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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?

#91
post #50

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…

Issues with offshoring giants like Tata & Infosys is - Engineers are often discouraged to exhibit autonomy & make decisions on their own.

It's rather an untold rule across the industry to channel all decisions & difficulties via their manager.

I'll give an example - We once asked our offshore-engineer (contractor) to share their personal email ID for a github invite for we knew that he had one readily at his disposal. Using gmail for work is a big deal for IT offshoring companies. The guy, instead of sharing his concerns about his directives & security guidelines directly with us, called his manager who replied to our email asking us to stick to Enterprise email IDs.

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

#92

You need to compete and market based on quality and knowledge, by just price. I have a competitor of yours trying to get a meeting with me. Their pitch is that I can have 10 programmers at $20/hr each, a 75% savings based on US programmers! The problem is I want solutions, not man-hours!

Also, if you look at the margins with which these organizations operate, the 10 programmers would be getting paid a mere $3/hr each for every $20/hr the organization charges.

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

#93

How 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.

Maybe I'm wrong, but a 10% to 20% failure rate could be pretty good. A lot of projects were never going to be successful no matter who tried to implement them. If you please everyone, you're probably doing easy work.

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

#94
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Re: Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

#95
Nobody gives a damn about wipro/tcs/infosys. India's best developers and designers are in a company called Directi. They compete w/ likes of google to get the best talent, pay them huge and groom talent. Most of their ex employees either land in Google or Facebook. Look it up for yourself.

They are not a service based company, so this is not a cheap plug promoting them.

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

#96

I see a lot of comments here about increasing code quality, work with your customer on the spec, don't play the lower price game, etc. These are all symptoms of a larger systemic, cultural issue. I'm not referring to the different cultures between regions, I'm talking about the developer culture. Successful agencies in the west pride themselves on being engineering focused and treating developers right. Treating them…

As a developer from India I can confirm this. There is a general attitude that if you are still writing code after 5 years after starting career, then you are a stupid.

Another aspect is payscale, you have to get promoted to non coding management roles to get a decent pay, So the priority will be getting to that level, not improving code quality and being a better developer

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

#97

I am working in a Startup, we have outsourced some jobs to third party team. I can’t tell you how horrible Code they write. Just to give a context they will store values in JSON inside the DB, just to lower the effort of converting them later I totally agree that the quality of work is way to low. I think that it’s up to the developer how well they write the code and develop themselves nothing to do with what majors…

I am not sure about your context, but even the relational databases like postgresql support json as the first class citizen because sometimes you have to store non relational data into your db
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