Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

But that is _not_ what the GP is saying. You're creating a strawman argument where The Boss forces his employees to stay late in office while the 'labour' gets to work within his time.

If anything, based on the work timings mentioned in his post - the work-life balance of the offshore employees is screwed and not of clifanatic's him/herself.

One trivial and silly real-world example: I'm currently working on a C codebase with a few developers in India. Sometime before I started the project, the American company I now work for contracted out a security audit of the code, and one of the obvious conclusions was that "safe string functions should be used" - strcpy() had been used to copy user input to statically sized buffers such that it was vulnerable to classic buffer overflows, all over the place. Requirement set, requirement followed - now strncpy() and strncmp() etc were used everywhere, but always either uselessly (25% of the time) or wrong and unsafe (75%). Most typical was to use the length of the source, calculated with strlen(). Now, I guess it was not specified "use strncpy() correctly, with the size of the destination". Failure of specification, right?

For what it's worth, the root of the problems on this particular project are that the original American lead dev was not that great and set some bad examples, which the outsourced devs copy diligently and industriously.

(But then again, it's not enough to say "this is clearly wrong, it will overflow if (expr)" - they tend to need explicit examples to copy. Sometimes they impress me by figuring the cause of a tricky bug. Sometimes they write smart but actually useless code, like using floats and log() to figure out how big a buffer is needed to print a uint16_t in decimal - 5 bytes will suffice, no float math needed. Sometimes they write 20 lines of code to calculate how long the string result of snprintf() will be, instead of using the size of the destination, right after I've lectured on what strncpy() is for. They often seem less thoughtful than a neural net. I've even seen "buf[strlen(buf)] = '\0'" - I just have no words sometimes.)

It really hurts me that when someone is working with an offshore team they are looking at me as a "cheap resource".

I don't expect the valley crowd to understand this, so let me suggest an experiment. Go to your best developer, and tell her that you are there in the company cause she is "cheap labour", and if it was possible in a fraction of second you would get an engineer from Google and would hire him to do your job! Repeat this constantly for 3 weeks and see if her productivity drops or if she is still around! Its really painful to spend so much time, understand your own workflow and identify shortcomings, being self critical, overcome shortcoming with tips from HN / Stackoverflow, to concentrate on the problem at hand and implement a feature and then have someone come in and call it cheap labor. Previously I was working with a team in US and was reporting to an American. I know he was happy with my performance compared with the rest of my team members in the Valley as a lot of R&D work would be assigned to me. I have worked with angualr, react, rails, java, chrome extensions, ios, android apps. I am definetly not the best in any of this. But based on my previous work I think I am fairly competent.

In enginerring its a huge challenge to bring down cost. SpaceX is celebrated cause they have brought down the cost of launching satellites, when ISRO does it, it hursts me to see the first person who says that they were able to do it cheaper cause of the labor cost in India. I respect my work, and take pride in having built it.

If you want to offshore work don't make them feel like that the only reason you are giving them the work is because they are "cheap".

I know this is not what the article says but I wanted to share this even though this is off topic.

I think this statement misses the point completely, the difference isn't the passion about coding, it's obviously the salary!

If you are one of the juniors toiling away in the front-lines, your pay is still going to be really low. A programming role only allows to get your foot through the door, if you are to make a decent living the only way is to shoot for a promotion into management.

As opposed to "the West" where you can actually pursue a technical role throughout your career because the pay is higher and there are many more different types of roles you could be doing.

E.g. ~$65k gets you a senior developer in Berlin (=€60k) and similarly in Canada (=90k CAD), so a lot more competition in that bracket.