Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

https://www.troyhunt.com/offshoring-roulette-lessons-from-outsourcing-to-india-china-and-the-philippines/

by RmDen • 10 years ago

265 113 10 years ago

clifanatic2• 10 years ago

I can't believe he skipped over the real elephant in the offshoring room - the time difference. All of those countries have almost no overlap with any part of the United States. If we schedule an 8 AM CST meeting with India (which is super early for some of the people here), it's already 7 PM at night there, and they're completely exhausted and ready to go home. And that's _if_ you can schedule a meeting far enough in advance that somebody else hasn't already taken up that precious 8 AM spot... usually you'll have to go out later in their day, sometimes as late as 10 PM there. Which really hurts when you consider how many of them rely on public transportation... which stops running before 10 PM. I've been told that some people have ended up sleeping in the office rather than push back on a very late meeting request.

gumby• 10 years ago

Well the author is in Australia so the differences are less significant.

digi_owl3• 10 years ago

He skipped it because his experience was from being based in Australia or some such. Thus the time zone was roughly the same (or near enough).

taneq• 10 years ago

My wife once worked for an Australian company which was having enterprise software customized by an Indian company. The time zone was definitely an issue, compounded by the fact that (due to rush hour and other factors) the Indian company kept relatively late office hours (~10am to 7pm local time).

The net effect was that if she sent an email during the day, the earliest she could expect a response from the Indian office was about 3pm Perth time, which realistically (giving an hour turnaround time) meant one round of communication in per day unless she stayed back past 5pm.

jakozaur• 10 years ago

A lot of organization ignore time zone, though are crucial. They can be double edge sword. If you run 24/7 SaaS they can help you deliver better reliability and avoid waking up at night, but they also created all sort of challenges.

12h time difference is the worst one, but in fact any cause some changes to your organization and you may need to learn to rely on async/writting skills.

I recommend a book: https://www.amazon.com/Working-While-Theyre-Sleeping-Separat...

gopalv• 10 years ago

I can't believe he skipped over the real elephant in the offshoring room - the time difference.

That was the reason off-shoring of BPO/call-centers happened in the first place - follow-the-sun.

CountSessine4• 10 years ago

Here's a question. You're in the US and your employer has decided to out source some work.

Why are you, the American worker, tolerating your employer's request to stay late to talk to their outsourced lackeys? Whenever I've been asked to stay late for a time zone crossing meeting with outsourced employees, I've refused. WE are THEIR customers, not the other way around. They can damn well get up at 3am and WebEx-in if we're going to have a meeting. No way am I going to stay late in the evening and miss my family so I can chat with our offshore labour.

dmoy2• 10 years ago

Well, in some cases people will do it because otherwise their employer may fire them. Living in the US most of us are at will, and don't have that much luxury to give employers the finger.

jdavis703• 10 years ago

Globalization works the other way too. I'm working at a Danish company that offshored Danish jobs to the US. Before that I was at an Australian firm that offshored Aussie jobs to the US. Before that I was at a firm founded by two immigrants. Globalization cuts both ways.

gwbas1c• 10 years ago

Gosh, you have a horrible attitude.

Outsourcing works best when you treat the people you're working with like people. Expecting them to regularly call into 3AM meetings is a recipe for disaster.

What I find works well is:

1: Find some common overlap times

2: Defend the overlap times against bullshit meetings

3: Take turns meeting at odd hours

garagemc2• 10 years ago

Really interesting and well written article. I don't think China will be an outsourcing destination for long.

In India your slowly starting to see agencies that aren't merely code factories but places where you can do actual product development. Its early days though.

AvenueIngres• 10 years ago

This is kind of frightening, our wages won't survive a world in which where there's a surplus of talent coming from developing countries.

Roboprog6• 10 years ago

I have seem some talent, at various levels, some of which is even quite good. But I surely would NOT call it a "surplus" :-)

udkl• 10 years ago

I feel it's mainly the younger generation (born after the 70's) that has embraced globalization and are coming up with quality outsourcing firms.

pavanky• 10 years ago

I am really glad that e-commerce is taking off in India. The code factories model of relying entirely on foreign projects is not sustainable in the long run.

