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My experience with off-shoring teams and what went wrong

195 points by rlv-dan 9y ago

mindhash 9y ago
Agree with most points. A plug and play never works when it comes to scaling engineering function through not just india but anywhere. One must invest from a long term standpoint. Offshoring isn't a shortcut to scaling, its better from cost perspective. Its best to first get someone on the team who knows local ecosystem(offshore) and is good fit from your culture standpoint. Its a harder process but once you get this right you are most likely to succeed.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I kinda blame the dotcom boom for this. Everyone lamented the bad habits developers learned but from my perspective it was the managers who picked up the worst tricks. As a manager you can make any lie work for about 18 months. After that the devs know if you’re full of shit and by the two year mark you have to find a new group of developers to feed your lines to. You aren’t building a product. You’re building a team that knows how to build that product. If you don’t then version 3 won’t ever happen. If you do it poorly enough version 2 will not happen. And once you’ve taken that risk of making a new product, why wouldn’t you want a version 2 or 3? Isn’t that where all the money is?
beagle3 9y ago
I’ve heard and read so many “here is how my offshoring went wrong” (or even just outsourcing locally), that I am really looking for successful examples and what one can learn from them.
- giarc 9y ago
  I'm currently working with two developers off-shore (through Upwork). I've used off-shore in the past for small jobs, basically to MVP a feature or so. For example, I currently have someone building a small raspberry pi program that takes RFID input, and posts the ID and date to our API. I want to demo this to some clients and if it's well received, we'll build it out fully. I think offshore can be great for small projects like this, I have no experience with larger, longer off shore projects.
- wordpressdev 9y ago
  I work as offshore / remote consultant with entrepreneurs and small-medium sized companies in the US. Some of these clients are working with me since 5-6 years.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    You're not a good example though. You can definitely build a successful relationship with a single dev in India. An easy route is to start on upwork, pay well, churn a bunch of people until you meet someone good, then hire them. The complexity comes when you need a team of people to build more than one person can do.
    - wordpressdev 9y ago
      Building remote teams is tough, agreed. But it can be achieved. Off-shore does not / should not mean cheap labor in some obscure part of the world. There are plenty of examples of companies thriving with remote teams, such as: Buffer: https://buffer.com/about https://buffer.com/about Automattic (parent of WordPress): https://automattic.com/about/ https://automattic.com/about/ By the way, I am in Pakistan, not India :)
      - x0x0 9y ago
        My apologies for assuming. I would say there aren't so many examples of companies with heavily remote workforces thriving. As a founder, this was the subject of a lot of internal debate. I largely came to the same conclusion as a lot of companies: remote slows down execution, and execution is probably the single most important thing for a small company. Also, this article discussed something different than building a remote team, and more in line with what most customers want: hire a mostly pre-made remote team all at once. The desired advantage is less cost savings and more speed. Building a remote team yourself is much more likely to work, but also probably slow enough that it's not worth it. You have to find a remote teach lead + hiring manager, work with him or her enough to trust him or her, and then empower that person to run hiring cycles.
- megy 9y ago
  We had it work, but out tech lead was onshore, would have daily standups, and would review all there code. The biggest problem we had is that when they had a problem, such as access or a backend system not working, they would not tell us until the standup. They would not email us so we could start working on it 5 hours before the standup.
Yhippa 9y ago
> In Germany, you would not call yourself a senior but apply for a position as senior. Interesting. Anybody know why that is? Seems to happen in the US.
- fitpolar 9y ago
  Because there are no junior developer jobs advertised. That’s almost not sarcastic. Realistically though there is a lot ambiguity over what defines a senior dev. If postings said 10-15 years experience or experience in building stable and complex architecture across the whole lifecycle...or something similar...that would clarify things.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    I'm refactoring a system that was written by someone with '20 years' experience. As far as I can tell it was the same 3mths repeated 80 times. I've got 11 years working on the web (and if we count the first time I sold software, 21 years as a developer). Time is only a rough approximation of skill.
  - crowbahr 9y ago
    It's very confusing honestly. If I wanted to apply for a job right now I've got 1 year professional iOS development experience and 2 years Android... So I don't really feel like a senior Android developer at all but junior positions are incredibly scarce. Most places I've seen are asking for a lot more experience or just saying senior with "deep knowledge of Android framework"... Whatever that is supposed to mean. Like are you asking me to know the exact implementation of the stock ArrayAdapter for ListView so that I can tell you why we'd need a custom one or are you looking for someone to debug Dalvik/kernal issues? Like I can architecture good clean code (and have done so for personal projects as well as professional) but I still feel junior because it feels like junior should until be 4+ years of experience.
    - lainga 9y ago
      >Like are you asking me to know the exact implementation of the stock ArrayAdapter for ListView so that I can tell you why we'd need a custom one or are you looking for someone to debug Dalvik/kernal issues? In my experience, both. They will hire for someone who knows every detail of one field, and once you're hired, put you to work on a 5-year-old bug queue for a technology you know nothing about.
dedsm 9y ago
I owned a company that provided off-shore services to companies in the US, it worked perfectly. If you are doing off-shoring, you really need to insist on the independence and the ability to speak up of the team, it doesn't work if you get yes-men, sadly that's the general case for India-based offshore companies
- megy 9y ago
  "Are you a yes-man?" "No" Perfect!
iooi 9y ago
> Most of them came pretty late (around 9 or 10am), mostly due to heavy traffic in the city. How is that late? It's not rare for some developers to get in between 11am-12pm in the large tech companies I know about/have worked at.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I imagine if you're hiring offshore workers you aren't working at a large tech company, and there might be a more standard work day which is expected to be adhered to. For example, I doubt most of the time the IT or programmers working for a bank can expect to roll in at 10 or 11. Different jobs have different expectations.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I'm in at 9 or 10. In our remote offices, the devs are often in by 8am (partially because that's the only time of day when our hours overlap, and thus the only time when live communication is possible).
- teachrdan 9y ago
  Nine or ten AM is late because the author is German :)
- reaperducer 9y ago
  The last two places I worked, the devs were expected in at 7:00am, and 8:00am. The second place gave you a five-minute grace period. These weren't "tech" companies. They were companies in other industries. You're not going to find a lot of 11am devs in finance, healthcare, or manufacturing.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    > These weren't "tech" companies. They were companies in other industries. You're not going to find a lot of 11am devs in finance, healthcare, or manufacturing. You'd be surprised. 10am is very common.
