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> 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 looki

> 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.
- godzilla82 10y ago
  Do you think the people who got selected into a company like Twitter, had language issues or were incompetent? If you are not from India, I can assure you that you cannot possibly comprehend the size of the population, and the resulting competition.
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.

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.
godzilla82 10y ago
Do you think the people who got selected into a company like Twitter, had language issues or were incompetent? If you are not from India, I can assure you that you cannot possibly comprehend the size of the population, and the resulting competition.

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.