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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

#101

Post by bulatb »

rwallace wrote: post #97
_0nac wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean "poached"? You can't pirate people...

Let's not tolerate the use of "poached" either; it implies (in a "ha ha, only serious") way that people are property, and it's been a long time since there was any excuse for tolerating that idea. The proper words are "hired" or "recruited".

It also implies it's somehow wrong to offer an employee of another firm a better deal than they're currently getting.

Well-mannered firms don't do that sort of thing, you see. It drives the wages up.

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

#102

Post by flanbiscuit »

> What I'd typically find is people would specialise in one discrete part of a software component and that's all they'd do.

I work in pharma advertising as a dev but sometimes our client has their own offshore dev team. I've dealt with Wipro many times. This right here has been a common issue with them. Our account team will ask me if something is doable and I'd say yes but Wipro would push back saying they can't. And our sites fall into that brochureware category so these were mostly front-end trendy things using history push-state or what not. We usually found that they had a very limited scope and would not venture outside of it. I guess that's the difference, you get what you pay for. Usually if something is handed to me that I've never done before I do some research first and 90% of the time I figure it out. We've had better luck with eastern European offshore team in this regard. If I were looking for offshore teams I'd suggest there or South America first

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

#103

Post by _nalply »

2001 I worked half a year in Pune, Maharashtra with Indian developers. In my personal experience Indians are hard thinkers but undisciplined and chaotic coders. This means they managed the mess they made rather well just because they still understand what they did. Perhaps it was the CEO who just let them do what they want provided it works after all.

The salary was one thirteenth of what I would get in Switzerland. The efficiency was about one half, but only because the Swiss CEO himself lived in Pune and later married an Indian woman. If he stayed in Switzerland efficiency would have crashed badly. In any case, don't talk about the code quality.

I also noticed the extreme churn the article mentioned. In my half a year about 5 to 10 percent of the people left and new people started.

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

#104

Post by Roboprog »

uiri wrote: post #74
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…

> So if you are paying 120K in the US, the same should cost you 54-60K USD when the engineer is in India When you are comparing to the US, are you talking about Silicon Valley or the Midwest? In Silicon Valley, $120K is probably a junior engineer that would cost $54-60K in the Midwest.

That's a good point. We should be using shops in cheaper parts of our own country (said from a US standpoint, obviously).

Of course, there's the tyranny of numbers to deal with when you are looking:

Population of India: 1300 million.

Population of Indiana: 7 million.

(approximately)

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

#105

Post by Roboprog »

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…

I hear you. I took a pay cut (albeit with the possibility of a pension after 5 years), largely so I would not have to deal with offshore hours.

That said, the guys in India on our support team were fairly accommodating about working what was for them swing shift, so that their schedule pretty much matched NY Stock Exchange hours. 6 AM Pacific Time would have been pretty brutal for me, personally. 7 AM was bad enough.

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

#106

Post by Roboprog »

AvenueIngres wrote: post #24
garagemc2 wrote: post #3

Really interesting and well written article. I don't think China will be an outsourcing destination for long. In India your slowly starting to see agencies that aren't merely code factories but places where you can do actual product development. Its early days though.

This is kind of frightening, our wages won't survive a world in which where there's a surplus of talent coming from developing countries.

I have seem some talent, at various levels, some of which is even quite good. But I surely would NOT call it a "surplus" :-)

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

#107

Post by Roboprog »

rwallace wrote: post #97
_0nac wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean "poached"? You can't pirate people...

Let's not tolerate the use of "poached" either; it implies (in a "ha ha, only serious") way that people are property, and it's been a long time since there was any excuse for tolerating that idea. The proper words are "hired" or "recruited".

But you see, competent engineers who work for below market salaries are an endangered species! As such, they deserve our full "protection".

Thus the word "poached" :-)

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

#108

Post by Roboprog »

rubberstamp wrote: post #85
sk1981 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds similar to my experience at a financial company a few years ago (2010 - 2014). The pay in Hyderabad for devs was in the $10K - $20K (USD) range, with most around the low middle of that. These were offshore employees, though, NOT outsourced contractors.

Keeping devs who learned something met with mixed success. On the one hand, the salaries were at least market rate for devs, I think, but management still offered the real Rs.

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

#110

Post by ido »

slowmotiony wrote: post #82
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.

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.

Harz 4 I think adds up to about 800 or 900 euros per month with all benefits combined, which is a lot less than 3000.

Our rent is 490 euros net per month (in Berlin) for a 1BR apartment but we're looking for a 2BR at the moment so our kid can have his own bedroom. This will probably end up costing about 800 eur/m net (not a central or hip location, but close to transit).

Also, while Germany has high income taxes it has lots of tax relief for being married and having kids. I think we ended up paying maybe 15% income tax last year (1 kid, wife earning minimally). Plus lots of subsidies for childcare & education (in Berlin even more than in other places in Germany).

You can definitely easily support a family of 3 or 4 with a single wage in that range.

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