- addicted 9y ago
t1o5 9y ago
The author forgot to mention how much he paid for the offshore team. There was no mention of money in the things that went wrong. I think the cost is a very important factor if you expect a high quality project. I have seen many people who bash India and Indian engineers for low quality work, but lets get to the crux of the problem. Its not that Indian engineers are all bad. They come in all shapes and sizes. You will get the best ones if you pay enough. You pay cheap, you get cheap. Where can you get cheap ones ? From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources. The employees in turn will also treat their jobs along those lines. So if you need high quality work, please don't go to these giant corporations. If you look hard enough, you will find small high quality places, but they are not cheap and not 'scalable' like your manager wants them to be.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  The last time I managed outsourced developers I made this joke. "There are some truly amazing Indian developers, it's just a shame none of them are in India". My observation was that the outsourced developers I managed, the good ones usually got visa's and buggered off abroad even though they where getting near UK wages in India they could earn more by moving.
  - t1o5 9y ago
    Agree. What I see is, skilled ones are flocking to Canada and Australia because of their merit based immigration system. H1B has lost its luster because its now a lottery visa, no place for skills. The Indian IT biggies flood H1B market with petitions claiming high skills for a meager developer. There are also a lot booming startups in many cities spread across India. You can find the best ones there too.
    - screye 9y ago
      Not really, I don't know a single top student who is studying in Canada or Australia. Maybe you are referring specifically moving for work. Australian wages are significantly lower than those in the US and for the most part, it isn't on anyone's mind to apply there. In my experience, students apply to Australia when they can't compete for good universities in the US. Canada is very sensitive to GPA values. I know of cases, where literally the absolute cream of the cream, with a strong profile to show for it, have been rejected from Canadian institutes, for reasons that no one seems to have figured out yet. In the past few years, I know a lot more people who are gravitating towards the EU over the US, but I don't don't hear much about moving to either Canada or Australia for work or education. That being said, the lottery system for giving the h1b is universally loathed.Some of smartest people I know are struggling to get one, while Infosys keeps sending utterly mediocre people in droves to the US. I hope it does become a merit based system (assuming the number of spots stay constant), I however have no idea as to how merit should be decided.
mvpu 9y ago
Indian engineers in India are like animals in a zoo. Indian engineers outside India are like animals in a forest. They thrive and shine because they are free. It's all in the environment. The only way to add "offshore" teams safely is to find people who refuse to accept a code review comment because that's not the right thing to do, no matter which part of the world they are in.
- ILikeConemowk 9y ago
  >Indian engineers in India are like animals in a zoo. Indian engineers outside India are like animals in a forest. They thrive and shine because they are free. It's all in the environment. These kind of generalizations are useless. There are "zoo animals" and "forest animals" all over the world regardless of location.
GFischer 9y ago
Well... " It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code." I guess that's what went wrong :( . I wonder why they do this, because they can?
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Was asked to give an estimate on a project that was offshored and I was amazed at a.) how few commits the developers did over several months b.) how little the person who hired the offshore developers was monitoring them. It's just so trivial to just check progress once a day, I like to commit to a development branch at least every day because I am paranoid about losing progress or experiments that I can reference even if I decide on something better later.
jccalhoun 9y ago
Interesting read. I would like to read something written from the perspective of the team in India that maybe explains some of their impression of the companies they are working for.
- BareNakedCoder 9y ago
  Read "Speaking of India" by Craig Storti.
jrochkind1 9y ago
Do the Indian developers get "cross-cultural training" in how to deal with Americans, Germans, or other people from 'hiring' countries, or is it assumed that only the Europeans and Americans have the aptitude to accommodate unfamiliar cultural expectations?
- dominotw 9y ago
  I got cultural training when i worked at a call center in 2002 , but never got any such training since then as a software engineer.
- rpiguy 9y ago
  I am sure they do, it is very common to have cross-cultural training. Go back 30-40 years and the Japanese and Korean professionals were getting cross-cultural training to work with US teams. Most MBA programs also include this kind of thing regardless of what country you get your MBA in. Of course you get a lot of generalities like: - Americans like fast decisions - Americans would rather fix a wrong fast decision after the fact than wait to make the decision - Europeans generally prefer analysis and deliberate decisions - Japanese are consensus based and hierarchal Etc.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    "Americans like fast decisions" I'd love to work in an organization with some American managers/admins like that!
- GordonS 9y ago
  At least at CapGemini and Cognizant, yes, so I assume this happens at the other big out sourcing firms.
thisisit 9y ago
This was a real insightful look at how "clients" feel when coming down to India. There are some great points made on how things don't gel well together. I have been on both side of the fence - both as a "resource" for an offshore client and contracting a team for work. If I reading this correctly the issue might have started from candidate selection itself. You have to be strict when it comes to hiring. Startup scene has ensured a good developers are paid well. But most offshoring firms tend to keep the salaries low even for in-demand stuff like mobile app development. So, offshoring pools can be dry. In which case, companies tend to fudge resumes or provide some low quality devs. So, look out for people being unable to answer basic stuff, that is red flag 1. And if they are unable to explain their past projects, that is red flag 2. Apart from that, there is another thing you have to answer - What is more important? Good candidate or quickly selecting one? We had to spend 8-9 months looking for a candidate. We found one who fit nearly 80% of our criteria, even with the best pay possible. But when we tried building a team quickly - the overall pay rose exponentially. IMO, a better idea is to open an offshore center and fester a culture that you want. It is difficult to ask people to follow one company's culture while they are working in another.
- mateo411 9y ago
  >IMO, a better idea is to open an offshore center and fester a culture that you want. You want to replace the word fester with foster. Fester has a negative connotation.
carlsborg 9y ago
