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Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#41

Post by aurelianito »

maxxxxx wrote: post #28

From the US the time difference is a major problem. You can never discuss anything during normal work hours and any issue will have a one day turnaround. Or you stay up late all the time and then it takes over your personal life. We have some devs now in Costa Rica which is much easier to manage because you can discuss things on the phone during the day.

I would like to second this. If you are in the US or Europe there is no way to meet via conference call/video with Indian developers and make the meeting be in office hours for both India and you. This makes the communication much less agile and/or generates a really poor work-life balance for the people that is forced to work at night, and this impacts directly on the quality of the development. For US and Europe it would be much better to hire from Latinamerica instead.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#44

Post by ThomPete »

Having worked with Indian companies and for Indian companies the last 20 years here is my advice.

1) Learn to say 'no' or 'we need to understand this better before we can give you a quote or a deadline — too often, way-way too often Indian outsourcing companies oversell their capabilities. Learn to say, 'this can be done, this can't be done' within the timeframe/budget etc.

2) Increase your prices, get more senior developers (increase their salaries). For most western companies even a 100 increase in price is still many times cheaper than what they can get and if you get better developers because you can pay more you will be able to better meet your deadlines.

3) Invest heavily in proper frontend people. Give them extra training if needed so they know how to write optimized code. There is a world of difference between solving the problem and solving it elegantly. All too often what you get back works but is useless because it's too slow.

4) Hire western project managers. Don't get me wrong I have worked with some really great Indian managers but understanding the western culture and expectations and being able to understand western expectations would remove 90% of the confusion that happens today.

5) Did I say, increase your prices and your salaries?

6) Be better at writing PRD's and set expectations, make sure you can meet those expectations and don't be afraid to push back on what's possible to deliver early on. The sooner a client knows there will be delays or the sooner they know their timeline expectations can't be met in time the better. That allows them to plan accordingly.

7) Did I say, Learn to say 'no' or 'we will have to look some more into this'

Ping me if you want more concrete advice, it's an area I care about a lot because I worked with Indian companies a lot.

Solving the quality, expectations and honest feedback would increase any Indian development house directly into a top-tier partner for me.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#45

Post by ethbro »

dcminter wrote: post #31
laci27 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they always say yes." OMG this is by FAR the most annoying thing with them. But I think It's a cultural thing.. They say yes, not because they know how to actually do it, but rather that they understood what you said (English is a second language for them so I think they just mean "yes, I understood that part").

Me: Can you blah blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Ok, and would you be able to blah blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Great, and do you think that will be ready by blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Fantastic. What approach do you intend to use? Them: Yes Me: mutes phone, curses, unmutes phone, goes back to start I've occasionally worked with some excellent individuals, but the aggregate has been poor. My most recent experience with a team of…

This has come up on HN and other places. If you want to avoid this issue, phrase your questions differently (e.g. as non-binary agree/disagree questions).

I'll let one of our Indian colleagues suggest the best alternative here, as I'm sure they know more about the relevant Indian cultural points than I.

But even something like "Tell me how you will accomplish X?" or "Do you have any worries about doing Y?" tend to produce better India-US communication.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#46

Post by Clubber »

osrec wrote: post #18

I've used large (Wipro/TCS) and small firms, and poor code quality is common amongst them all. What's more apparent is their lack of ability to innovate or think on their feet. If I give them a "familiar" problem to solve, they're generally okay, but anything that requires them to think outside of the box, they tend to overcomplicate and the result is often terrible. Also, I no longer find them to be cost effective,…

I've seen the same thing. If I didn't know better, I would say they have 1 or two guys in a large group that are talented and helps the tens of hundreds of people who are unqualified. That works ok for a while, but doesn't scale well, and you end up getting code written by unqualified people and the 1 or 2 good people don't have the time to check everyone's code and a lot of stuff falls through the cracks.

FWIW I worked with an eastern bloc country team (Europe) and it was top notch.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#47

Post by PaulRobinson »

Basically, in my experience, and the experience of others I've spoken to, you need to do almost exactly the opposite of everything the India dev agency industry does. The sector as a whole it completely trashed and discredited in the UK, from what I can see, and if I interview somewhere and they have an Indian agency on-board somewhere, it's a major red flag that something very, very bad is probably happening somewhere.

