Does your agency have any public GIT repository? To be more specific.
Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#52How can you show someone you are good mobile developers? I would focus on communicating how have done amazing work for previous customers, and try to earn referral business. Also, do amazing work!
That's exactly we have done so far. 80% of our business is either referral customer or repeat customer.
10 to 20% of times we have failed miserably to satisfy customers needs.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
I completely agree and these days I follow exactly that strategy, to good effect. However I think it's still, in general, damaging to general perception.
Another factor is that most of my encounters with such groups has been while working for organisations looking for a cheap option. I strongly suspect that this is common and results in hiring low quality groups with mediocre people - again tainting popular perception.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#54I'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 wor…
Yes, I tried Ukraine and the quality of back-end code was much higher. Front end UI was not great, but it worked.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#55[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#56In my last company we were burned by these "IT firms".
It is basically impossible to get any meaningful work done unless you have a person on site with the dev team.
You also need to write very very very detailed design docs and feature requirements.
If you absolutely must use services of these companies, try to get them work on peripheral features, instead of core application logic. You'll be minimizing long term technical debt damage risk to the project that way.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#57I had a positive experience a few years back with a small agency located in Bhubaneswar in Odisha.
Our company started working with them because we needed a mass-production job done quickly: we needed a whole mess of paper health-care forms converted to Acrobat (pdf) forms.
We quickly discovered that this particular agency assigned a staff member who worked to really understand the forms and imagine the workflow of the people using them. The forms (PDF forms really are programs) we got back were excellent. They actually made the work of filling them out faster than the old paper forms.
So we inquired whether they could do other development work for us. That turned into a good relationship.
We went into the relationship not thinking "how do we get the cheapest possible programming labor?" but rather "how do we add to our company's capacity to get all these @##*% forms converted?". We started assigning low-risk tasks. And, after three years or so they were great colleagues.
We gave them good references and they got other work partly as a result.
We did daily "scrum" calls, early in the morning US time and at the end of their workday India time. Somebody went to visit them once a year. In other words, we treated them like colleagues. It's all about people and relationships.
I believe classic cost-driven "outsourcing" contract deals -- the kind of stuff that's driven by finance executives -- have contributed to India-based agencies' struggles with reputation. Would you hire a kid fresh out of Carnegie Mellon and tell him "you have your job because you're cheaper than our other developers?" No. So why would you say that to a kid fresh out of an excellent Indian university?
I believe the Odisha location was helpful, because turnover was lower than it might have been in Bengaluru or Mumbai.
Plus, Odisha is a really cool place to visit.
That's one story.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#58I kind of get what you're saying. I live and work in Germany where there is the stereotype of a very high standard that we carry around on all our products i.e. there are companies that would not do business with us if they did not get the "Made in Germany" stamp from our exported goods/services. This is an image - whether correct or not - that was acquired over a long period of time where many companies (BMW, Bosch,…
This is by far the best advice I have received. Thank you.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#59Does your agency have any public GIT repository? To be more specific.
yes, we do have public git repo.
We also organize a monthly developer conference and emphasis on development practices + development tools on iOS.
Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?
#60I've worked with 4 different ones now (in Bangalore and New Delhi).
You want fixed price, fixed DETAILED spec, fixed timelines and assume that you don't want to maintain the product afterwards. That's worked well when we've had quant calculators that just need to done one thing. Expect there to be a high management cost on your side.
Outside that, my experience has been pretty terrible and it comes down to a cultural desire to be positive all the time. Saying Yes all the time is a disaster, especially when dealing with non-technical business people. I'll give a couple of examples:
1. I've tech-Lead a large group (40+ but I interviewed more) of offshorers, the manager on the Bangalore side helped the devs through their coding interviews by recording my questions, working out the answers and handing them round. When I realised what was happening, I invented easy questions off the cuff and found the interviewees (on the other end of the phone) would pause and then give an answer they couldn't explain. I could even hear one guy typing in the question as I asked it. When we approached the Bangalore manager to sit in on the interviews, he said that he didn't see a problem, claiming over and over that he'd chosen the very best developers.
The CEO still went with the agency and I found that the few good developers that agency had moved on because they were offered more elsewhere, leaving with the knowledge I'd trained them with.
2. We expanded our team by bringing in an offshore team. The Indian provider sent 6 to 8 (can't remember) "senior c# .NET developers" over for us to train on the system. One of the developers didn't know how to open a solution in Visual Studio and asked me where the "Run" button was. When I showed him the CV that had been sent over for him, he agreed that it was his and confirmed that he had 6 years .NET experience. How you can code in any framework for 6 years and not know how to press F5 is staggering (this was back in the day when VS was your only choice).
None of the companies or managers I've worked with before would ever go offshore (outside of Europe) again.
> How do we work on changing customer's perspective?
A lot of this is cultural. What appears to be of acceptable quality to an Indian agency isn't OK where I am in the UK. Also, there needs to be balance between being positive while at the same time realistic. "Bending the truth" is part of the back-and-forth of Indian business but in Europe (and especially in software development), that's a disaster.
The best you can do is act more like a Western business and how their perspective changes of your single company.