication of malicious actors. The number of major data hacks rose yet again in 2018, and is predicted to continuing getting worse over the next several years. This is why a recent survey of the technology industry found that 36% of software engineers “rank protecting applications from cyberattacks and data breaches as their top concern.”
The rising scale of the problem, combined with the increasing dominance of Software as a Service and the growing amount of data stored on the Internet of Things, means that successful managers must emphasize the importance of security during every step of the software development cycle.
One of the ways in which forward-thinking managers have proactively responded to this problem is by turning to outside security specialists to help design a development cycle that integrates security concerns, and test for a wide range of vulnerabilities during the quality assurance and testing phases.
