After years of hiring in Kathmandu, this is our honest view of where local talent is strong, where it is still developing, and what we have changed in how we train our people.
We interview many engineers in Kathmandu. The technical standard is high and rising: stronger fundamentals than the outsourcing stereotype suggests, and often better than candidates we have met in markets that charge four times as much.
Where the strengths are
Strong problem-solving ability, a willingness to learn unfamiliar technology, and a real work ethic. Engineers here routinely learn a new framework over a weekend because a project needs it.
Where the gap is
The area that needs more development is product judgement: knowing which requirement to question, noticing when a feature request is a symptom of a different problem, and estimating in a way that holds up in practice. That is not a talent problem. It is a lack of exposure. If your career has been spent implementing specifications written elsewhere, you never get to practise making those decisions.
What we changed
- Engineers join client calls from their first month, including the difficult ones.
- Estimates are written by the person who will do the work and then reviewed, never simply assigned.
- Every project has a written problem statement, and any engineer can challenge it.
- We review our own estimates after every project, not just our incidents.
The results took about a year to show. They are the reason we can confidently send a mid-level engineer to meet a client on their own.