There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. More than a decade ago I started out as a developer on an offshore team for a US based product startup. We grew from 2 people to 19 people and the US based company did well in its market and got acquired in a successful exit a few years later. There are numerous success stories like this for every engagement gone wrong. Now days I run an India based offshore team from Europe. The cost model has changed dramatically over time, but the premise that you can ship quality code with an India team is very much viable. Every large tech company does it. I’m happy to chat offline if you want.
- maxk42 9y ago
  I've hired a lot of remote developers over the years and it has pretty much been a flop 2 / 3rds of the time. I had some reasonably good success with Columbian developers a few years back, but the two most outstanding devs I hired on a remote basis were based out of Utah and Connecticut. I hired one a few months ago from Ukraine who absolutely blew the competition away when it came to the coding test, but then failed to actually put in the work hours when he started the job. Any advice for interviewing / hiring remote devs that don't suck?
  - carlsborg 9y ago
    I think the engagement model is equally if not more important than the recruiting. Tie their growth into yours. The startup I mentioned above gave the India team stock options.
- pebcakID10T 9y ago
  Every large tech company does not do it. I have worked with more than a few large tech companies whose Indian teams deliver abysmal quality code on a regular basis.
Joeri 9y ago
Although I never got an explanation, their managers were probably selling their employees to multiple projects. I've heard that this happens from people working there. Offshore developers from a body-shopping company who are shopped to multiple customers is common. I've seen it happen multiple times in different countries. I have over a decade of experience trying to make off-shore development work with several off-shoring companies, one of which was a wholly owned subsidiary (to avoid the various overbilling strategies). I've never been convinced it is worth it overall. The semi-irrational insistence on off-shoring was actually one of the primary reasons I quit my last job.
teachrdan 9y ago
The punchline: "It cost us nearly a million Euros to get both applications to a state that was acceptable to our customer. That did not include the actual personnel, coaching and travel costs." "It seems that costs scale better than people."
gabept 9y ago
For me, the secret was to stop looking at teams, and start looking at individuals. We found extremelly talented people that were underpaid, dislocated and suffocated by a toxic and outdated culture.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I always thought this. However, it seems like this would require a lot of direct management. Who was the PM for you - was it you? if not, was she/he local to the devs? What was your timezone? My struggle with offshoring to India (from PST) is that the nearly opposite timezone affords minimal overlaps, and thus either the offshore personnel or the local person managing would have crappy hours.
lowken10 9y ago
About 15 years ago my company made a long term investment in hiring software developers from India. Early on were some of them terrible developers? Yes, but so are many United States based Developers. Now 15 years later I can tell you that my India based coworkers are some of the best developers that I've ever worked with.
pkaye 9y ago
I find it important to have a off shore managerial team fully responsible for the project in the same manner as the home office. You can't just hire the off shore team and tell the home office engineers to make use of them. Also the project should be divided so that there is minimal need for daily communications between the teams.
codingdave 9y ago
> we needed to reject some candidates because we simply could not understand their English pronunciation. That could be a mistake - If you find someone who has good skills, and would otherwise make the team, there are language bootcamps you can send them to, which will help with their English. I have sent people to them, and they ended up being wonderful members of my team, once we got past the communication barriers. If you are willing to coach on other topics, refusing to coach on communications is an odd choice. For my part, when building an offshore team, I did a few things: 1) Brought them here for a couple weeks. Seeing how we work, and getting to know each other in person made a huge difference, including being able to get used to accents and mannerisms. Like any other team, it built trust, which goes a long way towards working well together. 2) I took lessons in Hindi. Never spoke it to them, never got fluent, and many Indians don't speak it anyway... but just trying to learn it helped meet in the middle on accents, and helped communications to the point that I often ended up translating between 2 English speaking people who just couldn't understand each other. And they appreciated having an American who would just laugh with them when we couldn't understand each other vs. getting frustrated and making them fear for their job.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Nice points. Unfortunately the type that is looking to offshore has a lot in common with those who are not interested in training or coaching at all. No, must "hit the ground running."
seltzered_ 9y ago
Another approach would be to start with one developer living in europe/US already but wants to live in India. Example: I have an Indian friend who was working in Seattle but ultimately wanted to go back to India. He found a job where he started at the headquarters on the east coast for a few months then moved to India to build a team there. The key thing is patience on these projects and paying people well. FWIW I'm impatient and when I had a similar discussion with management as in the blogpost I openly said it was a bad idea and found myself laid off months later. The company eventually had changes in upper management and closed it's India design center.
blub 9y ago
The company management doesn't know what they're doing and are looking to grow while magically cutting costs by outsourcing. It takes years and/or a very solid network to build competent teams. What went wrong? Your company is managed by amateurs.
luckydude 9y ago
BitKeeper guy here (predecessor to Git and Hg). If you think about the capabilities of a distributed source management system you can quickly see it's an enabler for out-sourcing. As a commercial DSCM provider, we got to watch a lot of out-sourcing attempts. In 18 years of doing that, I've only seen one really successful one. Which was a Portland based dev team and a Singapore based test team. Every day, the dev team would check in their stuff (or make it available in a test tree) and the Singapore team would wake up, pull it, test it, document the failures, the Portland team would wake up fix and dev some more, lather, rinse, repeat. As I recall, the Singapore team was out-sourced, different company, but they had a stable group of people dedicated to working with the Portland guys. It was more like two teams working on the same project. I've seen countless efforts based on "I can get 3 guys in India for what I have to pay one junior guy here" fail. The time difference makes communication hard, you have to send someone to manage the India guys and communicate what you want, there is zero loyalty, if a better gig comes along all the time you put into onboarding those guys is lost, the quality of the code is pretty crappy, etc. Pretty quickly it becomes not worth it.
- le-mark 9y ago
  This jives with what I've seen. One company I was at created a subsidiary company offshore and made the effort to hire FTEs. The offshore teams at that location were pretty damn good actually.
- otakucode 9y ago
  Yeah, the drawbacks of it being absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India are real. And something I've also seen other major companies encounter is the total lack of any respect for IP law. If you want to get your app built cheap.... and then find your competitor running a reskinned identical version a month later... sure, outsource it.
  - devnetfx 9y ago
    Absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students) While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!
sebringj 9y ago
I don't think it matters where people are as long as there isn't some hindrance to their work ethic or shady work schemes going on. You simply have to be due diligent AND be a tech lead at the same time. You cannot offshore that part. No way. Instead, you directly know each person working on the project and directly work with them, while providing guidance to the entire team. (Directly meaning on Slack since its offshore) For example, a coder puts out something sub optimal. You then correct that code, then go through this with your coder in a constructive way why this way is better and more efficient, while also noting to the group here is an example of X where you do Y. I make repos specifically for projects to refer to as example code scenarios that commonly crop up. For example, here's how you do a background image on a flexbox that auto sizes itself or here's how you destructure a promise.all easily, or here's a baseline project to start from with basic bones and structure to work from. You have to really guide and lead and there is no easy button where more time spent is the trade off of the cost savings.
0x445442 9y ago
It's an old, old story; middle management's never ending quest to commoditize and automate software development. They'll never accept software development has almost no commonality with assembly line work. But they keep trying. Fast, good, cheap; pick any two.
- andrei_says_ 9y ago
  Isn’t this what their business education defined as success?
pm90 9y ago
Off-shoring is hard. But it can be done right. It requires honest intentions and a commitment of enough financial resources. If a firm is off-shoring simply to get the cheapest devs, its not going to work. One of the first companies I worked at had an India office even though the company was pretty small (~50 engineers in total). The Director of the India office was good at recruiting good engineers and they were paid much above market rates for the city they were based in (still less than what US based developers were making). This situation worked out best for everyone. The only problem was when scheduling long face to face meetings, which had to be done either super early or later in the night. But I felt it was a small price to pay to get to recruit a lot of good talent.
megy 9y ago
Yes, you need someone onshore to inspect every bit of work. Offshoring can be done if you expect it. You don't just give them a project to work on an check in when it is done, or once a week. We would have standups every day, and tech leads in our country. They would explain the work needed, make sure they were on task, and check there work.
iAMAGuest 9y ago
> But that was very exhaustive and couldn't obviously go on like that forever. Then we switched to weekly meetings, reviews were mostly done by their team lead. That's where you went wrong first. You let go of the responsibility and handed it over to people who did not necessary have your best interests in mind. Quality, schedule, outcomes etc need to be managed, and managed so problems can be picked up early. Secondly "It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code. Although I never got an explanation ...", point to another management issue. I am sitting in a country with a reputation for being an outsourcing hub, I am from the western world and I can tell you that there are many talented developers. The problems are the same as I have had with managing western teams, personal issues, skill levels etc though some of higher or lower impact. But the basic fact remains, the further you distance yourself from responsibility the greater the risk of failure.
fahayekwasright 9y ago
Sadly, it never turns out well. The most talented Indian developers already live in first world countries.
hemantv 9y ago
Well good developers can get $100k in India. So money is very bad reason to hire in India. But equity you get is peanuts.
latchkey 9y ago
I'm from SF. Living in Saigon now for almost 2 years. Lots of people reach out to me to 'offshore' here because they hear that VN devs are pretty good and salaries are a fraction of the Bay Area. What I've learned is that Vietnamese developers are generally smart and hard working. There is a lot of young hipster attitude. They don't suffer from some of the same cultural issues I've seen in other countries. They have their whole own baggage here. ;-) They really love the latest technologies and strive to keep up to date on things. At the end of the day, it is quite hit or miss, but that could really be said anywhere. In the past, I've never really been a huge fan of offshoring, but with the right company, I've seen it work here on several occasions now. If you're willing to pay a bit more (but still way less than the bay area) for the better dev houses here, you can really get some quality work done.
znpy 9y ago
«if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys»
farhanhubble 9y ago
In India hiring decisions, on any level, are mostly based on which college one comes from, how many random buzzwords one can speak, and not based on the actual skills one has learned during college or picked up at work. People 'learn' things by reading nuggets from interview prep sites, they memorize things and repeat like a tape-recorder during interviews. No wonder their 'understanding' is non existent. At one end of the spectrum are people who come from 'premier' colleges (term invented by HR folks, I guess), like the IITs and NITs. Although these institutes produce some brilliant minds, the majority of graduates have no skills whatsoever. Most of the skilled ones go abroad while the'unskilled' ones get hired in India. So it's not uncommon to come across people, who have fancy titles, get paid insane salaries (by Indian standards) and who have been selected through 'rigorous' technical interviews to fumble when writing a simple application program. At the other end of the spectrum is a huge number of people graduating from private colleges. The quality of teaching and learning at these colleges is abysmal. Most of them end up at one or other 'IT giants' doing menial maintenance work and earning a pittance. The salary varies a lot across the spectrum but the quality of work is equally bad. Their approach to programming, and problem solving in general, is trial-and-error combined with some Googling. As the author points out the code that is produced by these 'engineers' and 'programmers' is compiler-ready not production-ready. Of course there are exceptions too. A small minority of people who stay back in India working for startups or as freelancers are amazing at what they do irrespective of which college they went to or how they learned to program. When you're sampling from this pool, your hiring process has to be ingenious or you end up with insurmountable technical and financial debt.
lijurajpillai 9y ago
You pay peanuts you get monkeys !!! If you want to outsource for cost then good luck with that, but if you want to do it for skill then you have options. There are really good shops who provide amazing service.These companies hire from the right schools and provide great training . Too much generalisation and lack of information in the article.
rootsudo 9y ago
I've had success using Filipinos for outsourced labors. Also fun to live in the Philippines. Realistically, if you need to coordinate people to only talk to person A because he's in department X then you're going to have a rough time...
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Sometimes its about ... everything. Time difference * culture difference * tool availability * hierarchy * quality expectations. If they are all 90%, you still end up at under 50% of the expected result.
known 9y ago
Argumentative & too emotional - are Indians tough to work with? http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-dossier/argumentative-too-emotional-are-indians-tough-to-work-with/articleshow/45638709.cms http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-doss...

