Your Man in India - Outsourcing Your Errands

http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20050909-outsource

by mhb • 19 years ago

31 17 19 years ago

smartmoney.com

icey• 19 years ago

For those of you who have read "Four Hour Workweek" this is the company that Tim Fenriss pimps throughout the book.

plusbryan• 19 years ago

and it was the only really interesting takeaway from the book

richard814• 19 years ago

BE CAREFUL.

Speaking from personal experience, hiring a bunch of coders in India can either be a fantastic investment and cheap way of getting a prototype done...

...or a minefield of poor communication, miscommunication, a LACK of communication, total misinterpretation of spec, and dog-ugly code.... don't even ask about database structure (or lack thereof).

The startup I've been working for over the past 12 months had one such development team do a prototype, and the next 3 months was a nightmare of bug fixes and code rewrites.

So if there's one thing I can emphasise if you're thinking of engaging an offshore development team.... get references. LOTS of references, and make sure they check out!

euccastro• 19 years ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. What do you think about outsourcing other things than software development? For example, people that are too busy to read all those long articles in social news sites could outsource such time consuming tasks to India. ;>

richard814• 19 years ago

Data entry is a good one as it's time consuming... .time = money and India = low cost so the math is easy on that one!

Copywriting as well, but like gommm said, test your prospective resource first.... a watertight grasp on English is essential if you're planning on having an offshore resource write copy for your site/marketing material/etc.

davidw• 19 years ago

Voted up, not able to discuss the details at the present time.

gommm2• 19 years ago

One should never ever hire programmers in india (or anywhere) without the help of a good programmer to test them and check on their progress....

The problem is that almost anybody can call himself a programmer and find a job since a lot of companies don't bother to check and do not take into account the huge difference of quality and productivity between programmers....

So what I did when we used programmers from philipines (same situation as india) in my company is first request them to do a small application that took two weeks to develop and we checked the code extensively. The first group of programmers didn't work out but the second one produced quality code. We then hired them and did weekly review checking out their code and testing it.

But it's true asking coders in other countries is not the cheap way out of getting a co-founder, who knows how to program, some people want it to be

richard814• 19 years ago

The two week test is a great idea..... I wish the founder of THIS company had thought of that, as I'm sure he'd rather pay for a two-week project and find out that the resource was a poor one, rather than find that out when there's a few months of dev work to be paid for!

I totally agree on the co-founder front..... having just one good coder in-house is better than having a half-dozen off-shore who have no clue what they're doing (IMO).

jsackmann• 19 years ago

An awful lot of the stuff he describes outsourcing seems like it would be just as fast if he did it himself. Ordering food? Placing Amazon orders?

I realize he's going for humor with some of the examples, but in each of these cases, once he's decided to outsource, written the e-mail requesting action (and making sure it's understandable to someone for whom english is not a first language), and checked to make sure it was done right, it's probably not a net gain. And he's paying for it.

I'm sure there are instances where outsourcing is wonderful--coding (in some cases), research, waiting on hold--but using a service like this in place of a secretary sitting right outside your office seems misguided.

darius• 19 years ago

this reminds me of the call center movie (http://callcentermovie.com)

gommm2• 19 years ago

Thanks this was a really nice short movie...

rwebb• 19 years ago

Your Man in India (YMII) is actually a service designed for Indians in the US to use. Brickworks is their task outsourcing business. They are not taking on new customers right now because of all the interest caused by 4 Hour Work Week. Get Friday is Brickworks' main competitor. They currently take about 2 weeks to respond to an inquiry (in broken English) and you then have to give them you CC# and commit to a monthly minimum and wait another 3 weeks before you can try the service. All reports I have seen have been very positive once the service starts, but I'm not holding my breath. Ask Sunday is a start up that was offering a month of free tasks (or 30 tasks total) for free with promotional code "beta". I use them for some business outsourcing stuff and have been quite good. I bet they are going to start getting overloaded with demand as well.

At the end of the day, for non-code business outsourcing (research, online tasks, etc.) the services don't save you that much money (US temp agencies are ~$18/hr - these Indian services are around ~$15). And obviously the best type of tasks to outsource are repetitive homogeneous ones that don't require subjective decisions.