The problem however is that there aren't a lot of jobs for other kinds of engineering. I hope that changes soon too.

sriram_sun• 10 years ago

Loved the Indian head shake video! Watch it if you can.

benmarks• 10 years ago

I was very fortunate to have a colleague familiar with this behavioral idiom in a developer training I was giving to a team from Hyderabad. He kindly interrupted me after I kept trying to explain a concept which it seemed to me they didn't understand!

ilaksh• 10 years ago

If you are offshoring a project because you can't afford local prices then the project may not be feasible at all within your limited budget, even at outsourcing rates.

If you have a limited budget, realize that means your requirements will be limited. Never select the vendor with the lowest rates. Always evaluate the actual people on the team.

The idea of line items for features is unrealistic for software development. It's X hours, days or weeks for each person, which needs to be re-evaluated every week or two.

If you don't have a good developer you trust before aside from the outsource team to look at the code on a routine basis then don't bother making the software at all. If you don't have a budget that allows for automated tests to be developed (20 percent of devs will do this automatically anyway) then cancel the project. If there is no budget for refactoring then please cancel the project.

If you plan on using thinly veiled racism to blame foreign developers for your inability to specify coherent requirements or comprehend the complexity of software development, then please cancel your outsourcing project.

If you follow this advice, 8/10 outsourcing projects would never start and everyone could spend their time on better things.

user5994461• 10 years ago

8/10 of all software projects should never start. It's not just about the outsourced ones ;)

digi_owl3• 10 years ago

I really wish there was a neutral unit of account one could use for comparing costs etc.

fapi1974• 10 years ago

I like this idea. What do you have in mind?

digi_owl3• 10 years ago

Not quite sure. Something akin to the Bancor that Keynes suggested back in the day perhaps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor

meganvito• 10 years ago

The flow of capital tends toward a low hydrolic potential from a high end. When the potential is lost, things turn to medicore, people just look around for an exit.

perseusprime112• 10 years ago

As I was reading this article and watching the head shake video, I clicked on this other video which I thought was hilarious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k2W8aGgmn1A

perseusprime112• 10 years ago

Interesting article. Is the code written in China considered open source for all practical purposes?

Roboprog6• 10 years ago

Yes, but it's a very specific "All your databases are belong to us" license :-)

elango• 10 years ago

Well written and balanced. Clearly steered away from conflicting topics.

r3dn3r• 10 years ago

What is he talking about? Indian with good english skills?? What? Good with computers?? When people will end all those prejudices ???

achow• 10 years ago

One thing that jumped out to me reading the article was the author’s (or the organization’s) aversion to writing requirement spec (“detailed documentation”).

That sounded very worrisome particularly considering the fact that the development was for a domain like that of Pharma, where rules & regulations shadows heavily on what and how things are done.

I have some experience in developing software products for Pharma industry and it was quite an effort in keeping track of FDA updates which would impact the features that were under development or were planned for. Examples, basic and mandatory feature sets like Audits, Logging, Security, Access management, Reports etc. are heavily influenced by compliance regulations of FDA and equivalent bodies of Europe, Canada etc. And added layer of complexity is each regulatory bodies have different approach to regulation and compliance.

Considering the fact that Pfizer were outsourcing to ‘code shops’ who would never ever get into that complexity; well thought out requirement documentation which has taken into consideration current and future landscape should have been number one priority. I would have sleepless nights if I was coordinating a project where ‘can do’ developers start working from a basic one-pager from ‘business people’.

I guess it was perhaps because the author was the go between the domain experts (he mentions them as ‘business people’) and the developers.

It would have been great if the author would have shed some light on what could client do from their end in terms of reducing ambiguity while working with teams where communication and loss in translation is one of the biggest risk.

I suspect that there is a whole missing dimension in this story.

ploxiln2• 10 years ago

The process of writing software involves some interpretation and making good small-scale design decisions. Think of things like checking for buffer overflows and error handling. If you completely specify how this is handled everywhere you've practically written the software already.