195 points by rlv-dan 9y ago

Agree with most points. A plug and play never works when it comes to scaling engineering function through not just india but anywhere. One must invest from a long term standpoint. Offshoring isn't a shortcut to scaling, its better from cost perspective. Its best to first get someone on the team who knows local ecosystem(offshore) and is good fit from your culture standpoint. Its a harder process but once you get this right you are most likely to succeed.

hinkley 9y ago
I kinda blame the dotcom boom for this. Everyone lamented the bad habits developers learned but from my perspective it was the managers who picked up the worst tricks. As a manager you can make any lie work for about 18 months. After that the devs know if you’re full of shit and by the two year mark you have to find a new group of developers to feed your lines to. You aren’t building a product. You’re building a team that knows how to build that product. If you don’t then version 3 won’t ever happen. If you do it poorly enough version 2 will not happen. And once you’ve taken that risk of making a new product, why wouldn’t you want a version 2 or 3? Isn’t that where all the money is?

beagle3 9y ago

I’ve heard and read so many “here is how my offshoring went wrong” (or even just outsourcing locally), that I am really looking for successful examples and what one can learn from them.

giarc 9y ago
I'm currently working with two developers off-shore (through Upwork). I've used off-shore in the past for small jobs, basically to MVP a feature or so. For example, I currently have someone building a small raspberry pi program that takes RFID input, and posts the ID and date to our API. I want to demo this to some clients and if it's well received, we'll build it out fully. I think offshore can be great for small projects like this, I have no experience with larger, longer off shore projects.
wordpressdev 9y ago
I work as offshore / remote consultant with entrepreneurs and small-medium sized companies in the US. Some of these clients are working with me since 5-6 years.
- x0x0 9y ago
  You're not a good example though. You can definitely build a successful relationship with a single dev in India. An easy route is to start on upwork, pay well, churn a bunch of people until you meet someone good, then hire them. The complexity comes when you need a team of people to build more than one person can do.
  - wordpressdev 9y ago
    Building remote teams is tough, agreed. But it can be achieved. Off-shore does not / should not mean cheap labor in some obscure part of the world. There are plenty of examples of companies thriving with remote teams, such as: Buffer: https://buffer.com/about https://buffer.com/about Automattic (parent of WordPress): https://automattic.com/about/ https://automattic.com/about/ By the way, I am in Pakistan, not India :)
    - x0x0 9y ago
      My apologies for assuming. I would say there aren't so many examples of companies with heavily remote workforces thriving. As a founder, this was the subject of a lot of internal debate. I largely came to the same conclusion as a lot of companies: remote slows down execution, and execution is probably the single most important thing for a small company. Also, this article discussed something different than building a remote team, and more in line with what most customers want: hire a mostly pre-made remote team all at once. The desired advantage is less cost savings and more speed. Building a remote team yourself is much more likely to work, but also probably slow enough that it's not worth it. You have to find a remote teach lead + hiring manager, work with him or her enough to trust him or her, and then empower that person to run hiring cycles.
megy 9y ago
We had it work, but out tech lead was onshore, would have daily standups, and would review all there code. The biggest problem we had is that when they had a problem, such as access or a backend system not working, they would not tell us until the standup. They would not email us so we could start working on it 5 hours before the standup.

Yhippa 9y ago

> In Germany, you would not call yourself a senior but apply for a position as senior. Interesting. Anybody know why that is? Seems to happen in the US.

fitpolar 9y ago
Because there are no junior developer jobs advertised. That’s almost not sarcastic. Realistically though there is a lot ambiguity over what defines a senior dev. If postings said 10-15 years experience or experience in building stable and complex architecture across the whole lifecycle...or something similar...that would clarify things.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I'm refactoring a system that was written by someone with '20 years' experience. As far as I can tell it was the same 3mths repeated 80 times. I've got 11 years working on the web (and if we count the first time I sold software, 21 years as a developer). Time is only a rough approximation of skill.
- crowbahr 9y ago
  It's very confusing honestly. If I wanted to apply for a job right now I've got 1 year professional iOS development experience and 2 years Android... So I don't really feel like a senior Android developer at all but junior positions are incredibly scarce. Most places I've seen are asking for a lot more experience or just saying senior with "deep knowledge of Android framework"... Whatever that is supposed to mean. Like are you asking me to know the exact implementation of the stock ArrayAdapter for ListView so that I can tell you why we'd need a custom one or are you looking for someone to debug Dalvik/kernal issues? Like I can architecture good clean code (and have done so for personal projects as well as professional) but I still feel junior because it feels like junior should until be 4+ years of experience.
  - lainga 9y ago
    >Like are you asking me to know the exact implementation of the stock ArrayAdapter for ListView so that I can tell you why we'd need a custom one or are you looking for someone to debug Dalvik/kernal issues? In my experience, both. They will hire for someone who knows every detail of one field, and once you're hired, put you to work on a 5-year-old bug queue for a technology you know nothing about.

dedsm 9y ago

I owned a company that provided off-shore services to companies in the US, it worked perfectly. If you are doing off-shoring, you really need to insist on the independence and the ability to speak up of the team, it doesn't work if you get yes-men, sadly that's the general case for India-based offshore companies

megy 9y ago
"Are you a yes-man?" "No" Perfect!

iooi 9y ago

> Most of them came pretty late (around 9 or 10am), mostly due to heavy traffic in the city. How is that late? It's not rare for some developers to get in between 11am-12pm in the large tech companies I know about/have worked at.

