Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Outsource

dontoutsource.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Don't Outsource

#21

Post by chrisjsmithuk »

I had this with some nice Latvian guys back in 2002 (please note: I have nothing against Latvia - just these guys). My little experience:

Our director decided to "cut costs" as we didn't want to take any permanent staff on for a job (as they are hard to get rid of in the UK) and chucked stuff over to a company in Latvia. They were sent a detailed (900 page) specification to extend our application which was put together with in mod_perl. What we got was something completely different that plainly didn't work and was full of script and SQL injection attacks. As we were in the crap if we didn't deliver, we threw them a load of cash and gave them another chance to fix it. Nothing arrived. We'd paid 2/3 of the agreed total by then.

Our director sent them a nice letter saying that it was a pile of shite and we weren't paying the rest (which was within the contract terms).

That evening, all our VPNs dropped and about 10 minutes later our SDSL connection fell over. Thanks to someone else's (uttery awfully simple) password and their box set up to accept telnet, they'd brute forced it and got into our network. As it was an pam LDAP set up, that was it. Whole LAN down. They ripped everything off and trashed it. We pulled the plug on the interface and cleaned everything up which took about a week.

About 2-3 days later we got a nastygram via email saying that they'd ripped us off and were going to fly over and rape our children. I shit you not. Nice people eh? I slept with a fricking baseball bat and hunting knife for about a year.

Also, after about 9 months we found the application up for sale at $200 on one of those crappy script sharing sites.

Now nearly 10 years later, I'm dealing with the same mess from a larger "more professional" outsourcing company in India. The irony being that I have to QA and clean up half their check ins which are just small packets of shite thrown over the Internet. They don't even write test cases and it's hard to understand what the hell they were thinking in most places. I could have written them myself and checked them in quicker. Also most of them required training in our technology which gave them a professional advantage in India so we basically end up training them and watching them move on. It's just a more professional mess.

Why people don't learn, I don't get.

Re: Don't Outsource

#22

Post by synnik »

This article raises red flags on the author's credibility. This looks less like a truthful account of a story, and more like a frustrated small company who had a partnership go bad, and are trying to defame their partner.

A whole web site, with linkbait headlines, set up to tell one story? Their about page doesn't even say they are trying to start a discussion... it just rehashes the story. With a few other pages to give a token appearance that they will tell more stories later.

I am sure there was fault on both sides, and I am equally sure the other side would have a vastly different story.

But this whole site sure looks like juvenile vengeance.

Re: Don't Outsource

#23

Post by NyxWulf »

judofyr wrote: post #4

Sounds more like "Don't Outsource to Criminals" to me.

Criminality is related to breaking laws. Doing business internationally is difficult because the laws are not consistent and cross-border enforcement is difficult in the best of cases. When entering into a business relationship you often don't know much about the people you are doing business with. People make similar mistakes in the U.S. by giving full and complete access to their source code to unknown and untrusted agents and then get screwed.

To be fair though, the developer probably has a different viewpoint. I've been screwed out of ridiculous sums of money on different deals through unscrupulous business owners thinking they had me over a barrel. Ultimately I always found it cheaper to walk away rather than trying to resolve it even in the U.S. court system. I have to wonder what would cause this person to react so hostilely for such a sustained period of time. This is personal somehow, there is no profit in this for TSC according to the story (100k wouldn't justify this).

There are always two sides to every story, this is suspiciously one sided and perhaps more disturbing it paints the entire indian culture and economy with the same broad brush.

The lesson here should be that development in general is hard. Outsourcing is even harder. Business disputes often get very messy, cross border disputes even more so. When engaging in any business transaction give serious consideration to what happens if this transaction goes south. Do they have access to your core systems? How bad can they hurt you? These exercises are just as valid with internal developers as they are with any external agent. Once you grow beyond the startup stage, building a sustainable and protectable business should be one of the main focus points of any management team. These guys made mistakes, who doesn't. This developer is acting childishly, it happens. Don't over-generalize from this single example.

Re: Don't Outsource

#24

Post by NyxWulf »

halostatue wrote: post #19
michaeldhopkins wrote: post #7

After paying so much money, they refused to spend a few thousand on bribes to stop the guy? That doesn't make much sense.

If they did so, they would be breaking U.S. law—and it’s one that is being fairly well enforced (the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, I believe).

Bribing the foreign officials would definitely violate the foreign corrupt practices act. Paying the developer 100k to sever the relationship would not have been a bribe. They may have been outraged by that, but depending on the nature of the relationship that may have been a reasonable fee. It also sounds like it would have been a lot cheaper in the long run.

Re: Don't Outsource

#25

Post by voidr »

This only proves that this particular company failed to handle outsourcing. They should have realized early on that they are getting screwed. Also there are horror stories the other way around too.

Re: Don't Outsource

#26

Post by highwind81 »

nhangen wrote: post #8

This should be changed to "Don't Entrust Your Entire Business to Incompetent Programmers and Criminals." The about page doesn't even work...what is this "campaign" designed to do? This is like saying not to drive because sometimes people get hit by drunk drivers.

I think the about page is the homepage. Not that that's a good design.

Re: Don't Outsource

#27

Post by rtperson »

I have had personal involvement in one outsourcing horror story, the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. Suffice it to say that, while what happened at Sapphire is extreme, it's hardly unique.

But let's correctly name the problem here: simple management incompetence. The managers at Sapphire, no doubt feeling bewildered by all this computer-techy stuff, decided to send all their source code and the entire management of their servers to a faraway place. A place where tech problems magically go away on their own. A place where code writes itself, where productivity is doubled for half the cost.

No company, be it in the US, Canada, Europe, China, India, or Madagascar, can afford to think this way any more. Managers can no longer pay someone else to understand technology for them. We are all technical managers now.

Re: Don't Outsource

#28

Post by powertower »

Looks like this thread has been flagged and taken down. What a shame that there is someone out there that thinks oursourcing works 90% of the time (vs 10% of the time).

Re: Don't Outsource

#29

Post by gm »

This is typical drivel from someone who refuses to learn the lesson: "The problem is unscrupulous developers, hired guns. It could not possibly be me."

I wager the real problem is lack of oversight, lack of understanding of the problem being handed off to someone else, and lack of acceptance of ultimate responsibility for the mess.

So the title should be "Don't outsource if your intention is to not retain ownership in your project (Ownership as in understanding your project, the development process, and accepting responsibility for oversight the project's progress)"

Anyway...

Re: Don't Outsource

#30

Post by mnazim »

DISCLOSURE: I am from India and I run a company with more than half revenues coming from outsourcing model.

The level of threats/attacks from the said man are alarming and completely un ethical, but there are really good companies also who care about their clients. But, I have had the (dis)pleasure of knowing companies/people who are doing activities like putting in kill switches and backdoors for the rainy days.

Outsourcing can work. It is a good model. Here are a few alarm flags that should be kept in mind before choosing outsourcing. I have seen these to work very well over past few years.

Flag 1) No in house tech team:- Hire at least 1 very good developer/engineer in house, who can actually the verify that credentials of the remote team.

Flag 2) "Oh we charge only $5 an hour":- Work force in India is cheaper than but c'mon it's not that cheap. Good(not great) developers won't cost less than $20 - $25. And you can get a really good guys at $35 - $40. The really great developers won't cost you any less than US/Europe here.

Flag 3) "Oh Oh! PHP, .NET, Rails, J2EE, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Blah, Blah, This and That? We got it all!":- Stay away from such companies. Look for small companies/teams with the niche expertize in the field of your requirements. If you require Drupal expertize, look for companies that specialize in Drupal solutions, If you need Ruby on Rails expertize look for a Ruby on Rails company and if you need Django expertize, look for a Django company. Give them a unpaid timed assignment if they do not posses any demonstrable project.

Flag 4) Need more developers on the team:- Never agree and never push to add more developers to a late project. Sometimes vendors push for it because of selfish reasons and some times clients push for it for a false sense of speed. If you absolutely and unavoidably have to add people to the team, add testers not developers.

Flag 5) Oh! We don't have/need testers or developers should do testing:- Never ever agree to working with out professionally experienced tester on the team. It will save you a hell lot of money in the long run. If company does not have a proper tester, don't hire them.

Flag 6) Daily so called "15 min" remote scrum meetings:- This does not work in Out sourcing. I have seen these scrum meetings go on and on for hours. I have personally sat in daily 3 hr long skype conversations. This leaves very less time to work and developers keeps worrying about what to report in tomorrow's meeting than concentrate on work.

Here is what I have seen to work. In a any work week:

* Monday: Specs and week goals meeting - max 2 hrs - whole team participation compulsory.

* Wednesday: Mid Week report - 30 min max - as many team members as practically possible.

* Friday: End of week report - 30 min max - as many team members as practically possible.

Flag 7) Tracker? What's that? Spreadsheets rule:- Use a tracker religiously. 99% of communication should happen trough issue tracker. things tend to get lost over emails. Use trackers for smallest of things. And do not accept any project related request over email(this goes for both clients as well as vendors)

Flag 8) No Time logs:- Ask your vendor to maintain time logs. If necessary, threaten non-payment for the week if time logs are not finalized and locked by Saturday. Review time logs every week to avoid any end of month invoicing disputes. Disputes waste time. Don't use spreadsheets for time logs, modern trackers have a decent time logging capabilities.

Flag 9) Outsourcing just to save money:- This is a bad idea. Outsourcing to a good team/company will probably save 30% money but that should not be the main reason to outsource. One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing is that works getting done while you sleep.

Flag 10) Not paying on time:- Clear invoices as soon as possible. I am not saying this happens always, but sometimes payments get delayed for reasons like confusion over banking details, payment methods etc. Set these things straight at the start of the project. Delayed payment means lost interest. I know great companies/teams here who are exceptional in work but operate on a hair line budget. For them delay payment means delayed salaries for their employees. And I don't have tell you what delayed salaries mean...

Flag 11) I am the project manager, talk to me:- These are the companies that are most likely to take you for a ride. Insist every developer on the project be present in all the meetings. Every developer be present on the project mailing list. Now there are many companies in India that won't allow this. They are scared that developers will steal away the projects if they came in contact with clients and don't trust the developers, but then again you do not want to work with such people.

Finally, always remember, a common India developer(who is employed by an outsourcing company) is shit scared of the client paying in dollars. They will say yes to almost anything. They don't want to offend clients and in turn their bosses. So get to know your developer team. Talk to them during meetings. A small amount casual talk will go a long way toward building the mutual trust and increase comfort level.

These where just my two cents.

Post reply on HN