My partner and I are thinking about opening an office in Pakistan to further develop our companies software & website, so would be PHP & MySQL developers mostly.
We would like to know about sources of information and advice, especially if anyone here can offer these.
We would be looking to recruit several people, enough to staff an office on a 24/7 basis, and we would want to rent office space. Initially all the staff would be on fixed term contracts, until we have better idea of how this would pan out.
While I am not of Pakistani origin, my business partner is - he comes from Multan. We are unlikely to want our office there, as we feel a larger city better. He is also thinking of returning to Pakistan to oversee the office. Any suggestions/comments/advice ?
As far as general advice goes, the three big cities to start such an office would be Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. I have heard that Lahore leads Pakistan in Software development but it could be a bias opinion.
It shouldn’t be a problem to find human recourses that are willing to work 24/7 and office space while can be expensive still shouldn’t be a problem. Renting such a place will obviously involve less paper work / beauraucratic headaches.
I used to work for a company called ATI which later got bought out by Mentor Graphics and they started an office in Pakistan, with the help of an employee who was Pakistani native. They basically started off with renting a house in Lahore and employing people who would do mainly minimal testing of the product they were making. Slowly they started to move their development over there. Now part of the development that business unit does is done in Pakistan, part of it in India but most of it in USA. I have heard that now they own an office space in Lahore and have moved out of the house.
The only problems I heard my managers refer to those units were the visa problems. So if they have to get one of the Pakistani employees to come to US for training or meetings, the first time around their visa process can take for ever. When they first started the business in the 90s they said snail mail back and forth was an issue but I guess FedEx eliminated that hurdle long ago.
If your partner is of Pakistani origin then it shouldn’t be a be deal at all for you guys. This organisation will give u good tips to setup a company in Pakistan