Hiring across Indian cities rather than within one removes the constraint that determines most engineering hiring here: whether a good candidate is willing to commute to your office. The pool becomes national, salaries outside the metros are lower, and attrition is often lower too. What it costs is everything that was previously handled implicitly by proximity, and the companies that struggle are the ones that did not replace those things deliberately.
The first is decision-making. In an office, decisions get made in corridors and at desks, and everyone nearby absorbs them. Remotely, an undocumented decision reaches the two people on the call and nobody else, so three weeks later someone builds against an assumption that was overturned. The replacement is writing: decisions recorded where the team can find them, with the reasoning. Teams that adopt this find it improves their thinking as well as their coordination.
The second is onboarding, which degrades sharply without proximity. A new joiner in an office learns by overhearing and by turning to the person beside them. Remotely they learn only what someone deliberately tells them, and they will not ask as often as they should. Assigning a named buddy, scheduling regular short check-ins for the first month, and building an environment setup that works unaided are the mechanisms that substitute for osmosis.
The third is the informal knowledge of who is struggling. A manager in a room notices someone stuck, someone withdrawn, someone about to leave. Remotely those signals are invisible unless you create occasions for them — regular one-to-ones that are genuinely about the person rather than status, and a culture where saying I am stuck is normal rather than an admission. Indian teams in particular need explicit permission for that, because raising a difficulty upward carries more weight here than in some other cultures.
Then meet in person periodically and treat it as infrastructure rather than a perk. A few days together every quarter or two, structured around the things that are genuinely better in a room — planning, difficult conversations, architecture debate, and time that is not work at all. Teams that have shared a meal interpret each other's terse messages generously for months afterwards, and that is the single cheapest intervention available to a distributed team.
