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Conversely, my experience working with teams out of India has been bad without exception even when we had proper planning and authority. Which only goes to say

Conversely, my experience working with teams out of India has been bad without exception even when we had proper planning and authority. Which only goes to say that you can have bad teams anywhere. I'm disappointed to see the same ingredients that led to failure with offshoring a decade ago now taking more firm root here than even during the dotcom boom: perception that 'coding' is a path to easy money and certain success, dime-a-dozen "coding boot camps" that teach how to make an Angular site but don't get into any fundamentals[1]. The perception existed in the waning years of the boom, but at least the most common path then was through a full degree. While my perception is that the situation is improving in India (at least if you avoid the well known warm body suppliers), it's getting worse locally. 1. This isn't to say that there is no value to boot-camp style programs - but there are presently a whole lot more that exist solely to capitalize on a financial opportunity than focus on providing a foundation for skills growth. edit: I should add that this was just an opportunity to express my general sentiment, and given the phrasing of the news from Twitter, I doubt performance was a factor.

blinkingled 10y ago
> Which only goes to say that you can have bad teams anywhere. Oh totally - much harder to find a good team in India if you are just another corporation looking to outsource. But if you are Microsoft, Google, Twitter or any other well known product company they have no trouble hiring the best and it usually speaks for itself. I wanted to point out that you can do acceptably well with offshore teams by doing your research, hiring right people, doing proper planning, getting used to more communication than usual and encouraging the team take up authority. Most of these apply to any team but the communication part becomes of more importance when the team is offshore.
- StreamBright 10y ago
  Not necessarily, one of my previous workplace did the same with the team in India due to some language barrier issue that has cost the company 10x of the savings on not hiring a native English speaking team somewhere else (for more money obviously). These events usually boil down to financial details. I bet Twitter made a calculation and it was not financially viable to maintain that team over there.
  - blinkingled 10y ago
    Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now! That's another stereotype/generalization that keeps getting thrown around! It's not the English - it's the culture that is different and there is relative ease of finding bad Apples over good ones. None of that is closely unique to teams in India. You can find perfectly well English speaking candidates here that don't fit as easily as anywhere else. Point is if you want to have a remote team for whatever reason you can't expect it to magically save you money and do everything you need. It's a process, you have to have upfront investment in terms of efforts and trying things out. In my experience it works if you give it time and efforts and it can save you money if that's what you're after. And of course remote teams are not fit for every type of project either - so there's a trade off to be made depending on various factors.
    - Theodores 10y ago
      Americans have been speaking English for a long time too but us Brits struggle to be understood by them. A lot of the early outsourcing was on cheap bandwidth, early VOIP. This added to the misery of a Western consumer phoning up for tech support to that free phone number, to be on call for an eternity.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      > Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now! You might be right, but not the ones on my BigCo support calls.
    - dennisgorelik 10y ago
      What kind of investments do you recommend into remote team in order to make it successful? I think only motivated people should be hired for remote jobs, because external motivation does not work well in remote environment.
      - blinkingled 10y ago
