Contractors are often pitched as "plug and play." In reality, managers end up spending more time fixing issues than moving projects forward. From onboarding delays to poor documentation, offshore outsourcing creates more overhead than it saves.
"A lot of contracting firms will just provide you a headcount. They don’t have engagement on an ongoing basis. With Howdy, engineers have mentors and managers, which isn’t available elsewhere." — Saro, Senior Engineering Manager at Truepill
When vendors treat engineers like temporary bodies, your team absorbs the costs of training, ramping, and oversight. Managers spend extra hours writing onboarding materials, chasing updates, and re-explaining processes to contractors. That time gets pulled away from strategy and product delivery, forcing your team into work that shouldn’t be theirs.
Why overhead piles up
Most outsourcing firms hand over headcount and walk away. You're left to do the hard parts yourself, turning what should be support into extra work.
1. Onboarding from scratch. Without shared systems or context, leaders end up writing their own onboarding guides for every new contractor. Time that could be spent on strategy goes into explaining workflows, tools, and company basics again and again.
2. Over-managing progress. When engineers are not fully integrated, visibility drops. Managers compensate by running extra check-ins, creating detailed progress reports, and chasing updates just to stay aligned.
3. Handling performance alone. If output slips, traditional vendors rarely step in to help. The burden of coaching, reassigning tasks, or replacing underperformers falls entirely on your shoulders, adding stress and lost time.
Howdy.com reduces the burden
Howdy.com was built to take this overhead off your plate. We provide onboarding support, local offices, and ongoing mentorship so engineers ramp quickly and stay supported. Instead of dropping a contractor into your team and walking away, Howdy integrates people with infrastructure behind them.
"One of the great things that I didn’t know was happening, but it was happening behind the scenes, was that Howdy created a cheat sheet for folks onboarding onto Truepill. We didn’t have time to build it, but it helped engineers get up to speed quickly." — Saro, Senior Engineering Manager at Truepill
Growth without hidden costs
With Howdy, your managers get to babysit rather than lead. Engineers ramp faster, stay longer, and build with confidence.
Book a demo with Howdy and see how we cut management overhead from outsourcing.