The Cost of Fractional Engineering
Josh Erickson nailed something important about fractional engineering not too long ago. And riffing on that: there's a hidden multiplier that makes offshore teams even more expensive than the math suggests.
We see this with hardware and software companies. They hire offshore teams at seemingly great rates, then spend significant energy explaining why their marine sensors need to handle saltwater corrosion differently than household IoT devices. Or why production line software for composite manufacturing has different UX, reliability and performance requirements than the end-user facing mobile app.
The 35% cost premium you mention? That's just onboarding time. The bigger hit is the ongoing communication overhead, misunderstandings, and extra management. These things never go away. Compare those headaches to the pleasure of working closely with a tightly knit team who just “get it” and respond within minutes.
Single point of contact models create translation layers. Your Product Manager explains a requirement to an offshore Technical Lead. Their TL explains it to engineers overseas. Engineers have questions. TL translates back. Each layer drops context and adds days. And ultimately, by communicating via cumbersome requirements to a team that does not have the context or domain experience, the UI and UX wind up compromised. That app intended for sailors to use while sailing picks up a reputation of being quirky at best, or worse, almost unusable, by those very same sailors.
When engineers have domain expertise and product managers have direct access to the technical team and visa versa, those translation cycles disappear. Questions get answered in minutes. Edge cases get caught before they ship. UI and UX are bang on and great ideas proliferate. The back-and-forth that elevates "technically correct" into "works amazingly well for our use case" happens in real time.
That's how to make fractional engineering efficient, and pleasantly not expensive.
Your math is right. But the domain expertise and communication structure matter as much as the hourly rate.
