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Why India outsourcing is doomed

devbattles.com

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Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#3
The most important point is of blended rate.

Outsourcing industry has a huge conflict of interest with the customer. Customer wants minimum number of high-quality engineers to complete work in the minimum possible time. Outsourcing companies want the opposite. They don't hire high-quality engineers because a) they eat in to their profit margins because of high salaries b) they get things done quickly which reduces their invoice.

They just want to deliver the "good enough" level of quality to ensure customer retention.

The interests of outsourcing companies and customers are totally orthogonal. And we all know this always end bad.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#4
Being an Indian, I agree with that. Sometimes, when asked "how do you justify the X salary you are demanding" I find very few who have any answers (except the occasional: 'How he/she belongs to IIT' as if being an IITian gives you the right to earn without work)

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#6
Not sure why the author seems to insinuate that the problems he/she has described are somehow specific to India. We had a disaster when we outsourced a large piece of design work to Denmark. We found out that the outsourcer in Denmark was themselves outsourcing chunks of work to Ukraine. Our bias assuming that an expensive Scandinavian outsourcer would be magically better than a cheaper Asian alternative led us astray. A mistake we won't make again. The real solution is doing proper due diligence and proper contract maintenance clauses that ensure the outsourcers goals are aligned with yours. That takes work, not just tossing a spec sheet across the wall.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#7

Not sure why the author seems to insinuate that the problems he/she has described are somehow specific to India. We had a disaster when we outsourced a large piece of design work to Denmark. We found out that the outsourcer in Denmark was themselves outsourcing chunks of work to Ukraine. Our bias assuming that an expensive Scandinavian outsourcer would be magically better than a cheaper Asian alternative led us astra…

We outsource successfully. But we have a 1 on 1 relationship with each developer outside our company. So no fooling us about whom it is doing the work.

It takes real work to manage any developer. Its an illusion to think outsourcing solve all the problems. We think of it as simply a recruitment tool really. Not that we hire all the developers we work with. But the outsourcing company is only there to bring in talent as needed. That talent still needs to be managed.

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