kbenson 9y ago
I imagine if you're hiring offshore workers you aren't working at a large tech company, and there might be a more standard work day which is expected to be adhered to. For example, I doubt most of the time the IT or programmers working for a bank can expect to roll in at 10 or 11. Different jobs have different expectations.
khedoros1 9y ago
I'm in at 9 or 10. In our remote offices, the devs are often in by 8am (partially because that's the only time of day when our hours overlap, and thus the only time when live communication is possible).
teachrdan 9y ago
Nine or ten AM is late because the author is German :)
reaperducer 9y ago
The last two places I worked, the devs were expected in at 7:00am, and 8:00am. The second place gave you a five-minute grace period. These weren't "tech" companies. They were companies in other industries. You're not going to find a lot of 11am devs in finance, healthcare, or manufacturing.
- user5994461 9y ago
  > These weren't "tech" companies. They were companies in other industries. You're not going to find a lot of 11am devs in finance, healthcare, or manufacturing. You'd be surprised. 10am is very common.
addicted 9y ago

t1o5 9y ago

The author forgot to mention how much he paid for the offshore team. There was no mention of money in the things that went wrong. I think the cost is a very important factor if you expect a high quality project. I have seen many people who bash India and Indian engineers for low quality work, but lets get to the crux of the problem. Its not that Indian engineers are all bad. They come in all shapes and sizes. You will get the best ones if you pay enough. You pay cheap, you get cheap. Where can you get cheap ones ? From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources. The employees in turn will also treat their jobs along those lines. So if you need high quality work, please don't go to these giant corporations. If you look hard enough, you will find small high quality places, but they are not cheap and not 'scalable' like your manager wants them to be.

noir_lord 9y ago
The last time I managed outsourced developers I made this joke. "There are some truly amazing Indian developers, it's just a shame none of them are in India". My observation was that the outsourced developers I managed, the good ones usually got visa's and buggered off abroad even though they where getting near UK wages in India they could earn more by moving.
- t1o5 9y ago
  Agree. What I see is, skilled ones are flocking to Canada and Australia because of their merit based immigration system. H1B has lost its luster because its now a lottery visa, no place for skills. The Indian IT biggies flood H1B market with petitions claiming high skills for a meager developer. There are also a lot booming startups in many cities spread across India. You can find the best ones there too.
  - screye 9y ago
    Not really, I don't know a single top student who is studying in Canada or Australia. Maybe you are referring specifically moving for work. Australian wages are significantly lower than those in the US and for the most part, it isn't on anyone's mind to apply there. In my experience, students apply to Australia when they can't compete for good universities in the US. Canada is very sensitive to GPA values. I know of cases, where literally the absolute cream of the cream, with a strong profile to show for it, have been rejected from Canadian institutes, for reasons that no one seems to have figured out yet. In the past few years, I know a lot more people who are gravitating towards the EU over the US, but I don't don't hear much about moving to either Canada or Australia for work or education. That being said, the lottery system for giving the h1b is universally loathed.Some of smartest people I know are struggling to get one, while Infosys keeps sending utterly mediocre people in droves to the US. I hope it does become a merit based system (assuming the number of spots stay constant), I however have no idea as to how merit should be decided.

mvpu 9y ago

Indian engineers in India are like animals in a zoo. Indian engineers outside India are like animals in a forest. They thrive and shine because they are free. It's all in the environment. The only way to add "offshore" teams safely is to find people who refuse to accept a code review comment because that's not the right thing to do, no matter which part of the world they are in.

ILikeConemowk 9y ago
>Indian engineers in India are like animals in a zoo. Indian engineers outside India are like animals in a forest. They thrive and shine because they are free. It's all in the environment. These kind of generalizations are useless. There are "zoo animals" and "forest animals" all over the world regardless of location.

GFischer 9y ago

Well... " It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code." I guess that's what went wrong :( . I wonder why they do this, because they can?

stevenwoo 9y ago
Was asked to give an estimate on a project that was offshored and I was amazed at a.) how few commits the developers did over several months b.) how little the person who hired the offshore developers was monitoring them. It's just so trivial to just check progress once a day, I like to commit to a development branch at least every day because I am paranoid about losing progress or experiments that I can reference even if I decide on something better later.

jccalhoun 9y ago

Interesting read. I would like to read something written from the perspective of the team in India that maybe explains some of their impression of the companies they are working for.

BareNakedCoder 9y ago
Read "Speaking of India" by Craig Storti.

jrochkind1 9y ago

Do the Indian developers get "cross-cultural training" in how to deal with Americans, Germans, or other people from 'hiring' countries, or is it assumed that only the Europeans and Americans have the aptitude to accommodate unfamiliar cultural expectations?

dominotw 9y ago
I got cultural training when i worked at a call center in 2002 , but never got any such training since then as a software engineer.
rpiguy 9y ago
I am sure they do, it is very common to have cross-cultural training. Go back 30-40 years and the Japanese and Korean professionals were getting cross-cultural training to work with US teams. Most MBA programs also include this kind of thing regardless of what country you get your MBA in. Of course you get a lot of generalities like: - Americans like fast decisions - Americans would rather fix a wrong fast decision after the fact than wait to make the decision - Europeans generally prefer analysis and deliberate decisions - Japanese are consensus based and hierarchal Etc.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  "Americans like fast decisions" I'd love to work in an organization with some American managers/admins like that!
GordonS 9y ago
At least at CapGemini and Cognizant, yes, so I assume this happens at the other big out sourcing firms.

thisisit 9y ago

This was a real insightful look at how "clients" feel when coming down to India. There are some great points made on how things don't gel well together. I have been on both side of the fence - both as a "resource" for an offshore client and contracting a team for work. If I reading this correctly the issue might have started from candidate selection itself. You have to be strict when it comes to hiring. Startup scene has ensured a good developers are paid well. But most offshoring firms tend to keep the salaries low even for in-demand stuff like mobile app development. So, offshoring pools can be dry. In which case, companies tend to fudge resumes or provide some low quality devs. So, look out for people being unable to answer basic stuff, that is red flag 1. And if they are unable to explain their past projects, that is red flag 2. Apart from that, there is another thing you have to answer - What is more important? Good candidate or quickly selecting one? We had to spend 8-9 months looking for a candidate. We found one who fit nearly 80% of our criteria, even with the best pay possible. But when we tried building a team quickly - the overall pay rose exponentially. IMO, a better idea is to open an offshore center and fester a culture that you want. It is difficult to ask people to follow one company's culture while they are working in another.

mateo411 9y ago
>IMO, a better idea is to open an offshore center and fester a culture that you want. You want to replace the word fester with foster. Fester has a negative connotation.