One trivial and silly real-world example: I'm currently working on a C codebase with a few developers in India. Sometime before I started the project, the American company I now work for contracted out a security audit of the code, and one of the obvious conclusions was that "safe string functions should be used" - strcpy() had been used to copy user input to statically sized buffers such that it was vulnerable to classic buffer overflows, all over the place. Requirement set, requirement followed - now strncpy() and strncmp() etc were used everywhere, but always either uselessly (25% of the time) or wrong and unsafe (75%). Most typical was to use the length of the source, calculated with strlen(). Now, I guess it was not specified "use strncpy() correctly, with the size of the destination". Failure of specification, right?

For what it's worth, the root of the problems on this particular project are that the original American lead dev was not that great and set some bad examples, which the outsourced devs copy diligently and industriously.

(But then again, it's not enough to say "this is clearly wrong, it will overflow if (expr)" - they tend to need explicit examples to copy. Sometimes they impress me by figuring the cause of a tricky bug. Sometimes they write smart but actually useless code, like using floats and log() to figure out how big a buffer is needed to print a uint16_t in decimal - 5 bytes will suffice, no float math needed. Sometimes they write 20 lines of code to calculate how long the string result of snprintf() will be, instead of using the size of the destination, right after I've lectured on what strncpy() is for. They often seem less thoughtful than a neural net. I've even seen "buf[strlen(buf)] = '\0'" - I just have no words sometimes.)

fgpwd2• 10 years ago

Some of these examples made me smile. But this cannot be taken as a representative of all developers in India. I am an Indian developer, and have met several very smart people. Most of them are presently working for big US companies like Google or Adobe.

Often when I meet a programmer, I can tell if they are genuinely interested in programming, or just happen to be a programmer because of circumstances or because it's what they decided to do to make money. The latter when writing code for you would just want to somehow meet the specifications and head off for the next lunch. They would be the first ones to complain about their job on social networks. As sad as it is for them, you really don't want to hire them if your aim is to build high quality products.

There are still a lot of good, capable developers in India, available for hire and at affordable rates. You just need a good process to find them and filter out those without a genuine passion for writing code or for building products. Hiring random people without a thorough selection process is always a bad idea, no matter which country you hire from.

zby• 10 years ago

Imagine that to compile your program you have to send it to India and wait two weeks. Every simple typo you make takes two weeks to be noticed. I used to work for Nestle when they were working on a global SAP implementation - all development was outsourced to India. I don't know what was the history of this - but when I was there the analysts were required to write so detailed specs that they were like a program in assembler. Only that you could not compile it, run and check if it does what it is supposed to do. That was insane!

lisivka3• 10 years ago

Customer representative directly in outsource office solves this kind of problems. Otherwise you need developers which are both experts in development AND experts in the field of your application.

coredog64• 10 years ago

One thing that jumped out to me reading the article was the author’s (or the organization’s) aversion to writing requirement spec (“detailed documentation”). That sounded very worrisome particularly considering the fact that the development was for a domain like that of Pharma, where rules & regulations shadows heavily on what and how things are done.

He addressed that early on -- he mentioned that much of the development was "brochureware" websites. Don't think the FDA gives a wet rat about that.

sudhirj• 10 years ago

One of the things you might want to remember when outsourcing to India: most of the best developers tend to jump to product companies sooner or later. The best Indian offshoring companies tend to charge around USD 50 / hour, out of which the developers see about $3 (college grads) to $20 (10+ years) per hour. The rest of it goes to managers and overheads. And this is the best companies. The more mass market ones charge $20 to $30 an hour.

The better devs know that their possible value to the company is always capped, and because the country has a huge number of engineering graduates rubber stamped by a network of substandard universities and colleges, developers are usually very easily replaceable cogs.

So Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Flipkart, Freshdesk, Hike, and a lot of smaller not known Indian companies that develop specialized tech is where folks tend to go.

fgpwd2• 10 years ago

In my previous company (a very big, reputable US Consulting company), I was charged at 40$ an hour to my clients in the US, but I got only 2-4$ an hour out of it. My monthly pay was fixed at around 550$, and I would have to work 8-12 hours everyday. This is a typical salary for a college graduate from a fairly good (in the top 15) engineering college in India.

tropo• 10 years ago

Nothing was said about the security implications of outsourcing to people who are required to obey a different government. Are you going to open up your network to them? Are you going to expose your trade secrets to them?

When you find a strangely perfect clone of your product on the market, do not be surprised.

kneegrown• 10 years ago

His writing is God awful and a huge bore. I'm interested in the topic but loathe his writing.

anupshinde• 10 years ago

Nice article and on the spot.

There is a difference between offshoring and cheap-shoring (i.e what I call offshoring at very low costs). Most of the bad experiences you get from India are a result of cheap-shoring. You get what you pay for. Cheapshoring undervalues good engineers and overvalues a lot of bad engineers.

I have seen this for almost 15 years (from the Indian side), and I don't like it. While some people see Indian IT as growing with the likes of Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc - I personally saw that as crippling good CS talent in India. However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight

If you want equivalently good engineers from India (as of now), be ready to pay half(45-50%) of the pay in US. So if you are paying 120K in the US, the same should cost you 54-60K USD when the engineer is in India. This will also reduce friction. One may get lucky in the early days hiring at cheaper costs, but sooner or later the good engineers will see their worth and will most likely leave instead of asking for a raise. You have to do your due-diligence selecting a worthy engineer - that is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If somebody chooses cheapshoring, they are planning for a higher cost that is at least more than the 50% mark mentioned and in most cases if you analyze retrospectively - it would have cost lower if you did not cheap-offshore in the first place. The release may seem less costly, but the maintenance and operating costs will ultimately outgrow.

ido3• 10 years ago

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries:

E.g. ~$65k gets you a senior developer in Berlin (=€60k) and similarly in Canada (=90k CAD), so a lot more competition in that bracket.

dep_b2• 10 years ago

I'd say good programmers are relatively underpaid in Western Europe compared to the rest of the globe.

txttran• 10 years ago

This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).

slowmotiony3• 10 years ago

Is it really that low in Berlin? That's like 3k net a month isn't it? Probably half that when you rent an apartment. At this point I'd just not bother, get some easy minijob gardening or something and apply for social housing and Hartz IV.

sundarurfriend• 10 years ago

While some people see Indian IT as growing with the likes of Infosys, TCS, Wipro, etc - I personally saw that as crippling good CS talent in India

There's two sides to that coin though - these companies and other cheap-shorers, as crappy as they may be, provide better employment opportunities than most other available ones to people in smaller cities and villages. I've known many such people, and most of them see these BPO/KPO type jobs similar to how Americans see "crappy" McDonalds burger flipping jobs - a way to sustain themselves and keep employed, while looking for better more suitable opportunities. (And just like with the McDonalds burger flippers and Walmart cashiers, some get out, some choose to remain, and some get stuck in the same place "for just a few more months" forever.)

I suspect this is also the reason for the high churn rate that the author mentions.

gech• 10 years ago

Exploitative employment should be allowed because "think of the people in villages"

clifanatic2• 10 years ago

BPO/KPO?

uiri• 10 years ago

So if you are paying 120K in the US, the same should cost you 54-60K USD when the engineer is in India

When you are comparing to the US, are you talking about Silicon Valley or the Midwest? In Silicon Valley, $120K is probably a junior engineer that would cost $54-60K in the Midwest.

Roboprog6• 10 years ago

That's a good point. We should be using shops in cheaper parts of our own country (said from a US standpoint, obviously).

Of course, there's the tyranny of numbers to deal with when you are looking:

Population of India: 1300 million.

Population of Indiana: 7 million.

(approximately)

saiya-jin• 10 years ago

I agree with what you say, and just validates what I think and heard over and over again for many years - off shoring isn't worth it for most of the use cases. In long run, it's at least as expensive if not more, the issue with time zones, communication and just doing everything is too much to counter the low savings which are not usually even there.

the only case I can think of is if you need an army of developers and for some regulatory reason cannot find them / bring them locally.