I blogged a bit about some of these services here:

http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2007/07/29/ask-sunday/

jimbokun2• 19 years ago

"Us high-end types will be as vulnerable as assembly-line workers."

I think this is the most insightful statement in the article. I keep hearing "yes, but the high end tasks will remain here" from every proponent of overseas outsourcing.

Why? Indian people and Chinese people and I'm sure people from lots of other countries are just as smart as us and often highly educated. There is absolutely no reason they can't do so called "high end tasks" as well as we can.

richard814• 19 years ago

True, but having high-end developers in-house is both handy, and good for the economy!

And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications.... can you imagine how frustrating it is to work with someone who apparently has a Masters in IT yet doesn't understand that "var1 = textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something I want to see in proper VB.Net code? Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter "wow, that's genius" when I cobbled together a session-based auth script.... ugh.

Like I said above, outsourcing basic, labour-intensive stuff is OK as long as you can verify qualifications and get plenty of references. Personally, I would never, ever outsource anything mission-critical or "high-end" as I'd be more than a little afraid of having IP compromised (not to mention security).

All that aside, one golden rule I swear by is:

Real-world experience is more important than qualifications.

Always.

I do not care if you have a Masters degree in Information Superhighway Architecture Specialization and Awesomeness. If you have 3+ years of experience and can exhibit resourcefulness, experience and intelligence, I will hire you over Mr PhD/Masters/B.IT/B.EComm/Fresh-out-of-college.

Maybe slightly off-topic but pursuant to the whole "verify your resource first" mantra.

jimbokun2• 19 years ago

"And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications...."

I suspect that's due to the rapid growth of the software development industry there. Allegedly similar things happened during the dot boom here in the 90s, when there was so much demand for software that many unqualified and under-qualified people were hired.

On the other hand, there was a Wall Street Journal article recently (much discussed here, I think) about how the best developers in India can command salaries closer to their Silicon Valley counterparts than the typical Indian IT salary.

Perhaps "you get what you pay for" applies?

"someone who apparently has a Masters in IT yet doesn't understand that "var1 = textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something I want to see in proper VB.Net code?"

I suspect you can find similar code from American developers. The only difference is that over here a lot of the less dedicated programmers have left the field and so now we have their Indian counterparts doing the same low quality work for less money.

"Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter "wow, that's genius" when I cobbled together a session-based auth script.... ugh."

If the article's portrayal of "Honey" is indicative, he may have been just trying to stroke your ego. :)

"Real-world experience is more important than qualifications."

No argument there.

sbraford• 19 years ago

Imho, too many americans have had sour experiences with offshored workers or H1-Bs working here, etc.

It's the language thing. Oh but they have an IQ of 160?

Well that doesn't matter much when communication is hugely important in conveying & understanding high-level ideas (on all sides).

The worst are suits who can't speak either language (tech & broken-english mumble). Offshore guy mumbles, "Oh we'll mmm hhmmm AJAX mmm hmmm Web 2.0 mmm hmmm screen-scrape data layer API. mmmm hmmm Simple." And the suit goes, "Well, Bob, glad we got that one nicked in the bud!"

subbu• 19 years ago

Some comments from an Indian working in Bangalore: there is definitely a lot of weed in the services offered from India. If you expect everybody that you come across in cheaper countries to be 100% efficient and as intelligent as everybody else in the world then rest of the world is really cooked. That's hardly the case. I have been on both sides of the interviews and have seen really crappy resources. On the other hand I have recruited bright guys for as little as $1000/month. The key here is to spend some time in choosing your resources. This could be a difficult task especially for foreigners because they have no or little idea about the country/people they are outsourcing to. Some ideas for getting the right resource: 1) Use any Indian connections you may have. I am sure a lot of them will have connections back home. This is your best option. 2) Use your LinkedIn connections. 3) Hang out in newsgroups/mailing lists and watch out for people who answer questions. They are generally good. 4) Use communities like news.yc and slashdot. Some communities attract bright people and some of them could be Indians.

I know it's not as easy as I say but you need to take that extra mile if you want good resources. It will pay off in the longer run.

Your Man in India - Outsourcing Your Errands

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