The "lower cost of living" argument, is misleading. Yes it is cheaper to live in many other places, but competitive forces make smart developers gravitate towards high paying jobs.. if you are paying $7/hr for a developer and you consider the overhead of management layers,communication costs, cultural diferences, productivity etc etc.. you end up getting about $7/hr type of product.
If your project can live with $7 components fine.. if you need better, you usually throw it away and get a new one...
( Exactly as I did last time I bought a cheap set of tools at home depo.. yea they where cheap, but lasted a week and gave me a whole lot of trouble and aggravation)
Outsourcing Doesn't Work
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#22I've read many articles critical of offshoring to India over the past few years, and they all seem to have the same pattern. The authors all seem to want to describe what's wrong with offshoring, but what they end up describing are great examples of the kind of thinking in American companies which leads to failure. The pattern is almost identical:
- It all starts with, out of nowhere, 'pressure' to 'outsource/offshore' a specific project against the will of the developers/managers in the US.
- These same devs/managers are entrusted with the project and told to 'get it done in India'. They have no idea where to hire great developers, or what these developers want after they're hired, but they set up a project anyway.
- They either go to an outsourcing company or set up a small office in India to get a 'bunch of developers'. There is no discussion in the article of a management structure in India and it is assumed the experienced devs in the US need to do the management and review of the work.
- It's amazing how often the result cited is that 'it would take us less time to rewrite what these guys did than to ask for rework'.
- The company, having learnt its lesson, presumably never ventures into these waters again.
Meanwhile, companies which know anything about a global workforce have a center in India set up not by a group of devs who don't want to do it, but at the topmost level of the company. They hire or send someone really bright who understands India and the talent market here and spends real effort and investment into hiring great people and building a real techie culture.
They protect their India teams from the I'll-spend-more-time-reviewing-it-than-writing-it-myself crowd, and give them real ownership and responsibility, often starting small but prepared to give more ownership as the teams grow in capability. They don't set them up for failure by givening them US managers who want them to fail.
I work at a large setup like this (and there are many others), where teams aren't 'sending code to be reviewed' by devs in the US, they're defining the specs and technical direction, shipping products to customers directly, often much better than the US teams they took the product over from. Not always, but very often. All the technical management for the product is in India and they're given real responsibility and authority to set directions for the technology.
Yes, as the article says, there are great developers everywhere, but they need to be found, they need to be attracted and appreciated and they need to be given real ownership. Then you find out if offshoring works or not.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#23Outsourcing can work.
The problem biggest is most people who outsource do it to save money. So naturally they end up selecting programmers who offer a cheap price (which has nothing to do with they skills).
The second biggest issue is the type of people who outsource have no technical skills, hence they cannot interview developers.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#24I would've changed the article name to "Outsourcing to India doesn't work". I fully agree with that, and can share many more horror stories. However - domestic outsourcing (such as to the company that I run ;)) does work. We use TDD, source countrol, iterations, product roadmaps, daily standups, code reviews, continuous build integration, and all the good stuff. Also, all the good domestic outsourcing companies appro…
Yea.. and you probably don't charge $7/hr.
Maybe the name of the article should read "Cheap outsourcing doesn't work"
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#25Outsourcing works, else it would not still exist.
Exactly: it's depressing, but working software really can be created by throwing dozens or hundreds of junior-level developers at it.
I'm just not interested in working on any problem domain where that's the best approach.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#26"A good developer in any country does not have to fear outsourcing or other cost-saving trends."
So the attention-grabbing headline is a statement on 'outsourcing' in general, which I believe means just delegating services to a third-party supplier and not necessarily to save costs, and the very last line of the post qualifies it to a 'cost-saving' sort of delegation, so as not to detract from the intensity of the arguments and yet leave it just about politically correct.
Nifty.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#27When you have developers given specs for small parts of larger systems, no stake in the outcome, small amounts of money, and no say in the design of the system, I'd expect bad results.
Generally speaking you get the best from programmers when they have a stake in the larger picture, some say in how and why things work the way they do, responsibility for their work, and at least some autonomy.
Why should it be different for outsourced work?
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a girl ("I am the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants (Indonesian/Chinese on one side and Russian on the other side)"). 1) The problem with domestic outsourcing is you frequently come up against the issue of "I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now." For small site projects like wordpress blogs this may be acceptable, but for actual software I still can'…
The domestic firms to which you outsource typically don't want #1 to happen. They want to build a long-term relationship and hold your repeat business. They want to become such experts on your software that it's not cost effective for you to pay their competitors to work on it. The way they can stay less expensive than in-house development is simple. They can use time division multiplexing to put an entire team of wo…
I'm sure that's true for many, many firms. But, in my experience running a domestic product development firm, the single best way to acquire repeat business is to exit completely and gracefully. Doing so builds a trusted relationship not only with the business managers who authorize our work but also with the technical resources who have to live with our code. When we give both groups reasons to trust our integrity, I find that I'm able to negotiate better, longer-term maintenance agreements (when those make sense) AND that I'm presented with opportunities to bid on future projects.
Clearly, many HNers have had poor experiences with outsourcing (whether domestic or overseas). But there are good guys out there, I promise.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#29I would've changed the article name to "Outsourcing to India doesn't work". I fully agree with that, and can share many more horror stories. However - domestic outsourcing (such as to the company that I run ;)) does work. We use TDD, source countrol, iterations, product roadmaps, daily standups, code reviews, continuous build integration, and all the good stuff. Also, all the good domestic outsourcing companies appro…
Yea.. and you probably don't charge $7/hr. Maybe the name of the article should read "Cheap outsourcing doesn't work"
Sure, it's not $7/per hour but it's not $100/per hour either. You'd be surprised.
Re: Outsourcing Doesn't Work
#30I've read many articles critical of offshoring to India over the past few years, and they all seem to have the same pattern. The authors all seem to want to describe what's wrong with offshoring, but what they end up describing are great examples of the kind of thinking in American companies which leads to failure. The pattern is almost identical: - It all starts with, out of nowhere, 'pressure' to 'outsource/offshor…
I completely agree with you. I've been on many projects where outsourcing ended up being a terrible idea, but anyone with a brain would be able to see that the process was screwed up from the beginning (on our side). I imagine myself in the shoes of the outsourced developer, and its easy to conclude I would have produced the same crap results given the constraints most managers put on the teams.
Code ownership and the freedom to make your own actual decision is vital for any really good developer. We can't just take that away, and then complain when the project hits the rocks.
Still, I'm going to stay away from using offshore teams in the future as its just too damn hard to get right if you have a limited budget.