Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

That sounded very worrisome particularly considering the fact that the development was for a domain like that of Pharma, where rules & regulations shadows heavily on what and how things are done.

I have some experience in developing software products for Pharma industry and it was quite an effort in keeping track of FDA updates which would impact the features that were under development or were planned for. Examples, basic and mandatory feature sets like Audits, Logging, Security, Access management, Reports etc. are heavily influenced by compliance regulations of FDA and equivalent bodies of Europe, Canada etc. And added layer of complexity is each regulatory bodies have different approach to regulation and compliance.

Considering the fact that Pfizer were outsourcing to ‘code shops’ who would never ever get into that complexity; well thought out requirement documentation which has taken into consideration current and future landscape should have been number one priority. I would have sleepless nights if I was coordinating a project where ‘can do’ developers start working from a basic one-pager from ‘business people’.

I guess it was perhaps because the author was the go between the domain experts (he mentions them as ‘business people’) and the developers.

It would have been great if the author would have shed some light on what could client do from their end in terms of reducing ambiguity while working with teams where communication and loss in translation is one of the biggest risk.

I suspect that there is a whole missing dimension in this story.

When you find a strangely perfect clone of your product on the market, do not be surprised.

There is a difference between offshoring and cheap-shoring (i.e what I call offshoring at very low costs). Most of the bad experiences you get from India are a result of cheap-shoring. You get what you pay for. Cheapshoring undervalues good engineers and overvalues a lot of bad engineers.

I have seen this for almost 15 years (from the Indian side), and I don't like it. While some people see Indian IT as growing with the likes of Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc - I personally saw that as crippling good CS talent in India. However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight

If you want equivalently good engineers from India (as of now), be ready to pay half(45-50%) of the pay in US. So if you are paying 120K in the US, the same should cost you 54-60K USD when the engineer is in India. This will also reduce friction. One may get lucky in the early days hiring at cheaper costs, but sooner or later the good engineers will see their worth and will most likely leave instead of asking for a raise. You have to do your due-diligence selecting a worthy engineer - that is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If somebody chooses cheapshoring, they are planning for a higher cost that is at least more than the 50% mark mentioned and in most cases if you analyze retrospectively - it would have cost lower if you did not cheap-offshore in the first place. The release may seem less costly, but the maintenance and operating costs will ultimately outgrow.