        For complex jobs that require lot of focus and perseverance where the employee is going to be remote and on their own, yes - nothing other than a highly self motivated, talented individual will work out. But for the jobs that are moderately complicated and require a team - like in offshored projects for e.g. - giving that team their own local office to work, hiring a good manager to track their work/progress and provide local motivation, setting up communication infrastructure (Skype, Slack, Code Repositories, Bug Repos etc.), managing timing differences, having the team fly over to your main location or having your core team go visit them once in a while, identifying skill gaps and setting up training to address those, starting slow and initially giving team members clearly defined work which can be reviewed objectively and giving the team actionable feedback etc. can make it a whole lot easier down the line when workload increases and you can't afford low quality work. As an ongoing thing - communication becomes the main thing so making sure to have short, meaningful meetings to review, hear, appraise, provide feedback etc. are a must. (W.r.t communication - being clear and direct, not using culture specific lingo, making sure people understand what you are expecting from them and assigning timeline and ownership for key items verbally make a great difference.) And there's still attrition to deal with but it can be worked around by having well documented processes and keeping a good work environment. It sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing and some of these apply to local teams too. Finally keep in mind that you can't really magically escape all of s/w engineering problems just by having a local team - there's going to be complacent people, people with skills issues, communication problems etc. and the issues are not limited to remote teams although they do get harder to manage.
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  Communication is essential for any remote team, but in particular for one that operates semi-independently. The issues I ran into in the past were made worse by poor communication from both sides. However, once we got past those, the underlying lack of skills became apparent.
dasil003 10y ago
Agree 100%. In India, computer programming has been something parents pushed their children into as a high value career for a long time. In the last 7-8 years we've seen that mentality also take hold in the US as the economy has gone sideways and a lot of formerly-headed-for-finance are looking to make their fortune in Silicon Valley. It really ends up diluting the talent pool over time. In these cases you really have to make sure you're hiring people with real potential as programmers, and that's easier said than done. Even after 20 years as a hiring manager I still get tons of false negatives and false positives. Beyond that I think India imposes at least one big cultural landmine which is that subordinates are extremely reluctant to ever deliver any bad news. Effective management requires asking probing questions and reading between the lines, not something that every western manager has great experience or talent with.
- praneshp 10y ago
  Yes, Indians are a really small bunch, go ahead and make more boneheaded generalizations about them. "Even after 20 years as a hiring manager I still get tons of false negatives and false positives." Just means that in addition to being racist, you are an incompetent hiring manager.
  - orf 10y ago
    The only boneheaded thing I see is your comment. What did he say that was racist?
- lr4444lr 10y ago
  Honest, unloaded question for you as a hiring manager: do you think accrediting body that is neither for-profit nor funded by for-profit entities could strike a balance in an industry as dynamic as software development?
  - Kadin 10y ago
    Not to put words in the GP's mouth but as someone involved in hiring I find that idea intriguing, although I think how effective it would be would depend a lot on the nature of how it was implemented (isn't that always the case, though...). The biggest problem with hiring experienced people for software development positions is the broad range of what falls under "software development". It's a very big field, and I think the breadth of the field isn't well appreciated by people working outside it -- including, particularly but not exclusively at large organizations, management and HR. A good accrediting body might do a lot as a way of ensuring a baseline level of competence for new CS grads, and in particular it might help people coming from schools that are good, but not one of the "big names", by showing that their education is up to a consistent standard. I don't know if it would do much for hiring more experienced candidates, though. Too much hinges on evaluating the experience that's being claimed since graduation.
cscurmudgeon 10y ago
There is a similar news item about Skype shutting down its office in London. There is no discussion about how bad England's programmers are. If anything this tells me the average HN user is racist and statistically ignorant.
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  That's one interpretation.

