Everything you need to know about friendshoring

23 January 2024

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A while ago an article on LinkedIn on team re-organizing caught our attention. The author aims to quantify software engineering productivity by providing objective data and using a Standford-made algorithm to help companies make data-driven decisions. It was proved that one of the companies participating managed to reduce their annual engineering spend from $12.3M to $7.4M by replacing 42 Bay Area engineers (>$200k avg. cost) with 41 in Poland ($80k avg. cost) and 5 in India ($35k avg. cost).

LinkedIn community warmly welcomed the post, since Poland developers are already well-known for their talent and dedication. The author pointed out that in about 6 months the new team’s performance almost matched the original team.

There’s no information on how long it took the original team to obtain that level of performance, so we can’t really compare it to the speed achieved by the Polish and Indian teams, but nevertheless, the result is impressive. A similar performance result and a spectacular 40% in cost savings were accomplished.

In the comments it was established, that the company in question didn’t hire the cheapest developers they could find but chose to have a consultancy company and cooperated with not the most expensive specialists, but also not the cheapest ones. Altogether the comment section was full of positive opinions on Polish specialists.

Being Polish ourselves it was a nice feeling to see people from all over the world commenting on Polish ethics of work, dedication, and talent. Poland has proved multiple times, that we tend to have good specialists in the IT field, and relatively a lot of them, since Poland is a rather big country with many acknowledged universities. Therefore it’s safe to assume that Polish IT companies are more than “just” trustworthy – they provide great value for their partners and because of that they go beyond “team leasing” – we called that extra mile “friendshoring” because we believe in sharing the know-how, experience and skill with our partners to make their business grow.

It’s more than just performing. Performance is important, but the strength of the IT sector in Poland comes from talent, education, and dedication. In the Polish ICT sector over 2500 companies are employing ten or more people, and Polish programmers have long been occupying the best spots in many influential rankings. Polish companies specialize in both hardware and software production, including the most advanced solutions based on artificial intelligence algorithms and machine learning.

A strong position of the Polish ICT sector has already been established not only in the EU, but also overseas. The worth of Polish telecommunication and IT equipment exports in 2021 reached EUR 11.8 billion. The feedback remains positive which brings us back to the case study from the beginning of this text – Polish programmers prove themselves and the quality doesn’t disappoint.

According to various sources, the number of Polish programmers is somewhere around 295 000, which happens to be the highest in the EU. Moreover, they tend to have high-quality education in engineering and information technologies fields. Poland is known to be one of the best-educated countries in the EU, with 32.4% of the population having a university degree or equivalent and computer science is currently one of the most popular fields of study in Poland, proved by over 44 000 students having started their studies in 2022. Their diploma can come from approx. 25 polytechnics and technological universities spread across the country. The combination of high-quality knowledge and English proficiency makes Poland a perfect place for developing advanced solutions.

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