How do I better function with my offshore developers?

Post date: 2023-02-04 07:20:08

Piggybacking on my previous question I'm having a really hard time integrating with my offshore team who doesn't really seem to want to work with me. There's a lot of language and cultural things here and I'm wondering how I might better integrate with them. This is software development if that matters.

I'm definitely looking for a new job but in the interim I'm having a really hard time getting the team to integrate.

- Standups last literally 3+ hours and everyone talks in circles. I feel as if we rehash the same thing over and over. I keep getting, "this is how we do it on previous projects" and if it isn't available to copy and paste it seems to confuse the team.

- The team overengineers and comes up with the most complex scenarios for things. For example we have a component that has alternating image sizes of big and small in basically an image carousel. I brought up just having it done in CSS and the client agreed. Instead they went and made it so that every image has to be sized and uploaded. They were on these calls but said it was due to "performance issues" and made their jobs harder.

- We're months behind and have something like 300+ bugs per component. I setup CI/CD but it isn't being used because they're used to manually upload broken code and letting QA come back and flag it. There's no basic quality checks, as in they don't even test if their build works. So instead of fixing the build they just go around the checks and push out bad builds so they can call it "done."

- Again, months behind with poor quality and I started developing which I'm not really setup to do. The team took this as a personal afront and deleted all my (working, tested) code. I've never had that happen before and this was discussed in sprint planning and standup. There seems to be a complete lack of motivation to get the project done in time and it is incredibly frustrating.

- I've spent my entire career learning to not micromanage but I find that unless I write pseudo-code and am incredibly descriptive the work doesn't get done. For example we have a video player and if you click play I'd expect the play button overlay to go away but it doesn't. This is an example of what I'd consider pretty common behavior that doesn't have to be explicitly defined.

I can tell the team is frustrated and they're not the top developers. I've accepted that and want to make it as easy for all of us, however they really want to also control the project so I feel as if I'm a bit stuck. On paper (and I don't care about hierarchy) I'm in charge. We've had several meetings about that and they ignore me and do whatever they want: pass around source control in emails, etc. I'm not even trying to be perfect I'm literally wanting to see some level of engagement and being self-driven. There are some Indian developers on-shore who are amazing, and I get they're not making a lot overseas but I feel as if there's a lot of language and cultural barriers I'm not used to.

The "us vs them" mentality is highly toxic to the team and I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve it. If I ask them directly what else I can do to help them, such as changing my hours, provide more documentation, more 1:1s I get nothing but silence.

I'm not asking for perfection, but I'd like to see some ownership. I'm tired of every day having another basic issue that could be solved easily by checking in code, or deploying.

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