blinkingled 10y ago

> Which only goes to say that you can have bad teams anywhere. Oh totally - much harder to find a good team in India if you are just another corporation looking to outsource. But if you are Microsoft, Google, Twitter or any other well known product company they have no trouble hiring the best and it usually speaks for itself. I wanted to point out that you can do acceptably well with offshore teams by doing your research, hiring right people, doing proper planning, getting used to more communication than usual and encouraging the team take up authority. Most of these apply to any team but the communication part becomes of more importance when the team is offshore.

StreamBright 10y ago
Not necessarily, one of my previous workplace did the same with the team in India due to some language barrier issue that has cost the company 10x of the savings on not hiring a native English speaking team somewhere else (for more money obviously). These events usually boil down to financial details. I bet Twitter made a calculation and it was not financially viable to maintain that team over there.
- blinkingled 10y ago
  Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now! That's another stereotype/generalization that keeps getting thrown around! It's not the English - it's the culture that is different and there is relative ease of finding bad Apples over good ones. None of that is closely unique to teams in India. You can find perfectly well English speaking candidates here that don't fit as easily as anywhere else. Point is if you want to have a remote team for whatever reason you can't expect it to magically save you money and do everything you need. It's a process, you have to have upfront investment in terms of efforts and trying things out. In my experience it works if you give it time and efforts and it can save you money if that's what you're after. And of course remote teams are not fit for every type of project either - so there's a trade off to be made depending on various factors.
  - Theodores 10y ago
    Americans have been speaking English for a long time too but us Brits struggle to be understood by them. A lot of the early outsourcing was on cheap bandwidth, early VOIP. This added to the misery of a Western consumer phoning up for tech support to that free phone number, to be on call for an eternity.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > Indians have been speaking English for a real long time now! You might be right, but not the ones on my BigCo support calls.
  - dennisgorelik 10y ago
    What kind of investments do you recommend into remote team in order to make it successful? I think only motivated people should be hired for remote jobs, because external motivation does not work well in remote environment.
    - blinkingled 10y ago
      For complex jobs that require lot of focus and perseverance where the employee is going to be remote and on their own, yes - nothing other than a highly self motivated, talented individual will work out. But for the jobs that are moderately complicated and require a team - like in offshored projects for e.g. - giving that team their own local office to work, hiring a good manager to track their work/progress and provide local motivation, setting up communication infrastructure (Skype, Slack, Code Repositories, Bug Repos etc.), managing timing differences, having the team fly over to your main location or having your core team go visit them once in a while, identifying skill gaps and setting up training to address those, starting slow and initially giving team members clearly defined work which can be reviewed objectively and giving the team actionable feedback etc. can make it a whole lot easier down the line when workload increases and you can't afford low quality work. As an ongoing thing - communication becomes the main thing so making sure to have short, meaningful meetings to review, hear, appraise, provide feedback etc. are a must. (W.r.t communication - being clear and direct, not using culture specific lingo, making sure people understand what you are expecting from them and assigning timeline and ownership for key items verbally make a great difference.) And there's still attrition to deal with but it can be worked around by having well documented processes and keeping a good work environment. It sounds like a lot but it's a one time thing and some of these apply to local teams too. Finally keep in mind that you can't really magically escape all of s/w engineering problems just by having a local team - there's going to be complacent people, people with skills issues, communication problems etc. and the issues are not limited to remote teams although they do get harder to manage.
GrinningFool 10y ago
Communication is essential for any remote team, but in particular for one that operates semi-independently. The issues I ran into in the past were made worse by poor communication from both sides. However, once we got past those, the underlying lack of skills became apparent.

dasil003 10y ago

Agree 100%. In India, computer programming has been something parents pushed their children into as a high value career for a long time. In the last 7-8 years we've seen that mentality also take hold in the US as the economy has gone sideways and a lot of formerly-headed-for-finance are looking to make their fortune in Silicon Valley. It really ends up diluting the talent pool over time. In these cases you really have to make sure you're hiring people with real potential as programmers, and that's easier said than done. Even after 20 years as a hiring manager I still get tons of false negatives and false positives. Beyond that I think India imposes at least one big cultural landmine which is that subordinates are extremely reluctant to ever deliver any bad news. Effective management requires asking probing questions and reading between the lines, not something that every western manager has great experience or talent with.

praneshp 10y ago
Yes, Indians are a really small bunch, go ahead and make more boneheaded generalizations about them. "Even after 20 years as a hiring manager I still get tons of false negatives and false positives." Just means that in addition to being racist, you are an incompetent hiring manager.
- orf 10y ago
  The only boneheaded thing I see is your comment. What did he say that was racist?
lr4444lr 10y ago
Honest, unloaded question for you as a hiring manager: do you think accrediting body that is neither for-profit nor funded by for-profit entities could strike a balance in an industry as dynamic as software development?
- Kadin 10y ago
  Not to put words in the GP's mouth but as someone involved in hiring I find that idea intriguing, although I think how effective it would be would depend a lot on the nature of how it was implemented (isn't that always the case, though...). The biggest problem with hiring experienced people for software development positions is the broad range of what falls under "software development". It's a very big field, and I think the breadth of the field isn't well appreciated by people working outside it -- including, particularly but not exclusively at large organizations, management and HR. A good accrediting body might do a lot as a way of ensuring a baseline level of competence for new CS grads, and in particular it might help people coming from schools that are good, but not one of the "big names", by showing that their education is up to a consistent standard. I don't know if it would do much for hiring more experienced candidates, though. Too much hinges on evaluating the experience that's being claimed since graduation.

cscurmudgeon 10y ago

There is a similar news item about Skype shutting down its office in London. There is no discussion about how bad England's programmers are. If anything this tells me the average HN user is racist and statistically ignorant.

GrinningFool 10y ago
That's one interpretation.