Post by Mohammad Dayem A.

Three months in, everything goes quiet. The engineers are still there. Tickets still move. But nothing is getting decided. A scope question stays open for a week. An architectural choice gets punted to the next call. The founder jumps back in to unblock things and realises they never actually stepped away. I have seen this happen with distributed teams more than once. The engineers were not the problem. The team was missing a layer. There was no one who owned the architecture between sprints. No one who could make a judgment call at 9am in Karachi when the founder was asleep. No one who kept the context alive across time zones and handed it forward cleanly. Pakistan has a large and genuinely strong engineering workforce. That is not the shortage. The shortage is at the layer above. Technical leads who can hold a system in their head, make decisions without supervision, and explain tradeoffs to a non-technical stakeholder. These people are rare anywhere. And on a CV, they look identical to a very good senior developer. When I hire now, I ask one question: has this person owned a project end-to-end? Not contributed to one. Owned it. Made architectural decisions under pressure. Gone back to a founder or a client and said this is the wrong thing to build with a clear reason. That question alone filters out most candidates. The ones who can answer it are the ones who can hold a distributed team together without being managed. How are you currently evaluating the leadership layer when you hire engineering teams abroad?