carlsborg 9y ago

There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. More than a decade ago I started out as a developer on an offshore team for a US based product startup. We grew from 2 people to 19 people and the US based company did well in its market and got acquired in a successful exit a few years later. There are numerous success stories like this for every engagement gone wrong. Now days I run an India based offshore team from Europe. The cost model has changed dramatically over time, but the premise that you can ship quality code with an India team is very much viable. Every large tech company does it. I’m happy to chat offline if you want.

maxk42 9y ago
I've hired a lot of remote developers over the years and it has pretty much been a flop 2 / 3rds of the time. I had some reasonably good success with Columbian developers a few years back, but the two most outstanding devs I hired on a remote basis were based out of Utah and Connecticut. I hired one a few months ago from Ukraine who absolutely blew the competition away when it came to the coding test, but then failed to actually put in the work hours when he started the job. Any advice for interviewing / hiring remote devs that don't suck?
- carlsborg 9y ago
  I think the engagement model is equally if not more important than the recruiting. Tie their growth into yours. The startup I mentioned above gave the India team stock options.
pebcakID10T 9y ago
Every large tech company does not do it. I have worked with more than a few large tech companies whose Indian teams deliver abysmal quality code on a regular basis.

Joeri 9y ago

Although I never got an explanation, their managers were probably selling their employees to multiple projects. I've heard that this happens from people working there. Offshore developers from a body-shopping company who are shopped to multiple customers is common. I've seen it happen multiple times in different countries. I have over a decade of experience trying to make off-shore development work with several off-shoring companies, one of which was a wholly owned subsidiary (to avoid the various overbilling strategies). I've never been convinced it is worth it overall. The semi-irrational insistence on off-shoring was actually one of the primary reasons I quit my last job.

teachrdan 9y ago

The punchline: "It cost us nearly a million Euros to get both applications to a state that was acceptable to our customer. That did not include the actual personnel, coaching and travel costs." "It seems that costs scale better than people."

gabept 9y ago

For me, the secret was to stop looking at teams, and start looking at individuals. We found extremelly talented people that were underpaid, dislocated and suffocated by a toxic and outdated culture.

r00fus 9y ago
I always thought this. However, it seems like this would require a lot of direct management. Who was the PM for you - was it you? if not, was she/he local to the devs? What was your timezone? My struggle with offshoring to India (from PST) is that the nearly opposite timezone affords minimal overlaps, and thus either the offshore personnel or the local person managing would have crappy hours.

lowken10 9y ago

About 15 years ago my company made a long term investment in hiring software developers from India. Early on were some of them terrible developers? Yes, but so are many United States based Developers. Now 15 years later I can tell you that my India based coworkers are some of the best developers that I've ever worked with.

pkaye 9y ago

I find it important to have a off shore managerial team fully responsible for the project in the same manner as the home office. You can't just hire the off shore team and tell the home office engineers to make use of them. Also the project should be divided so that there is minimal need for daily communications between the teams.

codingdave 9y ago

> we needed to reject some candidates because we simply could not understand their English pronunciation. That could be a mistake - If you find someone who has good skills, and would otherwise make the team, there are language bootcamps you can send them to, which will help with their English. I have sent people to them, and they ended up being wonderful members of my team, once we got past the communication barriers. If you are willing to coach on other topics, refusing to coach on communications is an odd choice. For my part, when building an offshore team, I did a few things: 1) Brought them here for a couple weeks. Seeing how we work, and getting to know each other in person made a huge difference, including being able to get used to accents and mannerisms. Like any other team, it built trust, which goes a long way towards working well together. 2) I took lessons in Hindi. Never spoke it to them, never got fluent, and many Indians don't speak it anyway... but just trying to learn it helped meet in the middle on accents, and helped communications to the point that I often ended up translating between 2 English speaking people who just couldn't understand each other. And they appreciated having an American who would just laugh with them when we couldn't understand each other vs. getting frustrated and making them fear for their job.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Nice points. Unfortunately the type that is looking to offshore has a lot in common with those who are not interested in training or coaching at all. No, must "hit the ground running."

seltzered_ 9y ago

Another approach would be to start with one developer living in europe/US already but wants to live in India. Example: I have an Indian friend who was working in Seattle but ultimately wanted to go back to India. He found a job where he started at the headquarters on the east coast for a few months then moved to India to build a team there. The key thing is patience on these projects and paying people well. FWIW I'm impatient and when I had a similar discussion with management as in the blogpost I openly said it was a bad idea and found myself laid off months later. The company eventually had changes in upper management and closed it's India design center.

blub 9y ago

The company management doesn't know what they're doing and are looking to grow while magically cutting costs by outsourcing. It takes years and/or a very solid network to build competent teams. What went wrong? Your company is managed by amateurs.

luckydude 9y ago

BitKeeper guy here (predecessor to Git and Hg). If you think about the capabilities of a distributed source management system you can quickly see it's an enabler for out-sourcing. As a commercial DSCM provider, we got to watch a lot of out-sourcing attempts. In 18 years of doing that, I've only seen one really successful one. Which was a Portland based dev team and a Singapore based test team. Every day, the dev team would check in their stuff (or make it available in a test tree) and the Singapore team would wake up, pull it, test it, document the failures, the Portland team would wake up fix and dev some more, lather, rinse, repeat. As I recall, the Singapore team was out-sourced, different company, but they had a stable group of people dedicated to working with the Portland guys. It was more like two teams working on the same project. I've seen countless efforts based on "I can get 3 guys in India for what I have to pay one junior guy here" fail. The time difference makes communication hard, you have to send someone to manage the India guys and communicate what you want, there is zero loyalty, if a better gig comes along all the time you put into onboarding those guys is lost, the quality of the code is pretty crappy, etc. Pretty quickly it becomes not worth it.

le-mark 9y ago
This jives with what I've seen. One company I was at created a subsidiary company offshore and made the effort to hire FTEs. The offshore teams at that location were pretty damn good actually.
otakucode 9y ago
Yeah, the drawbacks of it being absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India are real. And something I've also seen other major companies encounter is the total lack of any respect for IP law. If you want to get your app built cheap.... and then find your competitor running a reskinned identical version a month later... sure, outsource it.
- devnetfx 9y ago
  Absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students) While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!

