Engineering Job Future

Offshoring Success Story

Staff Article, written by Don Wilde

More than ten years ago, I began to realize that up-and-coming young engineers in countries not normally on everybody's vacation list were getting good enough to take away my job. I started thinking of how I could somehow turn this around to my advantage.

The situation became more real when an incredibly bright and motivated young Ukrianian engineer named Alex Prohorenko contacted me after seeing my name and e-mail on the FreeBSD mailing lists. He asked me for advice on how he could get American companies to hire him.

Alex and I talked quite regularly for the next few months, and I learned a lot more about him and his honor and integrity as well as his wide variety of coding skills. It turned out that he and his brother Olexiy had each worked for different ISP's in Ukraine, installing a lot of the top end of Ukraine's Internet infrastructure from satellite downlinks and routers to DNS and mail servers. We talked for almost six months before I even mentioned that I might possibly be able to find a way to employ them myself, so I had a really good idea of the quality of these young men before I started talking about money.

Finally, the opportunity came around that put everything together in a nice neat package. My friend Michael Carrillo was in the recruiting business and he wanted to build custom job boards for his own and other recruiters' businesses. It turned out that Olexiy's specialty was database-driven web sites, perfect for our new projects' needs. I also had some software engineering work that I knew Alex could do to support my Silver Lynx projects, so we hired them both.

Going on my intuition, we chose to pay them far more than what was at the time the going rate for programmers in Ukraine, $1.50 an hour, but it was still far less than American engineers their age were making. It was the right choice, because they bent over backwards to give us many times their salary in quality work.

Using Alex and Olexiy as our scouts, our team grew by fits and starts to as many as eight programmers and graphics designers. It didn't always go perfectly; some of the young men we hired sandbagged the work or even left us high and dry. I remember once I had to burn forty eight hours of midnight oil myself to finish a client project because all the rest of the guys were working hard and I didn't want to ask them to do something I wouldn't do myself.

We kept the team together for six years, eventually giving the brothers their fondest wish, our blessing on H1B visas so they could come to America with their wives. They both still work for my partner Micheal.

There are lots of people who would say that I "stole" jobs that belong to other Americans, but that's not the way I look at it. I created a job for myself from the leverage of their 'offshore' labor and their creativity on top of my own. Many of our clients would not have been able to afford to have web systems built if we had only had American programmers to do the work, so besides creating the job we created the opportunity for the work to exist.

Alex and Olexiy shared their experiences of being well paid and well treated by an American employer with all their friends, which helped erase whatever was left of the old Soviet propaganda about greedy American capitalists. The money they had in their pockets they earned with high quality labor, and they helped a lot of their family members and friends with it as well as stimulating the Ukrainian economy.

They were happy, Michael and I were happy, and our clients were happy.