That's because every single Indian dev agency experience I've had, has resulted in a net negative outcome, sometimes so bad we've thrown away _everything_ they've touched and started again.

A couple of ideas that might make everything "nicer":

1. Increase code quality. Commit to it. Understand technical debt and commit to reducing it. Refactor. Code reviews. Cite and apply industry standard texts like _Clean Code_ or language-specific texts (e.g. _POODR_ for Ruby). Test coverage, great documentation, highly readable code: they're not optional any more.

2. Go agile and lean. Don't expect BUFD. Realise the client is learning as they go too.

3. Don't take specs from a client and develop code that meets them. Develop the spec _with the customer_. Use BDD properly.

4. Realise there are many things that go outside the spec. Pre-empt. Don't wait to be told. Realise that functional requirements are less than 20% of what is needed to successfully ship a product. There are many things I would "just expect" a developer to do, but every time I've worked with an Indian dev agency I got exactly what I asked for, no more, no less, no common sense applied. Do I really need to tell you the "password" field should be encrypted at rest, and which crypto scheme to use? No, you should do that because it's basic common sense, and tell me what crypto you chose, and why...

5. Say "no" more. Say "I don't know" more. Say "we made a mistake" early when it's obvious you made a mistake. Don't pretend you/your colleagues are an "expert" in something if you've read one or two books or developed a couple of projects: you're still novices until you have 3-5 years experience of doing that thing. Embrace that, be honest about it, it's OK. Price yourself accordingly.

6. The sector tries to compete on price. Try and compete on speed or quality instead.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#48

Post by desaiguddu »

balladeer wrote: post #32
desaiguddu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, Jason. 1) To address the over-communication we have stopped working on fixed price projects, and rather worked with customers as their extended team 2) We as a group of individuals are trying hard to change this perspective. Our Computer Science education needs to be blamed as well 3)I have created a very interesting slide on our deck https://goo.gl/5jvN6R Cheers

2. As a someone who is from the land and had the same CS education I would beg to differ. Once you are a developer you must not blame the education you received till now. It all depends upon how you work and learn after college/uni. Also, the quality of CS education depends a lot on what college/uni a particular person went to. Some places impart really good fundamentals and I am not talking about just the IITs. But…

Thank you for your comments.

2. I still believe the CS Education needs to be improved like anything.

Some Unis are picking up good practices but at large the fundamentals of programming needs to be taught in a better way.

3. 100% agree with you on work-life balance. We are doing our best to keep the workplace healthy, interactive & fun.

As a small team, our emphasis is never about more work but better work. We have always encouraged team members to speak at developer events, contribute to open source etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#49

Post by drrob »

balladeer wrote: post #37
drrob wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid I have to agree; the ones I've worked with have all been characterised by terrible code quality. Perhaps the key thing is a tighter attitude to specialisation: most Indian (and, for that matter, far east Asian) development teams tend to have a "we can do everything across a billion platforms and techs" approach, where it might be better off concentrating your offering down to a few key techs, and really do…

IMHO it's more like - "let's not lose this contract".

Or "We're developing a website for them, maybe we can upsell them an associated Android/iOS app as well".

Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#50

Post by tnolet »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #15

Have tried a lot of times ( 8 times to be exact), the only one that worked is now doing his own projects and launches a SAAS. The CEO was involved in every project. Every project took a very long time though and deadlines were not met. Other experience, estimates are wrong, filling in more hours than actually worked and they always say yes. But what they mean is we can't or don't understand what your mean and we will…

Exactly, my two peeves having worked with companies like Tata and InfoSys were:

1. Saying yes to everything. Questions, estimates, analysis: everything was answered in the positive even when the facts were negative. I makes project control very hard. 2. Deferring to management every 10 minutes. On every call, meeting etc. Engineers were very much not able to make decisions by themselves.

Having said that, all men and women I worked with from these companies we're really friendly and certainly tried their best.

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