Basically, in my experience, and the experience of others I've spoken to, you need to do almost exactly the opposite of everything the India dev agency industry

Basically, in my experience, and the experience of others I've spoken to, you need to do almost exactly the opposite of everything the India dev agency industry does. The sector as a whole it completely trashed and discredited in the UK, from what I can see, and if I interview somewhere and they have an Indian agency on-board somewhere, it's a major red flag that something very, very bad is probably happening somewhere. That's because every single Indian dev agency experience I've had, has resulted in a net negative outcome, sometimes so bad we've thrown away _everything_ they've touched and started again. A couple of ideas that might make everything "nicer": 1. Increase code quality. Commit to it. Understand technical debt and commit to reducing it. Refactor. Code reviews. Cite and apply industry standard texts like _Clean Code_ or language-specific texts (e.g. _POODR_ for Ruby). Test coverage, great documentation, highly readable code: they're not optional any more. 2. Go agile and lean. Don't expect BUFD. Realise the client is learning as they go too. 3. Don't take specs from a client and develop code that meets them. Develop the spec _with the customer_. Use BDD properly. 4. Realise there are many things that go outside the spec. Pre-empt. Don't wait to be told. Realise that functional requirements are less than 20% of what is needed to successfully ship a product. There are many things I would "just expect" a developer to do, but every time I've worked with an Indian dev agency I got exactly what I asked for, no more, no less, no common sense applied. Do I really need to tell you the "password" field should be encrypted at rest, and which crypto scheme to use? No, you should do that because it's basic common sense, and tell me what crypto you chose, and why... 5. Say "no" more. Say "I don't know" more. Say "we made a mistake" early when it's obvious you made a mistake. Don't pretend you/your colleagues are an "expert" in something if you've read one or two books or developed a couple of projects: you're still novices until you have 3-5 years experience of doing that thing. Embrace that, be honest about it, it's OK. Price yourself accordingly. 6. The sector tries to compete on price. Try and compete on speed or quality instead.