In today's post, we’re covering benefit #5, Better Communication, in our countdown of the Top 6 Benefits of nearshore development in South America compared to overseas contractors in countries like India, China, or The Philippines.

Effective communication is the cornerstone of any successful project, and language barriers can pose significant challenges in software development projects. While coding proficiency is certainly a high priority, nearshore development teams provide better communication. Let’s look at some of the ways communication will be smoother with a nearshore team like Synersix compared to offshore contractors in Asia.

Nearshore teams typically have a strong English proficiency due in part to their proximity and cultural similarities to the US. This means there’s no need for translators, and the developers doing the work will be the same ones in meetings explaining what they’ve done, asking clarifying questions, and providing guidance and documentation for their work. It also facilitates smoother interactions during meetings and daily communications, cutting down on time wasted explaining the same things multiple times. When you’re working with English fluent developers in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile, they feel much more like regular remote members of the team, not outsiders or foreigners who work siloed from everyone else on different schedules.

Another benefit is that Spanish is much more common in the US than Asian languages. Let’s look at the number of people who primarily speak these languages in the US according to US Census Data:

This means that in addition to nearshore devs speaking better English, there’s a much higher chance that your local teams will have some Spanish speakers than Asian-language speakers. I bet your US team has more people who took Spanish in school than Tagalog or Hindi. In fact, I minored in Spanish in college, and even with my level of Spanish proficiency, we still have our Synersix meetings in English because their English is that much better than my Spanish.

The last big communication related benefit is the similar time zone. Depending on daylight savings time, all of South America is within 1 or 2 hours of the US eastern time zone, so their working hours will be the same as yours. If you have a question, you can ask it and get an answer immediately without needing to wait until tomorrow. If they need to check with product management about a feature they’re working on, they can have conversations the same way you would and not need to wait a day or worse, make bad assumptions and build something the wrong way.

When your development team members all speak the same language and are online at the same time, it minimizes misunderstandings and miscommunications. This clarity ensures that your requirements are accurately understood and implemented, reducing the risk of errors and rework. Moreover, language proficiency enhances the quality of written documentation, project reports, and code comments, and everything else outside of the code. By choosing nearshore development, you leverage the benefit of easier language communication, which leads to a more efficient and successful project outcome.

If you’d like to learn more about nearshore development services, send me an email at christian.doetsch@synersix.com to schedule a free, 30 minute nearshore strategy consulting session.