I'll take anytime mediocre dev that sits next to me to some remote superior dev, since all we do is a team effort that actual coding of lines of code is quite small part of.

dominotw3• 10 years ago

However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight

Thank you for your insight. Curious, what makes you say this? Is the current system trending down that path?

sfifs• 10 years ago

basically commodity work can as well be done by the next cheap market.

tigershark• 10 years ago

Honestly with a lot of very good engineers paid in Europe less than 60kUSD I would say that I strongly disagree with your point of view. If you want to be paid like that move to Europe or to US. If you want to live in a country with an abysmal cost of life then be prepared to have less in absolute value. Heck, I know that with 60k in India you can have several servants and you can live like a king. I think that there is a limit to what the pointy head bosses are willing to pay once they realise that in proportion they are poorer than you.

bewresu• 10 years ago

the Philippines:

"one of the starkest patterns I saw outsourcing there was their strong affinity to PHP. This isn't intended to be a derogatory... the LAMP stack is really appealing to folks who don't have much cash... the Microsoft stack... was simply much harder to find competence in. You'd go to a vendor and their default position was 'Yeah, we can do that in PHP and MySQL'"

arvinsim• 10 years ago

Java and PHP are traditionally the most popular introductory languages being taught in CS courses (CE students are usually taught C).

I see some schools switching to Python as an introduction course. But generally, the pace at which the educational system move to update their curriculum is glacial. Heck, I even see some schools still teaching VB6!

bkbaba• 10 years ago

THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore.

It really hurts me that when someone is working with an offshore team they are looking at me as a "cheap resource".

I don't expect the valley crowd to understand this, so let me suggest an experiment. Go to your best developer, and tell her that you are there in the company cause she is "cheap labour", and if it was possible in a fraction of second you would get an engineer from Google and would hire him to do your job! Repeat this constantly for 3 weeks and see if her productivity drops or if she is still around! Its really painful to spend so much time, understand your own workflow and identify shortcomings, being self critical, overcome shortcoming with tips from HN / Stackoverflow, to concentrate on the problem at hand and implement a feature and then have someone come in and call it cheap labor. Previously I was working with a team in US and was reporting to an American. I know he was happy with my performance compared with the rest of my team members in the Valley as a lot of R&D work would be assigned to me. I have worked with angualr, react, rails, java, chrome extensions, ios, android apps. I am definetly not the best in any of this. But based on my previous work I think I am fairly competent.

In enginerring its a huge challenge to bring down cost. SpaceX is celebrated cause they have brought down the cost of launching satellites, when ISRO does it, it hursts me to see the first person who says that they were able to do it cheaper cause of the labor cost in India. I respect my work, and take pride in having built it.

If you want to offshore work don't make them feel like that the only reason you are giving them the work is because they are "cheap".

I know this is not what the article says but I wanted to share this even though this is off topic.

krisroadruck• 10 years ago

I feel what you are saying but... that IS the reason people offshore. Why else would they ship jobs out of the US, deal with funky hours, bad phone connections, and often times very thick accents (which when combined with bad phone connections often render conversations 80% understandable at best) if not to save money? I would feel like crap if I was in that position too but I don't know how you go about solving it and still have a valid justification for offshoring that outweighs the negatives.

eequah9L• 10 years ago

Shortage of local talent might be another possibility.

On my team, about half the people are not local--I'm a remotee working from a different country, and a bunch of other folks are outsourced from India and Ukraine. I don't have insight into how much the outsourcing costs, but a figure of $50 per hour has been floated in this discussion. At that point you are pretty much back to local wages, so my guess is it's not the money.

