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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another plug: Americans living overseas. There's a ton of us, and we speak English, have US bank accounts, and understand American culture. We're also likely to be back in the US every so often...
How do I hire you guys?
As someone who managed off-shore projects, I think this model can be made to work only if the coding part is offshore. The design part would have to be done on-shore in a majority of cases. The problem with outsourcing design is that you may not have people who understand the business or the dynamics of the environment they are designing for.
So offshore projects require the Waterfall methodology to succeed? What if requirements change? The design has to change and of course the code. I think you are exactly right, but the nature of development makes offshoring problematic. I have not yet seen good software products created over seas. Usually they need lots of work in-house (rewritten). In my experience the cost savings of offshore development is really c…
Of course not.
Offshoring definitely does work. I manage 45 staff in 9 countries and it's a matter of hiring the right people.
Hiring a company from India to just handle the entire development for you is highly unlikely to work.
Hiring staff directly, only looking for top talent, with staff working from home, and picking the very best of the best can work, and can be a fraction of the cost of hiring staff in the valley. It's very hard to compete with Google and Facebook when trying to hire top talent, so why compete? The Internet allows you to hire in any city and any country, so why limit yourself to one area?
Hire on skills not on geographic location.
Well, I can speak about the problems from the other side of the fence :) Someone said on this thread that offshore works only when you give a very detailed specification of the project. The biggest problem problem I'm facing every day is not having a way to get answers to my questions. There are many layers of intermediaries that filter out information and delay the answers. I do have to deliver the project and I can…
We work with extremely slow connections and antediluvian software/hardware tools. All managerial decisions are taken by incompetent managers whose main skills is to shepherd as many people as they can. For technical queries, we have to wait for at least a day before someone from the client side can provide an answer.
The IT team from the client side never wanted us as they see us as job stealers and highlight even the smallest of our mistakes in a Daily WTF style because it helps validate the stupid-offshore-programmer notion everyone has. This is one of the more serious issues that no one wants to talk about. The xenophobia from the client kills any chances for meaningful conversation. We are low cost workers and are treated like one.
In the last 12 years that I have worked as an offshore developer, I have had very few meetings that were at a time convenient to me. To this day, I have meetings late in the night from 10:00pm to 12:00 morning or early morning before 7:00am.
Cut us some slack guys. Not all of us are uneducated, illiterate coders who speak bad English and write worse code.
http://mixergy.com/beanstalk-bootstrapped-run-virtually-gene...
From the interview...
Andrew: Where in the country or where in the world are your people?
Chris: Let’s see. I always have to think about this. There are nine of us total. We have people in Ukraine, Germany, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia.
It doesn't work because this is what happens. You're working for your mid-sized company, a couple hundred employees, and they had just a great 2010. The parent company is willing to invest in further growth, and at the top-level growth means headcount, headcount, headcount. So they hire a couple dozen people with titles like "product manager" and "business analyst" and the tech project pipeline, already stuffed to be…
Here’s my experience and if this helps someone gain a better handle on how to deal with the issue, great! The first time I looked to off-shore my development, I went with traditional off-shore development providers and was severely disappointed. The developers I found had big firm coding experience – having worked on projects for Goog, Msft etc and probably could build software on a consulting basis but just didn't get "startup" development. They needed a defined set of requirements within which they could work and needed for those requirements not to change. You can forget about pivoting. This "big-company, back-office" mentality obviously won't work for startups. They don't understand agile software development and are terrible with communication. And by communication I don't mean English, that’s usually not the issue; the issue is their approach to communication with a team - closing the loop on emails, replying in a timely manner (or doing anything in a timely manner for that matter) and addressing all the issues you communicate with them.
After spending time with 2-3 different teams I changed my approach and started searching for people who were passionate about and contributed to open-source, were active on forums, on Twitter & Fb, and were excited about working on my idea – as opposed to guys wanting to make money from a consulting gig. I found my current developer through such a search and so far it’s been great. There have been some hiccups, but I daresay these aren't issues that would have cropped up even with a team located stateside.
So I’m running a distributed company and it’s working out to be very cost-effective - which was the reason I started down this path in the first place. Anyways this is my experience. I may be one of the lucky few; but I do believe that you can find folks with a mentality suited to startups. And if you do, the cost savings are worth the pain.