Outsource software development to focus on your core business
You already know you want to outsource software development. You have recalculated your expenses, pros and cons, and decided to hire highly qualified specialists. You want to have a high quality product, easy communication and free resources to focus on what is most important for your core business. You can choose a company within your country or benefit from hiring abroad, where a wide range of possibilities opens. When you decide on the second option, you begin with a question.
Nearshoring vs offshoring? (What is the difference?)
If you are thinking about outsourcing your software development abroad the first dilemma you encounter is the choice between nearshore application development and offshoring. If you live in Germany and outsource to Poland, you make nearshoring, so you work with a company in the same geographical region (in essence: near to you). That means: the same time zone, minor cultural differences, possibility of f2f meetings, more travel opportunities.
The offshoring is outsourcing to the country in a location far from yours, in another part of the world. These are the countries with a very low execution price, thanks to which the cost of the entire development is significantly decreased. Of course, there are some disadvantages as: different timezone, greater distance, cultural differences, barriers of communication. So you have to calculate whether the benefits outweigh potential risks and design the project management process to overcome potential difficulties.
9 reasons for why it is good to outsource to Poland?
If you think about outsourcing abroad, I have something you might be interested in, a country with one of the best developers worldwide and one of the most competitive prices of services – Poland. I have a few facts, statistics and numbers that will speak for themselves.
1. Competitive pricing software development in Poland
Polish developers earn between $12,305 – $45,644 per year according to PayScale while in USA Software Developers earn $48,542 – $102,337, which is a few times more. Juxtaposing the median for a Polish software developer, which is $23,687 per year, with the median for other developed countries (the table from Stack Overflow), we see that the median salary is at least 2 times more (France) to 5 times more (USA) than the Polish one.
Of course, there are other operating costs and economic factors which influence the rates, but the median salary can give you the feeling of the valuation scope across the countries. One of the factors that influence this is currency difference: 1$ costs approx. 3.3PLN and 1EUR costs approx. 4.1PLN. A lower currency price determines the reduction of software manufacturing costs. You can also look at the median cost of developing iOS mobile apps to see the trend.
Don’t expect a 1:1 discount, as still, software development is not going to be cheap, but a lower hourly rate per developer can definitely be a bonus at the start. Your mobile app development cost will depend on the hourly rate and features you want, so after you specify your project scope, you can get an accurate quote. (take a look at our guide on how to price a project).
2. High development skills
Polish developers are one of the world’s top-qualified. An independent survey (2016) from Hacker Rank shows that Polish developers are among the top three best in the world. At Hacker Rank, coding challenges for developers are evaluated against the accuracy and speed of the performance. Thanks to the participation of hundreds of thousands of developers in tasks solving, the rank’s reliability is high. On a 100 degree scale, Poland has 98 points. Only Russia (2nd place) and China (1st place) obtained a higher score. The top rated skill areas with highest average scores of Polish developers are: Algorithms, Java, Tutorials, Python, Shell and Ruby. What is more, Poland got the highest ranks in most prestigious and popular international programming contests, such as Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, Google’s Code Jam, Central European Programming Contest and Top Coder Rank.
3. Good education
There are more than 500 universities in Poland. Six of them are featured in the QS World University Rankings® 2018, while 22 rank within the top 300 in the QS EECA University Rankings 2018 – a dedicated ranking of the top universities in Emerging Europe and Central Asia. One of the highest place among technology universities has Warsaw University of Technology which is ranked 19th among universities in Emerging Europe and Central Asia.
Poland is the biggest, most diversified country in the CEE region with 254 thousand developers and seven tech centers (Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Katowice, Poznań, Gdańsk and Łodź) with at least 10 thousand developers in each. The survey made by Infoshare based on Stack Overflow data confirms that Poland is the largest market of talented programmers in this region of Europe. There are a million programmers in Central and Eastern Europe in total and one quarter of it work in Poland.
What is interesting, of the 17 countries represented in the survey made by Hackerrank, Poland is one the top countries with the largest number of developers who started coding between 5 and 10 (which is an impressive number).
Maybe that is the reason for our developers’ high skills and great mobile and web app development. 😉
4. Good quality of code
The highest quality of computer science graduates definitely has an influence on code quality. Polish people know their craft well and have ambitions to become better and better. At Appchance, we made an online survey – “How to motivate employees in the IT industry” in 2017 among almost 200 IT employees exploring their motivation. We found that the answer “a good result of my work” gained an average grade 4.4 on a scale from 1 to 5, which is one of the top 5 motivators. As you can see, the outcome plays an important role in motivation.
