Mexico has more than 125,000 engineers with over seven years of experience. The domestic economy has grown and supports a thriving market for technology businesses. Their experience spans the gamut of programming languages, system platforms and applications.

This pool is growing rapidly as the number of new technical graduates is accelerating.

New graduates learn English as part of their requirements. Earlier graduates have learned it on the job along with other work experience.

Hermosillo is a nice, quiet city south of Phoenix.  The capital city of Sonora state, the city has over 700,000 people.  It is a safe, family-oriented and it boasts a low cost of living which makes it very attractive to young families.

Hermosillo is also a “High IQ” city with over 17 universities and colleges, 10 of which have software engineering programs at the BS, MS and PhD levels. This includes a Tech de Monterrey university campus.

With daily flights to Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston, the city is within easy reach of Western and Mountain states.

Roberto Martinez, CEO of Nearsoft, is a native of Hermosillo and has deep ties to the local community, businesses, government and even a nascent investment (Angel) sector.

Our staff has a wide range of expenrience with many languages and platforms. However, by design, they are assigned to specific client teams.  Because of that, when we sign up a new client we invariably have to staff a new team from scratch.  This gives us the flexibility to accommodate new technologies relatively easily.

So it really becomes a question of whether we can find and attract people with specific experience in a reasonable timeframe.  The answer to that is that except for very specialized skills, we can make the first hire for a new team within 3-4 weeks on average, six weeks max.

Besides recruiting the right people quickly, we also pride ourselves in being able to integrate them into effective working teams just as quickly.

In previous companies, we’ve had the experience of hiring a lot of people very quickly only to end up with a number of competing approaches to designing and creating software.  Over time these “camps” found hard to work with one another, to the detriment of the business. This time aroundn we’ve made sure that we would not go through that experience again.

Nearsoft’s focus in on software applications and systems development, primarily for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), IT departments and start-ups.  Other than that, we don’t emphasize one technology over another.

Because of the nature of our business, everybody is assigned to a long- term team and so when we sign up a new client we invariably have to staff a new team from scratch.  This gives us the flexibility to accommodate new technologies relatively easily.

The new team is immediately trained in our internal processes and to assure that their work “fits” with everybody else’s contribution and can take advantage of our tools and infrastructure.

The hourly rates are higher, on average, for equivalent experience. However, due to the time and geographical proximity, the Total Cost of Engagement (TCE) is lower in Mexico, by as much as 20%, than in India or China.

We will be happy to discuss this further. Please, contact us.

This attitude is changing, but in some cases it may still make sense to outsource to an offshore location, just not software development. Call Centers, Business Processes, and other back room activities may even benefit from the time separation. Software development, however, is most definitely not an activity that benefits from this separation.

Under the best of circumstances, software development is hard to do well. Splitting the development team across 12-13 time zones makes it even harder, almost impossible to do successfully.

If you plan to outsource software development, you should first consider doing it onshore, within two time zones of your US-based team. Your Total Cost of Engagement (TCE) will be lower and the risks will be much more manageable.

If you plan to outsource the development for a substantial number of projects/products, you should consider having teams in at least two locales to hedge your risks. This way if one locale develops endemic problems (e.g., high staff turnover), you would have a team in the other locale ready to take over. This also has the added benefit of keeping your outsourcing vendors on their toes and performing at their best.

The best approach, technically, is to keep all development co-located. If it makes sense to outsource, depending on the situation, onshore might be a good choice. In Life 2.0, author Rich Karlgaard describes 150 “reasonably priced US cities and towns you might consider.”

Even then, keep it within two time zones. Going beyond that makes it extremely more difficult to keep everybody in sync and working as a team.

Alternatively, you can also combine onshore and nearshore solutions to get the best of both options. Working with a nearshore vendor from Canada or Mexico, you can also place some of the outsourced staff onsite in the US for extended periods of time if that’s important. The special, TN (NAFTA) visas allow credentialed professionals from these countries to work in the US for an indefinite period of time years.

If you are building widgets, then this model may work for you. It may also work for Call Centers and other back office, repetitive functions.

However, if you are developing software, this does not apply. It’s as much a myth as “the mythical man-month.” Even trying to do traditional QA offshore is problematic, particularly when the teams’ working hours have no overlap whatsoever.

Engineers need to talk directly to one another, as often as possible; even Product Managers need to be in close contact with engineers and not through an Engagement Manager as is often the case with offshore projects.

In the traditional offshore setting, the teams will play email ping-pong, sending questions and counter-questions back and forth. One team will ask a question today only to get a request for clarification to the question the next day. This is very frustrating to both teams and causes delays or worse quality problems.

On the other hand, doing development or QA in Mexico, or even Central America has the effect of stretching the day by one or two hours, without the negative side-effects.

In this scenario, the QA engineers and the developers will be at work at the same time most of the day during which they can talk with each other and clarify any issues.

This is true given the sheer size of those countries, even after taking into account the different definitions of what an “engineering” degree is.

However, India and China also have a lot of demand for these engineers. This means that offshore vendors will have a heck of a time finding and retaining experienced engineers and project managers.

India’s outsourcing industry has doubled every year for the last four years and the unfortunate side-effect of that is extremely high turnover as offshoring companies compete for experienced people. This plus the rise in salaries and the valuation of the rupee vs the dollar has pushed the three major Indian outsourcing companies, TCS, Wipro and Infosys to establish offices in Latin America.

Irrespective of all that, the critical success factor for software development is the time difference and having access to a large number of engineers is a moot point if they are more than 12-13 time zones and half a world away.