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I totally see the upside of taking an Accenture et al approach but I can't stomach the offshore sweatshop model. In the early days I tried offshore and the qual

• exelius 9y ago
  It's gotten a lot better as everyone figured out the model, tooling and process. As long as you have someone onshore responsible for quality who doesn't let offshore get away with sloppy work, the model can produce high-quality products. The key is having stable teams offshore, and building skills in those teams in the same ways you would build them in an on-shore team. It's all about learning what work to do on-shore (anything involving client contact / communication, like requirements gathering) and how to package and hand off requirements to offshore. The big consulting firms will have an advantage over small ones in this model though, because hiring/training developers becomes an operational task that you're doing all the time. If you can grapple with the training and skills development you end up needing to do offshore, the model does work very well. It will distance you from the technology side of the business, however... and soon enough you'll find that you're working in professional services rather than software development. :)