Every engineering leader in Southern California has the same complaint: there aren't enough hours in the day. Sprints slip. Releases get delayed. The backlog grows faster than the team can burn it down.
But what if your development day was 24 hours instead of 8?
That's the core idea behind our Vietnam-based engineering pod model. It's not outsourcing in the traditional sense — it's a timezone-optimized extension of your existing team that turns your overnight downtime into productive engineering hours.
Why Vietnam, Specifically
The 12-hour timezone difference between Ho Chi Minh City and Irvine isn't an obstacle — it's the entire point. When your US team logs off at 6 PM Pacific, it's 9 AM in Vietnam. Our engineers pick up exactly where yours left off.
This isn't theoretical. Here's what a typical 24-hour cycle looks like for one of our clients:
6:00 PM PT — Handoff call (30 minutes). US tech lead briefs the Vietnam pod on today's priorities. Open PRs, blocked tickets, and anything that needs immediate attention.
6:30 PM – 6:00 AM PT — Vietnam shift. Our engineers work on tickets that don't block US work: bug fixes, test coverage, refactoring, new feature branches, database optimization, and code review of AI-generated PRs.
7:00 AM PT — US team arrives. They find completed PRs ready for review, bugs fixed overnight, and test results from the previous day's commits. The morning standup is 15 minutes instead of 45 because half the blockers are already resolved.
What Works Best in the Overnight Shift
Not everything translates well to an async handoff. Here's what we've found works — and what doesn't.
Works great:
Bug fixes with clear reproduction steps. Our QA engineers find bugs in code your US devs just committed, and our engineers fix them before your team wakes up.
Test writing and coverage improvement. AI generates features fast but rarely writes comprehensive tests. Our overnight team adds edge cases, integration tests, and load tests.
Technical debt reduction. Legacy code cleanup, dependency updates, performance optimization — the work that's important but never urgent enough to prioritize during business hours.
AI code review. Your US team generates code with Cursor or Copilot during the day. Our Vietnam team reviews it for security, performance, and architecture overnight.
Doesn't work well:
Greenfield architecture decisions that require real-time discussion. Save these for overlap hours or synchronous sessions.
Customer-facing urgent issues that need immediate context from your US team. Keep an escalation path for true emergencies.
The Handoff Protocol
The handoff is everything. A sloppy handoff creates more work than it saves. Here's our protocol:
Every ticket assigned to the Vietnam pod includes a context block: what was tried, what's known, what's unknown, and what success looks like. This takes US engineers about 5 minutes per ticket — and saves hours of back-and-forth.
We use a shared Slack channel with async video updates. A 2-minute Loom video explaining a tricky bug is worth more than a 500-word Jira comment.
Every PR from the Vietnam team includes a summary of changes, testing performed, and any decisions made. Your US team reviews it with full context in the morning.
The Math
A senior engineer in Southern California costs $180,000–$220,000 fully loaded. A three-person Vietnam pod — one senior engineer, one mid-level, one QA — costs less than a single US hire. And they give you 8 additional productive hours per day.
Over a quarter, that's roughly 500 additional engineering hours. That's a product launch. That's a migration. That's the backlog finally getting under control.
The companies winning in SoCal aren't the ones with the biggest teams. They're the ones that never stop building.