What Top Staff Augmentation Companies Don't Tell You About Hiring Remote Workers

Remote work has opened the door to many collaboration opportunities and business models the world over. Staff augmentation, or adding project-specific skills on demand is one of them, and for good reason. IT companies the world over are struggling to fill up vacancies owing to skill shortages.

But, while staff augmentation has grown from 4.3% to 6.3% between 2017 and 2020, companies continue to ponder over its utility. Many of the top staff augmentation companies out there rarely bother telling their customers that staff augmentation is not the plug and play solution the latter is hoping for.

Reading Between the Lines of Your Staff Augmentation Agreement

Staff augmentation may seem like the perfect solution to any IT problem at the face of it. But, it’s rarely as easy or even simple as it looks. The following issues inevitably creep up and can throw your project timeline of the track if you’re not prepared.

Your Staff Augmentation Company is Probably Charging You Differently

The IT services sector is no stranger to differential pricing. Two companies with the same project requirements may get quoted very different prices, usually under the banter of flexibility.

If you’re not careful, you may overspend on certain resources, so it’s always a good idea to run a price benchmark before getting on the phone with a staff augmentation agency.

Operating Risks are Your Problem

Unlike managed service models, a staff augmentation service provider only commits to providing resources at fixed hourly rates and is not responsible for any deliverables.

In other words, all operating risks are yours to bear and you will need to figure out how to fit the provided staff in your company. Cost overruns are also more common in augmented teams partly because paid-by-the-hour workers have a vested interest in increasing their logged time so that they can maximize their income from a project, and also because making a disparate group of people work together takes time to figure out. Left unchecked, things here can quickly spiral out of control.

You Probably Don’t Need Staff Augmentation

If you’re new to remote working, any top staff augmentation company will educate you on which operating model (in their opinion) will work best for you. You might in fact be better off with a managed team instead of having your existing one augmented with remote staff. 

In a nutshell, staff augmentation is best suited for companies looking to rapidly scale an operation up or down. Managed services on the other hand are better suited for long-term projects where the service provider agrees to take full control of staffing and project execution.

Let Us Help You Get Your Best Team Yet

At Muoro, we get that remotely operating staff augmentation or managed service models are uncharted territory for most companies. This is why we have a Three-Week Trial to let you test the waters so that you can decide with complete confidence.

Our industry leading Engineer-as-a-Service model ensures your interests are kept paramount. Feel free to call or email us if you’d like to discuss a project with us. 

Our List of the Best, Most Secure Remote Software Development Tools for .NET Work

Despite being one of the oldest development frameworks out there, .NET continues to thrive with companies old and new using it to build a variety of applications. The toolset has only become more robust. Its third party library support continues to expand and with companies like Microsoft and Amazon making massive investments into .NET, its future is secure.

But, creating a tech stack of remote collaboration and development tools can be hard. Since your organization’s overall productivity and running costs depend heavily on which services and tools you go with, selecting the right tools is of paramount importance before you hire remote .NET developers.

Here’s a list of tools that we work with.

VSCode

VSCode is the most popular IDE out there, period. Since you can code in any popular language via readily available extensions, you needn’t download specific IDEs for every language you want your remote teams to work with. A quick look at Microsoft’s VSCode’s account on Github reveals just how fast the platform is evolving.

VSCode is also a relatively lightweight editor as a fresh install, but even after you have added a dozen or so plugins, the tool continues to run lightning fast. We use VSCode for all our development work and have found it to be an ideal fit for .NET powered projects. It also simplifies our recruiting and onboarding process since we only hire remote .NET developers who are familiar with VSCode. 

Jira

Jira is a project management tool which is ideal for agile work. While SaaS productivity tools abound today, Jira was one of the firsts being launched in 2002. And, it has only gotten better with time.

Jira offers both a cloud and server option. You can install it on your inhouse server if you wanted to, or, go with a pay-as-you-go model with their cloud version which only costs $10 per month for 10 users. The software comes with Scrum and Kanban boards out of the box, making your project management more visual.

We love Jira for its robustness and the fact that it can integrate with thousands of SaaS tools and plugins out there. Project managers have a very easy time getting a bird’s eye view of their team’s progress from the customizable dashboards.

Given its vast feature set, we use it for everything from bug reporting and fixing, workflow tracking, and test case management. Most of the .NET developers we hire swear by Jira and its incredibly intuitive interface.

Evernote

Writing down issues, ideas, and questions to discuss on paper is so 2010. Even though you can always save them into your smartphone, Evernote takes note taking to the next level. You can create notebooks, which are essentially categories in which you can save ideas specific to them. All notes and notebooks can be shared with other people as well.

Besides recording ideas, Evernote has basic project management capability too. You can assign tasks and track them through the inbuilt checklists. These are ideal for small, off the record office work that aren’t part of any project.

Slack

Think of Slack as a Whatsapp for teamwork and office communications. The message board interface is instantly recognizable. Slack’s workspace is divided into 3 groups - channels, private channels and direct messages.

Channels are topical message boards where you can share your messages and ideas with all your team members. Private channels can be opened up between a select group of people. Direct messages are one-to-one boards that you can use to communicate privately with individuals.

Slack also integrates with hundreds of other apps and platforms including Jira, Evernote and VSCode, so we can share files between all our workspaces seamlessly. Given its features, Slack is also by far the most cost-effective solution with the basic version being free, while the paid version starting at $6.67 per user per month.

Hire Remote .NET Engineers Securely With Our EaaS Model

 EaaS or Engineer-as-a-Service is a recruitment and service delivery model exclusively developed by Muoro to address key industry challenges like difficulty finding required skill sets in time, poor deliverable quality, high team attrition rates, and difficulty managing teams.

All our developers are carefully vetted for not only experience and skills, but whether they can acclimatize to the new normal as well. With us as your recruitment and team management partner, you can hire remote .NET developers with complete peace of mind. Send us a message or call us to learn more about our services.