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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

#111

Post by gwbas1c »

CountSessine wrote: post #15
clifanatic wrote: post #2

I can't believe he skipped over the real elephant in the offshoring room - the time difference. All of those countries have almost no overlap with any part of the United States. If we schedule an 8 AM CST meeting with India (which is super early for some of the people here), it's already 7 PM at night there, and they're completely exhausted and ready to go home. And that's _if_ you can schedule a meeting far enough i…

Here's a question. You're in the US and your employer has decided to out source some work. Why are you , the American worker, tolerating your employer's request to stay late to talk to their outsourced lackeys? Whenever I've been asked to stay late for a time zone crossing meeting with outsourced employees, I've refused. WE are THEIR customers, not the other way around. They can damn well get up at 3am and WebEx-in i…

Gosh, you have a horrible attitude.

Outsourcing works best when you treat the people you're working with like people. Expecting them to regularly call into 3AM meetings is a recipe for disaster.

What I find works well is:

1: Find some common overlap times

2: Defend the overlap times against bullshit meetings

3: Take turns meeting at odd hours

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

#112

Post by 7fff00 »

slowmotiony wrote: post #71
dep_b wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say good programmers are relatively underpaid in Western Europe compared to the rest of the globe.

Absolutely - if they work as regular employees. In Munich a senior dev can be offered around 100k. If he's single and without kids, the government will immediately take more than half of that. Then the apartment will set him back around 1000 euro a month. This leaves him with around 3000€/month. I can make that in less than a week as a contractor doing the same thing in literally the same place.

We don't even pay nearly that much on our total income here in Denmark - this chart says Germans don't either https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_T...

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

#113

Post by coredog64 »

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…

> 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.

He addressed that early on -- he mentioned that much of the development was "brochureware" websites. Don't think the FDA gives a wet rat about that.

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

#114

Post by tigershark »

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…

Honestly with a lot of very good engineers paid in Europe less than 60kUSD I would say that I strongly disagree with your point of view. If you want to be paid like that move to Europe or to US. If you want to live in a country with an abysmal cost of life then be prepared to have less in absolute value. Heck, I know that with 60k in India you can have several servants and you can live like a king. I think that there is a limit to what the pointy head bosses are willing to pay once they realise that in proportion they are poorer than you.

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

#115

Post by rubberstamp »

sk1981 wrote: post #95
rubberstamp wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Average salaries are not a good indicator as there are lots of variation in Bangalore. Firms like Amazon, Flipkart, Walmarts, Ola (not sure of Microsoft) and lots of startups and financial firms pay quite high for their core engineering team. For example see this : https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Salary/Goldman-Sachs-Vice-Presid... . Average is 60K USD and max 82K USD. Technology does not includes the securities division…

I agree that avg salaries is not a good indicator. Unfortunately glassdoor shows average salaries instead of median salaries.

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

#116

Post by satwikhebbar »

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…

Is it just me or does anyone else find these comments borderline feudal in their line of thinking? Clients, not masters. Services, not servitude.

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

#117

Post by satwikhebbar »

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…

In my experience, the thickness of accents works both ways. There is no such thing as a pure accent - only what you are more used to.

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

#118

Post by slowmotiony »

7fff00 wrote: post #112
slowmotiony wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - if they work as regular employees. In Munich a senior dev can be offered around 100k. If he's single and without kids, the government will immediately take more than half of that. Then the apartment will set him back around 1000 euro a month. This leaves him with around 3000€/month. I can make that in less than a week as a contractor doing the same thing in literally the same place.

We don't even pay nearly that much on our total income here in Denmark - this chart says Germans don't either https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_T...

Google "brutto netto rechner" and calculate yourself. If you're single and childless half your money goes to tax and social stuff.

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

#119

Post by [deleted] »

7fff00 wrote: post #112
slowmotiony wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - if they work as regular employees. In Munich a senior dev can be offered around 100k. If he's single and without kids, the government will immediately take more than half of that. Then the apartment will set him back around 1000 euro a month. This leaves him with around 3000€/month. I can make that in less than a week as a contractor doing the same thing in literally the same place.

We don't even pay nearly that much on our total income here in Denmark - this chart says Germans don't either https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Income_T...

[deleted]

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

#120

Post by sumanthvepa »

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…

I'm curious. Have you tried asking a US engineer to improve the brick? I've had that experience, and the engg. team came back to me and asked me to improve the spec. I was an Indian product manager using engineers in the US (for a very very very large US software company) I had to specify the exact length of a text input field for a search box, because the team couldn't figure it out for themselves! Idiots exists everywhere.
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