This may not be your typical outsourcing story though. Individual people are actually hired like you would hire anyone local, with interviews and all, except it's a manager traveling there to do a series of interviews and not vice versa. The team is quite stable, the churn reported in the article doesn't seem to be a problem.

satwikhebbar2• 10 years ago

In my experience, the thickness of accents works both ways. There is no such thing as a pure accent - only what you are more used to.

sk19812• 10 years ago

Don't feel bad - lots of people just assume it's all about saving money, but sometimes the reason is the available to talent in Bangalore. I don't have any proof except what I have seen over the past 11 years. Most of the places I have worked had pretty good pay in Bangalore ( > 80000USD ) and it showed in the work they do. Also, if any of the good employees who were planning to resign, we did try our best to see if they would be interested in shifting to US instead. While this is anecdotal, I wrote it to point out not everyone looks at Bangalore as cheap resource and good developers are respected irrespective of where they are located.

rubberstamp3• 10 years ago

Quick search for developer salaries in Glasdoor lists avg salary in Bangalore at Rs. 500,000 which would be approx 8,000 USD as opposed to > $80k. The max I could find was for Microsoft and Amazon, which was $19k.

ryuker16• 10 years ago

   I doubt your bangalore credentials. Needs more "do the needful" and "sir".

glaberficken• 10 years ago

"In the markets I'm discussing here, they almost exclusively want to move to a position where they're instructing others. There just seems to be less interest - less passion - in code and inevitably that's going to impact quality."

I think this statement misses the point completely, the difference isn't the passion about coding, it's obviously the salary!

If you are one of the juniors toiling away in the front-lines, your pay is still going to be really low. A programming role only allows to get your foot through the door, if you are to make a decent living the only way is to shoot for a promotion into management.

As opposed to "the West" where you can actually pursue a technical role throughout your career because the pay is higher and there are many more different types of roles you could be doing.

rawTruthHurts• 10 years ago

In my experience, also in "the West" managerial positions are, on average, better paid. Not that you don't make money on a tech role, but management will still do better.

jister• 10 years ago

"But conversely, the Microsoft stack that I worked in and we were increasingly unifying around in Pfizer was simply much harder to find competence in"

That's probably because the developers that are strong in Microsoft stack were already out of the country most likely pirated by companies in Singapore or in other parts of the world. Majors banks in Singapore had been pirating IT people in Philippines from QA to Project Managers for years.

_0nac• 10 years ago

Did you mean "poached"? You can't pirate people...

rwallace• 10 years ago

Let's not tolerate the use of "poached" either; it implies (in a "ha ha, only serious") way that people are property, and it's been a long time since there was any excuse for tolerating that idea. The proper words are "hired" or "recruited".

kabisote• 10 years ago

"Vendors don't build software, people build software"

Working with vendors is logical for big projects but an obstruction for small projects. If we eliminate the middleman, outsourcers would pay less and developers would be paid more. There'd be less bureaucracy. There'd be greater loyalty.

I hope there was an easier way for outsourcers and developers to find each other.

lisivka3• 10 years ago

It's called «freelancing». It's way cheaper and worse than outsourcing.

asenna• 10 years ago

Any reason why you consider freelancing worse than outsourcing? I think if you can build a good team of freelancers, you basically save yourself from a lot of the issues this article mentions.

ensiferum• 10 years ago

My experience (I managed a team of Chinese based devs for about a year) was that:

a) people are indeed leaving. thats cause the main selling point (at least at that consulting company was indeed price), so there was 0 commitment to employees from the employers side, so it's normal that the employees have the same and leave immediately when they get something they consider just slightly better offer.

b) trying to "adjust" the agreemtents to their benefit. A use case example is that the chinese org puts their better candidates as named engineers on their offer. Once the project is signed they start to swap them out under whatever bullshit. (Oh, we're very sorry, we have to swap John Holmes for Ron Jemery, etc.) On that point I woudln't be surprised if some of these people only existed on CVs and were totally fabricated resources simply used to try to win projects.

c) the need for constant supervision and very precise instrumentation. If you gave these chinese engineers a brick and said "see this brick here. it's nice, but I'd like you find out how to improve it somehow. Maybe make it more durable, cheaper to manufacture etc." Two weeks later the chinese engs will get back to you and ask, "what do we need to do?" However if you give them the blueprints for a brick factory and tell them to build you the factory and 1 million such bricks, that's a task they can do.

sumanthvepa• 10 years ago

I'm curious. Have you tried asking a US engineer to improve the brick? I've had that experience, and the engg. team came back to me and asked me to improve the spec. I was an Indian product manager using engineers in the US (for a very very very large US software company) I had to specify the exact length of a text input field for a search box, because the team couldn't figure it out for themselves! Idiots exists everywhere.

shagie• 10 years ago

The article does generally reflect what I've seen - not only with outsourcing, but also reflects the general cultural predisposition of people that I've worked with, in the US, from those places.

