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I've read many articles critical of offshoring to India over the past few years, and they all seem to have the same pattern. The authors all seem to want to des
by chanakya 16y ago
I've read many articles critical of offshoring to India over the past few years, and they all seem to have the same pattern. The authors all seem to want to describe what's wrong with offshoring, but what they end up describing are great examples of the kind of thinking in American companies which leads to failure. The pattern is almost identical:
- It all starts with, out of nowhere, 'pressure' to 'outsource/offshore' a specific project against the will of the developers/managers in the US.
- These same devs/managers are entrusted with the project and told to 'get it done in India'. They have no idea where to hire great developers, or what these developers want after they're hired, but they set up a project anyway.
- They either go to an outsourcing company or set up a small office in India to get a 'bunch of developers'. There is no discussion in the article of a management structure in India and it is assumed the experienced devs in the US need to do the management and review of the work.
- It's amazing how often the result cited is that 'it would take us less time to rewrite what these guys did than to ask for rework'.
- The company, having learnt its lesson, presumably never ventures into these waters again.
Meanwhile, companies which know anything about a global workforce have a center in India set up not by a group of devs who don't want to do it, but at the topmost level of the company. They hire or send someone really bright who understands India and the talent market here and spends real effort and investment into hiring great people and building a real techie culture.
They protect their India teams from the I'll-spend-more-time-reviewing-it-than-writing-it-myself crowd, and give them real ownership and responsibility, often starting small but prepared to give more ownership as the teams grow in capability. They don't set them up for failure by givening them US managers who want them to fail.
I work at a large setup like this (and there are many others), where teams aren't 'sending code to be reviewed' by devs in the US, they're defining the specs and technical direction, shipping products to customers directly, often much better than the US teams they took the product over from. Not always, but very often. All the technical management for the product is in India and they're given real responsibility and authority to set directions for the technology.
Yes, as the article says, there are great developers everywhere, but they need to be found, they need to be attracted and appreciated and they need to be given real ownership. Then you find out if offshoring works or not.
- jpcx01 16y agoI completely agree with you. I've been on many projects where outsourcing ended up being a terrible idea, but anyone with a brain would be able to see that the process was screwed up from the beginning (on our side). I imagine myself in the shoes of the outsourced developer, and its easy to conclude I would have produced the same crap results given the constraints most managers put on the teams. Code ownership and the freedom to make your own actual decision is vital for any really good developer. We can't just take that away, and then complain when the project hits the rocks. Still, I'm going to stay away from using offshore teams in the future as its just too damn hard to get right if you have a limited budget.
- jared314 16y agoSo, outsourcing doesn't solve your problems, it just shows them to you. Where have I heard that before?
- jtbigwoo 16y agoWhat you're describing doesn't sound like outsourcing or even offshoring to me. It sounds like expanding the business in new geographic areas. Successful manufacturing companies would never think of sending off a spec sheet to the cheapest contract manufacturer and then just sitting back and waiting for the first production run. But somehow, companies have no problem sending off a software spec and just sitting back and waiting for a product.
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- chanakya 16y agoI see what you're saying, but 'expanding the business' is a bit of a euphemism. The article gets almost everything wrong, but I think it has a good definition of outsourcing/offshoring that works: save a ton of money and ship quality software. The article claims this almost never happens, but make no mistake, this is exactly what is happening from the better centers. The cost differences are enormous, Indian cost often being no more than a quarter to a third of US ones. The article has a lot of nonsense about why great Indian devs will 'charge' the same as what US ones do (as if they have the power of market makers), but the reality is that you really can get great teams at a fraction of US costs. Another reason to call it offshoring is that every time the company stock is under pressure, US top management wants to let go some people in the US and move more to the India office. This is often not what the India teams want. Over the years, they've developed strong relationships with devs in the US office, with respect for their abilities and acknowledgement of having learnt a lot from them, and don't want to see themselves as taking away the US devs' jobs. The best devs in india want to go off and do new things they've thought of themselves, but are pulled into 'transitioning' new stuff. Managements are the same everywhere, and these kind of things don't figure in their calculus.