sebringj 9y ago

I don't think it matters where people are as long as there isn't some hindrance to their work ethic or shady work schemes going on. You simply have to be due diligent AND be a tech lead at the same time. You cannot offshore that part. No way. Instead, you directly know each person working on the project and directly work with them, while providing guidance to the entire team. (Directly meaning on Slack since its offshore) For example, a coder puts out something sub optimal. You then correct that code, then go through this with your coder in a constructive way why this way is better and more efficient, while also noting to the group here is an example of X where you do Y. I make repos specifically for projects to refer to as example code scenarios that commonly crop up. For example, here's how you do a background image on a flexbox that auto sizes itself or here's how you destructure a promise.all easily, or here's a baseline project to start from with basic bones and structure to work from. You have to really guide and lead and there is no easy button where more time spent is the trade off of the cost savings.

0x445442 9y ago

It's an old, old story; middle management's never ending quest to commoditize and automate software development. They'll never accept software development has almost no commonality with assembly line work. But they keep trying. Fast, good, cheap; pick any two.

andrei_says_ 9y ago
Isn’t this what their business education defined as success?

pm90 9y ago

Off-shoring is hard. But it can be done right. It requires honest intentions and a commitment of enough financial resources. If a firm is off-shoring simply to get the cheapest devs, its not going to work. One of the first companies I worked at had an India office even though the company was pretty small (~50 engineers in total). The Director of the India office was good at recruiting good engineers and they were paid much above market rates for the city they were based in (still less than what US based developers were making). This situation worked out best for everyone. The only problem was when scheduling long face to face meetings, which had to be done either super early or later in the night. But I felt it was a small price to pay to get to recruit a lot of good talent.

megy 9y ago

Yes, you need someone onshore to inspect every bit of work. Offshoring can be done if you expect it. You don't just give them a project to work on an check in when it is done, or once a week. We would have standups every day, and tech leads in our country. They would explain the work needed, make sure they were on task, and check there work.

iAMAGuest 9y ago

> But that was very exhaustive and couldn't obviously go on like that forever. Then we switched to weekly meetings, reviews were mostly done by their team lead. That's where you went wrong first. You let go of the responsibility and handed it over to people who did not necessary have your best interests in mind. Quality, schedule, outcomes etc need to be managed, and managed so problems can be picked up early. Secondly "It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code. Although I never got an explanation ...", point to another management issue. I am sitting in a country with a reputation for being an outsourcing hub, I am from the western world and I can tell you that there are many talented developers. The problems are the same as I have had with managing western teams, personal issues, skill levels etc though some of higher or lower impact. But the basic fact remains, the further you distance yourself from responsibility the greater the risk of failure.

fahayekwasright 9y ago

Sadly, it never turns out well. The most talented Indian developers already live in first world countries.

hemantv 9y ago

Well good developers can get $100k in India. So money is very bad reason to hire in India. But equity you get is peanuts.

latchkey 9y ago

I'm from SF. Living in Saigon now for almost 2 years. Lots of people reach out to me to 'offshore' here because they hear that VN devs are pretty good and salaries are a fraction of the Bay Area. What I've learned is that Vietnamese developers are generally smart and hard working. There is a lot of young hipster attitude. They don't suffer from some of the same cultural issues I've seen in other countries. They have their whole own baggage here. ;-) They really love the latest technologies and strive to keep up to date on things. At the end of the day, it is quite hit or miss, but that could really be said anywhere. In the past, I've never really been a huge fan of offshoring, but with the right company, I've seen it work here on several occasions now. If you're willing to pay a bit more (but still way less than the bay area) for the better dev houses here, you can really get some quality work done.

znpy 9y ago

«if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys»

farhanhubble 9y ago

In India hiring decisions, on any level, are mostly based on which college one comes from, how many random buzzwords one can speak, and not based on the actual skills one has learned during college or picked up at work. People 'learn' things by reading nuggets from interview prep sites, they memorize things and repeat like a tape-recorder during interviews. No wonder their 'understanding' is non existent. At one end of the spectrum are people who come from 'premier' colleges (term invented by HR folks, I guess), like the IITs and NITs. Although these institutes produce some brilliant minds, the majority of graduates have no skills whatsoever. Most of the skilled ones go abroad while the'unskilled' ones get hired in India. So it's not uncommon to come across people, who have fancy titles, get paid insane salaries (by Indian standards) and who have been selected through 'rigorous' technical interviews to fumble when writing a simple application program. At the other end of the spectrum is a huge number of people graduating from private colleges. The quality of teaching and learning at these colleges is abysmal. Most of them end up at one or other 'IT giants' doing menial maintenance work and earning a pittance. The salary varies a lot across the spectrum but the quality of work is equally bad. Their approach to programming, and problem solving in general, is trial-and-error combined with some Googling. As the author points out the code that is produced by these 'engineers' and 'programmers' is compiler-ready not production-ready. Of course there are exceptions too. A small minority of people who stay back in India working for startups or as freelancers are amazing at what they do irrespective of which college they went to or how they learned to program. When you're sampling from this pool, your hiring process has to be ingenious or you end up with insurmountable technical and financial debt.

lijurajpillai 9y ago

You pay peanuts you get monkeys !!! If you want to outsource for cost then good luck with that, but if you want to do it for skill then you have options. There are really good shops who provide amazing service.These companies hire from the right schools and provide great training . Too much generalisation and lack of information in the article.

rootsudo 9y ago

I've had success using Filipinos for outsourced labors. Also fun to live in the Philippines. Realistically, if you need to coordinate people to only talk to person A because he's in department X then you're going to have a rough time...

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

Sometimes its about ... everything. Time difference * culture difference * tool availability * hierarchy * quality expectations. If they are all 90%, you still end up at under 50% of the expected result.

known 9y ago

Argumentative & too emotional - are Indians tough to work with? http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-dossier/argumentative-too-emotional-are-indians-tough-to-work-with/articleshow/45638709.cms http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-doss...