A bit on India with the churn that was mentioned I've seen explained as that it is difficult to get a promotion within the company - you need to get hired by another company to move up. With one contract shop that I've worked with, over the course of 18 months (we worked with them for three years) every developer position was replaced with a new person (so twice across those three years). This resulted in a lot of loss of institutional knowledge of the product. You'd train up a person, they'ed work on it for awhile, and then move on to another company and train their replacement. That training process was always lossy.

The goal for a ((stereo)typical) Indian developer is to be where the pay is best. The way that the companies are structured (and note other comments to the effect of the pay scales) is that this is in management. One gets to that by demonstrating management potential rather than technical skill. The highly paid sr. developer path isn't as viable as the (comparably) highly paid jr. management.

Another major point that didn't appear to be touched on in the article is the intellectual property leakage and protection. Many managers here are afraid of that (rightly?) and take significant effort to make sure that overseas developers are strictly limited to what they are working on. Sometimes that goes as far as "you have access to _this library_ - not the entire application that it is part of" (or for that matter, even the integration test suite - a build breaks because of a library change... and you can't provide the full test to show how it broke) leaving the integration to the in house team. That can cause some friction in the development process that is often unaccounted for at the start of the project.

lake99• 10 years ago

About churn, promotions are one of the issues, and the other is a good salary. Many companies are quite exploitative (that's one way of looking at it). If you can't play hardball with your HR, your freshly hired subordinate's salary might end up being much higher than yours. One way that HR can operate is to reward talent and productivity. The other way is to reward negotiation skills.

I can't empathize with the other points that the author made about India -- because I've never worked on an outsourcing job.

AJ007• 10 years ago

That was a great outsourcing article, except showing one picture of Manila slums and calling the country poor.

Here is my suggestion -- don't use outsourcing agencies (acknowledging, easier said than done.) With an agency you end up with invisible HR problems. When something weird is going on at the office, you won't know about it. If senior developers are slacking off and giving junior devs all the work, you will not know. Hire the developers directly, give them the full salary, listen when they ask for something, give them flexible time off.

If what they are working on is really important, take the time to fly and go meet them in person, or if you have a team fly everyone to the same spot.

quantum_state• 10 years ago

Very nice article n much on the mark!

flanbiscuit• 10 years ago

What I'd typically find is people would specialise in one discrete part of a software component and that's all they'd do.

I work in pharma advertising as a dev but sometimes our client has their own offshore dev team. I've dealt with Wipro many times. This right here has been a common issue with them. Our account team will ask me if something is doable and I'd say yes but Wipro would push back saying they can't. And our sites fall into that brochureware category so these were mostly front-end trendy things using history push-state or what not. We usually found that they had a very limited scope and would not venture outside of it. I guess that's the difference, you get what you pay for. Usually if something is handed to me that I've never done before I do some research first and 90% of the time I figure it out. We've had better luck with eastern European offshore team in this regard. If I were looking for offshore teams I'd suggest there or South America first

_nalply• 10 years ago

2001 I worked half a year in Pune, Maharashtra with Indian developers. In my personal experience Indians are hard thinkers but undisciplined and chaotic coders. This means they managed the mess they made rather well just because they still understand what they did. Perhaps it was the CEO who just let them do what they want provided it works after all.

The salary was one thirteenth of what I would get in Switzerland. The efficiency was about one half, but only because the Swiss CEO himself lived in Pune and later married an Indian woman. If he stayed in Switzerland efficiency would have crashed badly. In any case, don't talk about the code quality.

I also noticed the extreme churn the article mentioned. In my half a year about 5 to 10 percent of the people left and new people started.

Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

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