Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

troyhunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 121 posts

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#61

Post by lisivka »

zby wrote: post #44
achow wrote: post #32

One thing that jumped out to me reading the article was the author’s (or the organization’s) aversion to writing requirement spec (“detailed documentation”). 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…

Imagine that to compile your program you have to send it to India and wait two weeks. Every simple typo you make takes two weeks to be noticed. I used to work for Nestle when they were working on a global SAP implementation - all development was outsourced to India. I don't know what was the history of this - but when I was there the analysts were required to write so detailed specs that they were like a program in a…

Customer representative directly in outsource office solves this kind of problems. Otherwise you need developers which are both experts in development AND experts in the field of your application.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#62

Post by lisivka »

kabisote wrote: post #51

"Vendors don't build software, people build software" Working with vendors is logical for big projects but an obstruction for small projects. If we eliminate the middleman, outsourcers would pay less and developers would be paid more. There'd be less bureaucracy. There'd be greater loyalty. I hope there was an easier way for outsourcers and developers to find each other.

It's called «freelancing». It's way cheaper and worse than outsourcing.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#63

Post by ensiferum »

My experience (I managed a team of Chinese based devs for about a year) was that:

a) people are indeed leaving. thats cause the main selling point (at least at that consulting company was indeed price), so there was 0 commitment to employees from the employers side, so it's normal that the employees have the same and leave immediately when they get something they consider just slightly better offer.

b) trying to "adjust" the agreemtents to their benefit. A use case example is that the chinese org puts their better candidates as named engineers on their offer. Once the project is signed they start to swap them out under whatever bullshit. (Oh, we're very sorry, we have to swap John Holmes for Ron Jemery, etc.) On that point I woudln't be surprised if some of these people only existed on CVs and were totally fabricated resources simply used to try to win projects.

c) the need for constant supervision and very precise instrumentation. If you gave these chinese engineers a brick and said "see this brick here. it's nice, but I'd like you find out how to improve it somehow. Maybe make it more durable, cheaper to manufacture etc." Two weeks later the chinese engs will get back to you and ask, "what do we need to do?" However if you give them the blueprints for a brick factory and tell them to build you the factory and 1 million such bricks, that's a task they can do.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#64

Post by krisroadruck »

bkbaba wrote: post #45

THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore. 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…

I feel what you are saying but... that IS the reason people offshore. Why else would they ship jobs out of the US, deal with funky hours, bad phone connections, and often times very thick accents (which when combined with bad phone connections often render conversations 80% understandable at best) if not to save money? I would feel like crap if I was in that position too but I don't know how you go about solving it and still have a valid justification for offshoring that outweighs the negatives.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#65

Post by asenna »

lisivka wrote: post #62
kabisote wrote: post #51

"Vendors don't build software, people build software" Working with vendors is logical for big projects but an obstruction for small projects. If we eliminate the middleman, outsourcers would pay less and developers would be paid more. There'd be less bureaucracy. There'd be greater loyalty. I hope there was an easier way for outsourcers and developers to find each other.

It's called «freelancing». It's way cheaper and worse than outsourcing.

Any reason why you consider freelancing worse than outsourcing? I think if you can build a good team of freelancers, you basically save yourself from a lot of the issues this article mentions.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#66

Post by shagie »

The article does generally reflect what I've seen - not only with outsourcing, but also reflects the general cultural predisposition of people that I've worked with, in the US, from those places.

A bit on India with the churn that was mentioned I've seen explained as that it is difficult to get a promotion within the company - you need to get hired by another company to move up. With one contract shop that I've worked with, over the course of 18 months (we worked with them for three years) every developer position was replaced with a new person (so twice across those three years). This resulted in a lot of loss of institutional knowledge of the product. You'd train up a person, they'ed work on it for awhile, and then move on to another company and train their replacement. That training process was always lossy.

The goal for a ((stereo)typical) Indian developer is to be where the pay is best. The way that the companies are structured (and note other comments to the effect of the pay scales) is that this is in management. One gets to that by demonstrating management potential rather than technical skill. The highly paid sr. developer path isn't as viable as the (comparably) highly paid jr. management.

Another major point that didn't appear to be touched on in the article is the intellectual property leakage and protection. Many managers here are afraid of that (rightly?) and take significant effort to make sure that overseas developers are strictly limited to what they are working on. Sometimes that goes as far as "you have access to _this library_ - not the entire application that it is part of" (or for that matter, even the integration test suite - a build breaks because of a library change... and you can't provide the full test to show how it broke) leaving the integration to the in house team. That can cause some friction in the development process that is often unaccounted for at the start of the project.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#67

Post by sk1981 »

bkbaba wrote: post #45

THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore. 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…

Don't feel bad - lots of people just assume it's all about saving money, but sometimes the reason is the available to talent in Bangalore. I don't have any proof except what I have seen over the past 11 years. Most of the places I have worked had pretty good pay in Bangalore ( > 80000USD ) and it showed in the work they do. Also, if any of the good employees who were planning to resign, we did try our best to see if they would be interested in shifting to US instead. While this is anecdotal, I wrote it to point out not everyone looks at Bangalore as cheap resource and good developers are respected irrespective of where they are located.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#68

Post by eequah9L »

krisroadruck wrote: post #64
bkbaba wrote: post #45

THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore. 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…

I feel what you are saying but... that IS the reason people offshore. Why else would they ship jobs out of the US, deal with funky hours, bad phone connections, and often times very thick accents (which when combined with bad phone connections often render conversations 80% understandable at best) if not to save money? I would feel like crap if I was in that position too but I don't know how you go about solving it a…

Shortage of local talent might be another possibility.

On my team, about half the people are not local--I'm a remotee working from a different country, and a bunch of other folks are outsourced from India and Ukraine. I don't have insight into how much the outsourcing costs, but a figure of $50 per hour has been floated in this discussion. At that point you are pretty much back to local wages, so my guess is it's not the money.

This may not be your typical outsourcing story though. Individual people are actually hired like you would hire anyone local, with interviews and all, except it's a manager traveling there to do a series of interviews and not vice versa. The team is quite stable, the churn reported in the article doesn't seem to be a problem.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#69

Post by lisivka »

asenna wrote: post #65
lisivka wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called «freelancing». It's way cheaper and worse than outsourcing.

Any reason why you consider freelancing worse than outsourcing? I think if you can build a good team of freelancers, you basically save yourself from a lot of the issues this article mentions.

If you CAN build good team of freelancers, you can start your own outsource firm.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#70

Post by [deleted] »

ensiferum wrote: post #63

My experience (I managed a team of Chinese based devs for about a year) was that: a) people are indeed leaving. thats cause the main selling point (at least at that consulting company was indeed price), so there was 0 commitment to employees from the employers side, so it's normal that the employees have the same and leave immediately when they get something they consider just slightly better offer. b) trying to "adj…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN