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Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

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Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#21

Post by russell »

utnick wrote: post #15
jmtame wrote: post #8

Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…

Don't you have to have an iphone and a newish mac to develop for the iphone? That barrier will keep costs high because not many 2nd or 3rd world programmers have access to these tools.

Not really. The outsourcers aren't using a dung powered recycled PC. The ones I have worked with have had hundreds of programmers, much larger than the companies I was working for. Usually they already had the hardware needed or could get it quickly.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#22

Post by kirubakaran »

marcus wrote: post #6
patio11 wrote: post #2

I love Rails and will agree that it boosts productivity tremendously, but if you cut out the 80% of your time you spend on gruntwork, you'll find that 80% of your remaining time is spent on gruntwork relative to your increased capabilities . Which means the economics of "OK, outsource the gruntwork!" still make sense. I have a RoR website which is probably pushing 1,000 lines these days. (1,000 lines in Java will, ma…

The point is that at a certain point writing the code gets easier than writing a spec. Lets say you outsource this site, and you send a spec to the developer the spec looks something like this: 1) These 27 actions should only be used by an administrator. 2) All users must register with a valid looking email and choose a username. Every one of those would still take one line, wouldn't it be simpler to just code the da…

Test driven development might help here. The test cases you write will act as spec, ensure quality of what they deliver and will also enable further development. You have not wasted your effort.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#23

Post by russell »

koraybalci wrote: post #5

All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?

My experience with several Indian teams at different companies bears out the article. They didn't have the same level of education that a developer gets at a good US engineering/CS school. It was more like at a JC level, a few months of Java then turned loose on the clients. The ones I worked with had several years of work experience, but not the depth of knowledge that one would expect from top notch locals. A lot of the savings was lost because we had to manage them more closely with a local liaison and daily code reviews.

OTOH I worked with a Ukrainian outsourcer that had very talented, well schooled, professional, and productive developers. They were also fairly expensive at $40/hour. Good, but not much cheaper.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#24

Post by huherto »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #7
koraybalci wrote: post #5

All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?

Even if such statistics existed, they wouldn't be that helpful because it pretty much comes down to how successful each company is when they outsource development work. In my own experience, I've managed outsourced teams in China, Mexico, India and Argentina. While doing so, I've worked with some fabulous developers and also many not-so-fabulous developers. I've also hired more than my share of engineers in the US an…

I am currently having a similar experience. I've assembled a young and talented software development team here in Mexico, but the rest of the company (sales, QA, production, etc) is in California. I do not think they are aware of the our capacities and we do not understand where they want us to go. I feel out of the creative process of the company, but we are the ones who actually have the skills (programming) to take it there. So we are stuck doing what we are told to do.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#25

Post by jimbokun »

koraybalci wrote: post #5

All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?

"I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others?"

I would suggest it's more that the highly skilled developers in, say, India are not cheap enough to make the outsourcing worth it. Here's a WSJ article making that argument:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118342455118256110.html

"Last year, Mr. Shah paid his engineers in India about half of Silicon Valley levels. By early this year, it was 75%."

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#26

Post by russell »

Outsourcing can be hugely dangerous for startups. I have talked to the founders of several startups who were domain experts but not professional developers. They usually ended up with a product that they couldn't release. Part of the problem was that the founders were not sufficiently technically skilled to communicate their vision across the language and cultural barriers. Another was that they usually ended up with an unscalable MS stack. To be fair, that's pretty common, if you use less skilled US developers.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#27

Post by jimbokun »

jmtame wrote: post #8

Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…

"The only way to beat outsourcing is to be creative."

Why can't someone in India be creative?

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#28

Post by jimbokun »

patio11 wrote: post #2

I love Rails and will agree that it boosts productivity tremendously, but if you cut out the 80% of your time you spend on gruntwork, you'll find that 80% of your remaining time is spent on gruntwork relative to your increased capabilities . Which means the economics of "OK, outsource the gruntwork!" still make sense. I have a RoR website which is probably pushing 1,000 lines these days. (1,000 lines in Java will, ma…

"(Validation that a user has a name and email address? Takes 1 line... 1 line of grunt work. Verifying that anyone using these 27 actions is an administration? 1 line... of grunt work. Implementing a search function for lost registration keys? Four lines... of grunt work. etc)"

This doesn't make sense as a definition of "grunt work" to me. These are more like business process rules or requirements. And 1 line or 27 lines or 4 lines of code sound actually more efficient to me than the corresponding English, mock-ups, etc. needed to specify the documentation for them.

In other words, it probably takes you much less time to write those lines of code than it would take to describe the required functionality unambiguously to someone living across an ocean from you.

Re: Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails

#30

Post by huherto »

russell wrote: post #23
koraybalci wrote: post #5

All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?

My experience with several Indian teams at different companies bears out the article. They didn't have the same level of education that a developer gets at a good US engineering/CS school. It was more like at a JC level, a few months of Java then turned loose on the clients. The ones I worked with had several years of work experience, but not the depth of knowledge that one would expect from top notch locals. A lot o…

Yea, that may be true. But I think most large companies in the U.S end up hiring average developers. Seems to me they have a hard time distinguishing who is talented and who is not. They also have a bureaucratic structure that does not allow the talented people to make the decisions and it becomes harder to retain the talented developers.
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