3 min read

Why Turing.com model won't work for Chinese vendors (for now)

What's Turing

Turing (https://www.turing.com/) is a jobs platform helping companies spin up their remote engineering teams quickly. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, and acting as a two-side marketplace – on one side to provide western companies the engineering resources and the other side is to have the software talents on other parts of world to directly gain access to these companies. They offer both full time (embedded into your team) as well as contractor jobs.

Sweet spots of Turing's model

It's a mostly a model innovation, but catching the trend of working anywhere, which was definitely sped up by the pandemic.

  • Turing tries to provide a strict screening process to vet the best candidates, so companies can save lots of time comparing with them going to freelancers website to search themselves.
  • Also, Turing tries to provide a self-service B2B portal, so companies can go to the portal to search themselves by setting filters like salary range, seniority and the locations of the candidates, of course, the rating on the providers side.
  • In addition, Turing provides certain protections, for example, if the employer is not satisfied, within 2 weeks, Turing will take care of the costs and help to find another candidates for the companies. However, as long as the contract term starts, it has to be minimum three months.
  • This essentially opens the door to lots of vendors oversea, especially tech engineers at Indian and Pakistan. Previously, the developers there have to be under certain consulting companies (who took a big cut) and they didn't have the flexibility and channels to build their own brands. Now, with Turing, they could be truly act as a free lancer and with a full time term instead of only based on one-off project.
  • Turing will take care of the monthly salary international money transfer which could be a big pain point for the employee, especially if they have vendors at multiple oversea countries. They don't currently take a cut in those transactions, and it's based on that particular day's US dollar exchange rate (interesting fact, today is the 20-year dollar high, good for US employees if the contractor is based on USD). They might charge a transaction fee in future.
  • Currently, the pricing model is mostly a contingency model. Later, they may have a SaaS model or a transaction fee model.

Where do the majority of vendor come from on Turing?

I gained the access of the platform, played around and conducted some basic searches. The search experience is pretty intuitive and fully self-service. You can tell they had conducted quite some vetting for the candidates. One thing could be improved is that the review of the developer leveling is a little bit too much into the nitty-gritty technical details, but guessing that's one part they could later further encapsulate well, now, it doesn't bother to show the raw data. On the other hand,  you can tell most of the vendors are from Indian and Pakistan. Certainly, there're engineers from Africa and Latin America, but interesting enough, barely, any engineers from China.

Traits of Chinese software vendors

So why not many vendors from China, despite the language barrier (which is not always true), we can see there're quite some dynamics changes happening on the Chinese engineer talents market after 2019.

  • With the pandemic recovering, the layoff for lots of Chinese tech companies are happening to quite some degree since later of 2021, and still lots of new engineer students are merging into the market. So definitely feel like supply is over demands.
  • The Chinese academic training and the successful of Chinese tech firms in recent 10 years cultivated lots of great engineers. A majority of them are probably not born software architects, but the average smartness of these engineers could propel them well to be excellent engineers to quickly implement the product ideas using modern programming technology.
  • Even in terms of language, if it's about everyday English, you can see the levels of English is really case by case for each individual; however, the bright side is given certain framework, certain tasks could be clearly communicated over some tools, for example, jira or even some strict templates on these tasks management platform. With a finer granularity analysis,  a big percentage of these potential workers could easily get to the professional working proficiency of English.

What will happen in future for Chinese software vendors

  • So these excess of supply over demand will have the potential to contribute more competent vendors to the international market, just like those Chinese apps or business – Shein or TikTok, etc.
  • The entry bar needs to be lower from both sides: on the western companies side, they need more knowledge to understand these stream of supplies and easy access to vet them; on the Chinese vendor side, they need certain training to enable them to embedded into the western companies and work independently. Maybe they need some people to be the middle man for a while, but once the working relationship has been built and solidified over time, the communication should get more smooth. And don't forget, the translation of languages is becoming less and less a barrier thanks to OpenAI technology.  
Jinai A

Jinai A

Seattle