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Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

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

#81

Post by jsymolon »

gshrikant wrote: post #41
CountSessine wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, yes I do realize that. But think about what his employer is asking of him. Is the wellbeing of these offshore workers his charity? Why should clifanatic EVER be put in the position of saving the offshore workers that his boss hired? Clifanatic's boss can ask those offshore workers to stay late, and then he can damn well shell out for them to take a taxi home. Maybe he can even let them come in late, given what an…

>> Is the wellbeing of these offshore workers his charity? Why should clifanatic EVER be put in the position of saving the offshore workers that his boss hired? 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-li…

> the work-life balance of ...

BOTH employees are screwed to save a dime.

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

#82

Post by slowmotiony »

ido wrote: post #49
anupshinde wrote: post #38

Nice article and on the spot. 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…

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries: 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.

Is it really that low in Berlin? That's like 3k net a month isn't it? Probably half that when you rent an apartment. At this point I'd just not bother, get some easy minijob gardening or something and apply for social housing and Hartz IV.

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

#83

Post by saiya-jin »

anupshinde wrote: post #38

Nice article and on the spot. 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…

I agree with what you say, and just validates what I think and heard over and over again for many years - off shoring isn't worth it for most of the use cases. In long run, it's at least as expensive if not more, the issue with time zones, communication and just doing everything is too much to counter the low savings which are not usually even there.

the only case I can think of is if you need an army of developers and for some regulatory reason cannot find them / bring them locally.

I'll take anytime mediocre dev that sits next to me to some remote superior dev, since all we do is a team effort that actual coding of lines of code is quite small part of.

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

#84

Post by jsymolon »

eequah9L wrote: post #68
krisroadruck wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Shortage of local talent might be another possibility.

Only shortage is, is a person at the price that they want to pay.

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

#85

Post by rubberstamp »

sk1981 wrote: post #67
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…

Quick search for developer salaries in Glasdoor lists avg salary in Bangalore at Rs. 500,000 which would be approx 8,000 USD as opposed to > $80k. The max I could find was for Microsoft and Amazon, which was $19k.

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

#86

Post by dan_b »

ido wrote: post #58
alvarosevilla95 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what I can tell, London has starting salaries in the £30-40k range which compared to the $60-100k in the valley seems absurd, specially as cost of living in London is not that much different.

Yeah London is quite off the charts, similar developer wages to large German cities but at much higher CoL. I think this has to do with UK culturally not valuing engineers as much compared to Germany.

It's a blue collar job in the UK, coupled with the out-dated concept that individual contributors cannot earn as much as managers.

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

#87

Post by dominotw »

anupshinde wrote: post #38

Nice article and on the spot. 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…

>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

Thank you for your insight. Curious, what makes you say this? Is the current system trending down that path?

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

#88

Post by dmoy »

CountSessine wrote: post #19
dmoy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in some cases people will do it because otherwise their employer may fire them. Living in the US most of us are at will, and don't have that much luxury to give employers the finger.

What's your value to your employer? If you're not willing to stay late to do a cross time zone meeting then I agree that you're worth a bit less to your boss than you otherwise would be. Personally I would rather accept a bit less pay to be rid of a nuisance like a boss who thinks I'll inconvenience myself and my family for stupid shit like adjusting myself to his outsourced labour's schedule. I do stay late when shi…

Sure if you're 99% confident you can walk into another job of comparable total comp, then you have the luxury to walk out. If you're the sole or main breadwinner, deep in a mortgage, possibly with healthcare issues, and living in an area where comparable employers are slim to none, then you may do much worse things than stay up late or work odd hours for an employer.

We don't have much of a safety net in the US...

Don't get me wrong I'd much prefer if it was E.g. Germany where your boss can't email you after work.

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

#89

Post by dominotw »

txttran wrote: post #75
ido wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries: 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.

This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).

> very high quality English speaking devs

Thats exactly what OP is saying you'll get in India for that price. Unless your assumption is everyone in India/China is low quality at any price.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

txttran wrote: post #75
ido wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries: 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.

This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).

[deleted]
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