My employer, which is probably more 'young company' than startup by now, has had about 2/3rds of its developers in Ukraine since pretty early on. There are a lot of really great things about it, the price obviously one but Kharkov in particular has a really large university system with a lot of well educated talent. The keys so far have been to work directly with the developers, cut out any project manager/glorified-translator role, and take a general 'try before you buy' approach of rolling a trial-month into a semi-probation-quarter into a long term expectations but still month-to-month structure. It takes half a dozen or so positions for this to really work, and you just roll through people looking for genuine talent that shows initiative and communicates well.
One drawback I have noticed is that this works extremely well for creative/features/front-end development, but when you get into architecture/backend things like a sharding design or complex cluster configurations then less so. Most devs never really grok that stuff to begin with, so combined with the language/communication/timezone barriers its hard to do your platform engineering stuff this way.
One drawback I have noticed is that this works extremely well for creative/features/front-end development, but when you get into architecture/backend things like a sharding design or complex cluster configurations then less so. Most devs never really grok that stuff to begin with, so combined with the language/communication/timezone barriers its hard to do your platform engineering stuff this way.