Few things accelerated pushes for transformation, nor pushed forward digital iniatives quite like Covid. IT decision makers have since announed that the pandemic brought their transformation ahead by as much as five years, as they sought to diversify their offerings and get ahead of the competition on the road to digital first. To go to digital first is to create new products and services with digital at their core. Why? Their customers are increasingly living in a digital world and have corresponding desires, expectations, and demands. They key to this is software, placing at the heart of an organisation. However, in order for that to work, businesses need top-tier software talent and that can sometimes require staff augmentation.
The seller’s market
Organisations in Western Europe, North America, and Australia are aware of this need for skills. The problem they face is an acute monopolisation by large tech corporations, including the giants of the industry, when it comes to top developers locally. It doens’t mean that hiring locally is off the cards, just that it comes at a premium and that as the cream of the crop go to the biggest players, there’s not always enough to go round for everyone else. Staff augmentation with overseas engineers used to be about reducing costs, but today it’s more often than not about reducing skills gaps in an existing development workforce.
Overcoming the obstacle of talent
Due in part to the pandemic mainstreaming remote work, and by extension the idea of working with teams outside of their locality, business leaders have accepted new ways of accessing and working with software talent. This acceptance has manifested itself in the form of various working models: including outsourcing, staff augmentation, and offshoring. These phrases are often used interchangeably, but there are characteristics of each which separate them
Outsourcing vs offshoring vs staff augmentation
Outsourcing is great for project-based things, like a one-off app or helps with a temporarily bulging pipeline of work. However, there’s no cultural buy-in from the engineers, they’re picked and chosen by the software vendor. Staff augmentation can sometimes be a synonym for that. Likewise, it can also be used as a synonym for a dedicated offshore team – full-time colleagues who work for a business in the exact same way as the local engineers do. This is a more long-term, high-value solution for businesses that want to scale up with highly talented engineers but can’t find them at home.