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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 - i

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.
StreamBright 10y ago
At what point in my comment have I made any generalisation? I was telling a story that was specific to a small group of people who happened to be hired in India. We had several other teams hired in that country doing just fine.

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.

StreamBright 10y ago

At what point in my comment have I made any generalisation? I was telling a story that was specific to a small group of people who happened to be hired in India. We had several other teams hired in that country doing just fine.