Our developers care about code quality i.e. its structure, readability, code documentation, pattern usage, unit testing, avoidance of repetitions, avoidance of code commentary, component function minimisation.
5. Easy communication
Poland is ranked 11 in the English Proficiency Index of 2017, which is the world’s largest ranking of countries regarding English skills. The Polish education system emphasizes learning English, from primary school until university, so graduates are well prepared to work for international companies. There are no understanding barriers connected with the linguistic background.
Polish people also know that understanding is not only speaking the words. So there is more and more emphasis on soft skills. A highly qualified specialist does not only have to code well, but they have to cooperate with the team, communicate well and learn to listen. (List of tips which will help you to become a better listener you will find here). This is a career building factor which influences their career and promotion path.
Our teams work agilely with the best tools. It means that projects move forward with iterative modules. After each module, the selected fragment of a software is developed, then fixed or accepted. To run with this approach, teams use various communication tools: JIRA (tasks within the process, usually used internally), Trello (tasks in a post-it notes format, usually used to communicate with a client), Slack (chat and immediate notifications), Invision (design), Skype (complex issues), mail (sum up, arrangements), Bitbucket/Git (code repository), Fabric (monitoring test versions of applications). But the truth is: everything that is convenient for the client. Fortunately, the IT industry is highly flexible, so there are no tools which cannot be taught and used immediately.
Poland also has a good digital infrastructure, optical fibers are commonly used, there is 72% of Internet penetration across the population and a much better Internet connection in comparison to competing (price-wise) countries like the Philippines and India. So you won’t bother with any slow down in speed or communication interruptions.
6. Cultural similarities
Poland belongs to the European Union and there are no significant cultural differences compared to the USA or other European countries. We watch the same movies on Netflix, read similar books and perceive the world in the way Western countries do. Solving problems, negotiations and doing business looks pretty much the same as in Germany or the UK, so there won’t be any habit-associated surprizes.
7. Location
Poland is a country located in Central Europe between Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia. The Polish economy has been growing steadily up from 2.7% GDP in 2016, to 3.3 percent in 2017 and estimated 3.2 percent in 2018, according to the World Bank.
Poland uses Central European Time (CET) so outsourcing to Poland from the United Kingdom or Germany means practically no time zone differences. We are GMT+1 (i.e. UTC+1), so at 3:00 p.m. in Warsaw, it is 2:00 p.m in London.
The USA is in a bit different situation as there is a bigger time gap between (for example) New York and Warsaw. New York is UTC-5, and Warsaw is UTC+1, so the overall discrepancy is 6 hours. That means that when you start work at 9:00 a.m we’ve already worked 6 hours and then we have at least 2 hours of overlap. In this time, mutual arrangements and Skype meetings can be done. Of course, working hours misalignment can be problematic as response time gets a bit delayed – ASAP actions won’t be possible. But still, you can make an agreement with your software house about the reaction time and manage this. On the other hand: there will be a 14 hours cycle of work – while you are resting, the job is in progress. That means all comments collected during the day are implemented in the next hours, which equals 14 hours cycle of work.
8. Acknowledgement of the top software companies
Poland is a world center for multinational offshore software development. Global ICT giants have their R&D centers in Poland, which employ 50,000 highly professional developers. Companies like: Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Cisco, Samsung, Intel already have their subsidiaries here.
9. Intellectual property
Poland is a member of World Trade Organization, the European Union, the UN, NATO, the Paris Convention, the Berne Convention, the Hague Agreement, the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the Madrid Protocol. Thanks to that, it is easier to outsource to Poland. All data can be openly transferred among EU countries. The European Union laws for copyright and IP also comply with the United States’ standards in data security and IP protection.
So now you know why is worth to outsource to Poland?
Companies around the world choose Polish developers for outsourcing their mobile and web app development. The main reasons are high competences and relatively low costs of hiring. Having a reliable technological partner is crucial for taking full advantage of the opportunities outsourcing provides. If you hire a company that will partner with you in solving all issues occurring during digital product development, you will have free resources to focus on what is crucial for your business.
The variety of possibilities blur the clarity of the choice. But don’t worry, we listed out the factors which you should consider before hiring a software house in Poland. You can also contact us and estimate your project. Check them out to choose wisely 😉
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Great article a lot of usefull data, thx.
Very well explained! Thank you! You have given a lot of essential information about outsourcing abroad. It helped to recognize what it needs to know about.