I wouldn't get too complacent. The reason for these bad experiences is similar to manufacturing horror stories in China: basically companies that are competing on price alone are going to give you the minimum they can get away with. Over time companies that outsource are going to come to terms with the failure of this bargain basement model and those companies will either improve or be replaced by new companies that provide "good enough" service.
Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
111–120 of 143 posts
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#112Quote one of my past Indian coworkers: "If you pay peanuts, you hire monkeys.". Which is the chuckle worthy way of saying that eventually the markets are, all else equal, fairly efficient, and that the labor pool available at $4 an hour to bill to you at $12 an hour has systemic, pervasive competence issues which will prevent the successful completion of many projects. Anyhow, beating the usual drum: don't be a cost…
If you want to outsource to India, you need to find a company that hires super stars. Super stars in India demand a salary of Rs50,000 to Rs 100,000 a month. Which is still quite less from international point of view: its about $1000 to $2000 a month. A company hiring them will bill you a minimum of $20-30 per hour. Usually more like $40-45 per hour. If you go with a company that is billing you less than that from In…
Not sure which Indian superstars you'll get for Rs.50,000 today. This may have been true in 2001, but no one I know today will go below 1.5L-2L a month.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#113As a product manager for the last 6 years, I've had the opportunity to work for outsourced teams in India, Romania, and Ukraine. I've become really good at managing remote teams, and it can work out really really well. What I write below is based on single data points in each country... India: I didn't like working with the Indian team. They had the tendency to be overly literal and "by the book" - the book being wha…
> the Indian team. They had the tendency to be overly literal and "by the book" My anecdote: We had a spec for a financial business application. Two of the database fields were last-changed-username and last-changed-timestamp. The document mistakenly had them populated backwards, specifying that the current user's name should be populated into last-changed-timestamp and vice versa. You can guess what happened when th…
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Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#114Please change the racist title. Racism towards programmers from India is a problem and you're contributing to it.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#115I'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.
It isn't bad to change requirements depending on user feedback. You can have the best implementation in the world, done after the best specifications in the world; but it's all for nothing if customers don't want it.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#116Quote one of my past Indian coworkers: "If you pay peanuts, you hire monkeys.". Which is the chuckle worthy way of saying that eventually the markets are, all else equal, fairly efficient, and that the labor pool available at $4 an hour to bill to you at $12 an hour has systemic, pervasive competence issues which will prevent the successful completion of many projects. Anyhow, beating the usual drum: don't be a cost…
Figure out how the business works and nobody will even consider outsourcing the projects you'll work on. Exactly. It's easy for a tech person to get lost on the tech side of things. We have to remember that the business people really don't care how cool the algorithm was that we used to solve their problem. All they care about is that a) their problem was solved and b) it saved/made the company more money. In reality…
You must have great communication/presentation skills. Sometimes you can present poor judgement as an excellent solution and if you don't you might not be able to present you work in a very favourable light.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#117Earlier 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…
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. And at that point it's just easier to hire local developers. I just don't get the push to hire cheap people. Even if you do find someone who is a rock star in the Philippines for cheap they might work for 3-6 months before job hopping again. Any sizable business is going to have systems…
> I just don't get the push to hire cheap people.
Unfortunately, it's because you're a programmer that understands the actual cost of software development. Believe me, there are many "business" people that don't understand software and never will. They see stories on the news of teenagers developing million dollar iPhone app in a weekend and think "Wow, this must be so easy."
And because they don't understand the difficulty (especially with larger systems) they don't understand why paying one developer $75/hr is probably better than paying one $15/hr. (I say probably because I have come across people charging high rates that weren't really that productive). As a business person who probably can't be that much more productive than the next person, they don't understand how a programmer could really be more productive and get things done in much less time.
To give you an example. On my last contract I was hired near the start of the project. And even though it was near the start, I could tell from the code that this was headed towards a disaster. Eventually I got things cleaned up and got it released for them and they are making money from it. They went through 5 other developers and I ended up being the only one near the end. I left shortly after one of the company owner's comments got passed down to me. He said "Why are we paying this guy so much when we could just hire high school students at $10/hr."
People like that will just not understand the difference and look only at the hourly rate.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#118Earlier 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…
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. And at that point it's just easier to hire local developers. I just don't get the push to hire cheap people. Even if you do find someone who is a rock star in the Philippines for cheap they might work for 3-6 months before job hopping again. Any sizable business is going to have systems…
And at that point it's just easier to hire
local developers.
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#119TL;DR - consultant writes about how his price is justified, then registers a new account with HN and submits the story
Re: Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
#120First point the title is rude.
One of the biggest problem in India is culture. Right now we have a culture where companies like Wipro & Infosys go to campuses and hire 100-500 graduates , majority of them are from fields other than CS where the companies provide 3 months on training. Why do they do this? Coz someone somewhere needs to get workdone at cheaper cost, and 9 out of 10 times it cuts quality. Quality of code for the client and quality of hiring for the company.
The other major issues is culture. Indians push their kids to be Engineers and Doctors and kids do it even if they dont like it. more than half of my class of 2006 is no longer in the Software development fields coz they never liked it.
Edit:
Also you can get bad programmers everywhere , its just that India , due to the population has a large number of them which makes finding good people & companies very tough.