Nearshoring
Nearshoring is outsourcing software work to a country in a nearby time zone, so the team's working hours overlap with yours. For a Dutch or German company that usually means Central European Time, where a question is answered the same hour instead of overnight.
Nearshoring sits between hiring locally and classic offshoring. You still work with a team in another country, but one close enough that your days line up. The point is not the map; it is the clock. When the team is awake when you are, standups happen at the same hour, blockers clear before lunch, and you can correct the work while it is being built rather than after.
For companies in the Netherlands and Germany, the practical nearshore zone is Central European Time. The genuinely affordable end of that zone in 2026 is the Balkans, where the talent is younger and fluent in English without sitting at Western European rates.
