Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#51

Post by kamaal » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:21 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #37

bguthrie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. Good programmers in India, like good programmers everywhere, cost more than bad programmers. If you would like to hire a decent shop, there are boutiques and larger firms available, but they will charge $40-50/hour, not $15. The problem isn't in the outsourcing, it's treating development like a $15/hour commodity. We all know that it doesn't work that way. The author described paying an hourly rate f…

But there are plenty of good programmers in the US that will work for $50 an hour, which ends up being about $100,000 a year. And if you can have your users, analysts, and programmers in the same building for what it costs to outsource, why outsource?

There is a lot to business than just hourly billing. If you are running a big company. Real estate, paying support services, insurance and other side costs also matters.

All these side expenditure and head ache in managing them saps a lot of money and people.

A lot of people feel its better to some money and have others do it for you. Than you doing it. Especially if that job is not your company's core expertise.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#52

Post by smg » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:21 AM UTC

Look around you and you will find that most American companies hire lots of Indians as programmers. Do you think that the guys who ended up coming to America suddenly transmogrified in to competent programmers during their flight across the ocean? Do you think that those Indian engineers who decided to stay back and work in India are any less competent than the ones who took the flight? Having worked in both India and the US for over a decade, my experience tells me that the distributions for programming skills are almost identical in the two populations. The top percentile of programmers in India (those who work for Google, MS, Amazon) are as good as their counterparts in the US. The $12 crowd is about as good as the craigslist freelancers who charge a similar rate. While you may not have to worry about being replaced as a programmer, what you should worry about is an India startup like Zoho or Freshdesk competing with your company. Unlike China where startups can focus on the largely internal Mandarin speaking market, Indian startups are going to come after all the English speaking markets.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#53

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:21 AM UTC

Here's why you should feel threatened by programmers in India.

I recently hired a guy over there to work for our startup. He's smart and he gets things done. He's still a little green, but overall he adds a lot of value to our company. He's just as good as anyone I would have found in the US.

And after we exit/die, the company he starts might be competing with yours.

India has a billion people, 10's of millions of code monkeys, and millions of good coders. The existence of code monkeys doesn't mean you don't need to compete with the smarter guys.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#54

Post by tsunamifury » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:21 AM UTC

This post is so similar to my current situation I checked the authors connections to see if he was talking me myself and my partner. I am a designer with little code experience who tried to spec and design an app using Indian developers. Needless to say its been a disaster and many months and hours paid later we have a inefficient, poorly coded app which likely needs to be rebuilt with an American team.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#55

Post by bguthrie » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:22 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #37

bguthrie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. Good programmers in India, like good programmers everywhere, cost more than bad programmers. If you would like to hire a decent shop, there are boutiques and larger firms available, but they will charge $40-50/hour, not $15. The problem isn't in the outsourcing, it's treating development like a $15/hour commodity. We all know that it doesn't work that way. The author described paying an hourly rate f…

But there are plenty of good programmers in the US that will work for $50 an hour, which ends up being about $100,000 a year. And if you can have your users, analysts, and programmers in the same building for what it costs to outsource, why outsource?

$50 sounds low to me--I'm not on the sales side, but I'm told that $75 is closer to the minimum for, e.g. a Ruby skillset, and many shops, such as my employer, charge much more--but yes, at that rate you're better off going local, particularly for the colocation benefits.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#56

Post by paulhauggis » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:26 AM UTC

compay wrote: post #15

I'm a partner at a Ruby outsourcing company in Argentina. I sympathize with the author, but I think the conclusion that outsourcing doesn't work is overly broad. The crux of the problem is that working with a remote team is a very different proposition than working with people onsite - a fact that is obvious but that people generally fail to act on. Quite often at my company we're contacted by clients want to hire fo…

"Have a crystal clear idea of what you want built."

Rarely have I ever worked for a company that knows this. The last company where I worked would change their mind mid-stream every couple of weeks and it added almost a year of extra time onto the final release date.

It's usually not this bad, but if more companies followed this (not even just with outsourcing), there wouldn't be as many failed projects.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#57

Post by senthilnayagam » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:32 AM UTC

Be it onsite/nearshore/offshore, "What was the parameters evaluated to choose a Consulting company or freelancer?"

If price quoted was the only criteria to evaluate, then there are many unknowns

We face the reverse problem, so many times american clients come to us to get a quote, after getting quote then telling it is 2x their budget.

When we give them a detailed breakup question the need for documentation, requirement freezing in the name of Agile.

Also many question why the need to signing off with acceptance testing and would ask for perpetual warranty support.

Now our new presales activity includes gauging clients software life cycle knowledge and understanding working with remote teams.

We take clients and projects where we find a right fit, and can meet or exceed client expectations.

We have been growing at 100% year on year for past 5 years, and employ 132 people now

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#58

Post by drieddust » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:40 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #44

I am from India and let me say you don't have to feel threatened by bad programmers in India. The problem with posts like these is they make massive generalizations which are not true. Not every body here is a genius and not everybody here is an idiot. I have worked in extremely challenging projects which were billed for dirt cheap prices. Considering the cost at which finished the projects it was almost like we were…

Spot on. My 10 years’ experience in outsourcing industry is similar[0]. I think of this as another instance of bias against Indian outsourcing. I have seen many instances during my career which seems to indicate that pricing do not correlate with performance.

[0]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182996

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#59

Post by harichinnan » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:40 AM UTC

This is like I paid for an iPad clone made in China and concluding that iPad's made in China are of low quality. You need to be an Apple or Google or Microsoft or you should have enough money to afford Wipro, Infosys or TCS to successfully get work done out of India.

Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India

#60

Post by Duff » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:45 AM UTC

compay wrote: post #21

johnbender wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have a crystal clear idea of what you want built. > Have frequent and early deliverable dates. Both of these things are extremely difficult (if not impossible) for experienced software consultancies to know up front, let alone the crowd looking to outsource. More importantly both figuring out what to build and knowing when those things are deliverable have, in my experience, required the involvement and input of th…

A lot of companies are looking to build simple, mainstream projects. For example "add a shopping cart to my site." Those are easy projects for outsourcing. If the client is looking to do something that has never been done before, then outsourcing may not be the best idea.

I think that's his point. Outsourcing doesn't eliminate your responsibility as a customer to participate in the development process -- it just shifts part of the labor to another entity.

Telling an outsourcer "do X for me", where X isn't a well defined thing (ie. run a warehouse, manage windows servers, etc) is going to be a disaster. What does "add a shopping cart of my site" mean? Do you want to figure out sales tax for various jurisdictions? Do you need to to interface with the German banking system? Is there a configurator?

If you treat an outsourcer as a partner in development and participate in that process, you're either going to get a result that makes sense, or you'll figure out that the process isn't working out and terminate early.