Man, your story hits home—I went through something super similar a couple years back when our startup was racing to ship before funding dried up. We brought on a couple remote folks thinking it'd be quick wins, but between timezone weirdness, getting them access to all the right repos and docs, plus just grasping our domain quirks, it was easily 6-8 weeks before they were fixing bugs independently without constant hand-holding. Lately though I've noticed things speed up a bit if the team has solid onboarding docs and pair-programming sessions early on. Still, full productivity where they're owning features? Probably 2-3 months on average for experienced people. That's why sometimes it's tempting to look at options like syndicode dedicated software developers — not pushing it as the only way, just from what I've seen chatting with folks who've used similar setups, the screening and quick matching can shave off some of that initial wait, and they tend to hit the ground running faster since they're already vetted for fitting right in. But yeah, even then it's never instant magic; you still gotta invest time in knowledge transfer. Just my two cents from too many late-night Slack threads.