Permanent Remote Work Opens Doors to Global Talent

Microsoft is the latest tech giant to permanently embrace remote work, joining Facebook and Twitter and many more. It’s one more company that has found remote work good for employees and businesses. It works, or why else would the largest tech companies make this pivot?

In a corresponding trend, more and more workers are looking to relocate. A Blind survey found that 66 percent of workers in the largest U.S. tech hubs would relocate if they could work from home full-time.

All-remote teams and mobile developers mean that geography is increasingly irrelevant for hiring. The ability to work from anywhere is good news for developers--they can live where they please, and no longer have to waste time and money commuting. It’s also good news for CTOs because they can hire great developers from anywhere in the world.

The shift to all-remote teams is also good news for global developers looking for opportunities to work for great companies outside their regions. While much of the world faces a shortage of engineers while millions of talented developers outside the country are looking for opportunities. And it is not changing. “There’s an ongoing situation of basically negative unemployment for developers,” said Nicolas Brien, CEO France Digitale, an industry organization representing European startups. “There was a clear shortage of tech talent before the coronavirus crisis, and there’s no sign that’s going to change.”

Until recently, connecting high-performing global engineers with U.S. companies has been focused on short-term projects or freelancers working independently, but U.S. businesses aren’t looking for temps. They are looking for long-term team members that can collaborate on challenging products--just like a full-time employee would.

Enter long-term engineering staff augmentation. With long-term staff augmentation, a third-party firm recruits, vets, pays, and supports engineers where talent is plentiful, but software jobs are scarce. The client interviews and selects the right candidates, and the engineers embrace the company’s culture, tools, and development processes. 

These are not just average engineers. The best engineering staff augmentation firms vet and rank engineers for seniority and experience using multiple assessment tools and processes. They also train developers in remote work best practices to hit the ground running in their engagements. 

Does it matter whether an engineer works remotely in the U.S. or in Lagos or Nairobi? The answer, increasingly, is no. When everyone is remote, location dissolves as a barrier. The issue, as it should be, is getting the best talent available on engineering teams. 

Remote teams are here to stay. As scaling software teams remains a challenge, companies are looking outside their local markets--far outside--to regions rich in talent. Andela has pioneered long-term staff augmentation to match great developers with great opportunities. 

To learn more about different ways of hiring and retaining great developers, you can attend the next installment of CTO Connection’s Attracting Top Talent webinar series. It’s on October 21. Andela’s Oluseyi Sonaiya will talk about “Redefining top talent: it’s not just about the code,” along with engineering leaders from Datasite, Karat, and Honeycomb.