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I am that client. Not exactly yours of course - but i am the client who is going to replace someone with India provider within next month. Here is the context

I am that client. Not exactly yours of course - but i am the client who is going to replace someone with India provider within next month. Here is the context: - Current worker is USA, Bay Area based and is good technically (4+ out of 5). - Current worker is local and it is very convenient for us. - Current worker is AMAZING talking to customers and putting off fires. His "talking" skills certainly exceeding his technical skills. - The competing Indian provider is well tested, exceeding expectation in quality and skills. - The Indian provider is very professional. We met him in person and had interview. - The Indian provider charges 4 times less. - The Indian provider has capabilities to scale his capabilities. So there are positive potentials for us. - The project can be executed by remote team (i.e. there are no restrictions) - Current worker (local) is employed by uncooperative consultancy who is planning to raise the rate for current worker for us against prior negotiated rate. Just because they [think that they] can. That same consultancy can (and will) be a competitor as they can gain a valuable hard-to-get skills if we continue to employ and train current worker. This is show stopper and we were forced to stop giving current worker access to advanced projects, keeping him currently on older projects. - Current worker been offered to join us but he refused. Your context may vary - but that's a fair context from the real project.

codycraven 7y ago
Thank you for including this "Current worker been offered to join us but he refused" throughout the rest of your comment I was thinking "Why didn't you hire the engineer?" Totally makes sense to avoid this consultancy from becoming a potential competitor.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  At my employer, there are various consulting/contracting companies we’ve used. Some made it easy to convert those workers we wanted to hire as full time team members, some made it hard — or virtually impossible. We generally don’t work any more with the contracting/consulting companies that make it hard. We’ve dealt with plenty of overseas contracting companies. The horror stories are too numerous to go into, but suffice it to say that there is no amount of cost savings that could make up for the negative externalities they have caused. Sure, the outsourcing companies will demo well. Everyone demos well. But once they’ve hooked you, they will replace the people who did the demo. Odds are, they will lose those people in a couple of months, even if they don’t replace them on their own. And thus begins the slide into a new kind of hell.
codingdave 7y ago
> The Indian provider is very professional. We met him in person and had interview. The Indian provider will be a new person every 6 months. I'm basing this solely on my experience having a team from India. This being HN, actual residents of India might be in this thread, and may be able to offer a different perspective. That being said, my experience showed that their working culture is to constantly seek promotions, and if you want a long-term team member, it causes conflict. When they talk about ability to scale, they mean that your original dev wants to take over as manager, and hire new devs. Who, in a year, will want to be managers and hire their own devs. And if you aren't growing fast enough to meet their career goals, they'll go somewhere else and you end up with new devs anyway. All of this is manageable, but you have to be sure the project is documented and structured well enough that if you onboard a new dev team every 6 months, it doesn't kill the project.
Accujack 7y ago
In my experience, the Indian contractors are going to be lower rated technically, but for 1/4 the price you can question whether you NEED someone who's a 4/5 or whether you can get by with a 2 or 3. Determining what functions need top technical people is something most managers figure out after offshoring, when the damage is already done. Contractors are incredibly valuable in certain respects, but one thing they don't do generally is write code for future maintainability... they're under a lot of pressure to produce workable results quickly, which opposes planning for the long term technically speaking. Like offshoring itself, that may not matter depending on the company and what it does.
- Trias11 7y ago
  After desperately trying to find local consultants to do $75K gig, we hired remote Indian person who did it for ~$13K. The delivered quality and timing exceeded our expectations. And honestly it changed the way i used to view remote offshore consultants.
  - southern_cross 7y ago
    Did you consider remote, on-shore resources? Perhaps work-at-home folks, or those working remotely from other US cities? I ask because I've run into people who would otherwise normally insist that their domestic resources be local and in-house, but then would end up off-shoring stuff instead. WTF?
    - Trias11 7y ago
      I absolutely did and will. Local are often preferred.
southern_cross 7y ago
My experience dealing with such folks 10 or 15 years ago was that even if the person presented to you as the "provider" was actually the person doing the work (and not just a frontman for others), you were lucky to be able to hold onto them for a year. I see that others here are saying just six months, though. Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India. We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though. The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though. Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!
dplgk 7y ago
That person won't be the one doing the work. You'll have to lay out every single microscopic detail for the work to be done anywhere close to correct. You'll find out how expensive cheap developers are.
teddyuk 7y ago
For outsourcing like this to work you have to be very explicit about what it is you want and expect and then you need to check regularly that is what you are getting. I saw one app that was meant to be a three tier web app - it was two tier so when it was delivered the customer complained and a proxy tier was hacked in that only served to slow down the application - they could have just deployed a service onto the app boxes that did nothing and it would have been better.

codycraven 7y ago

Thank you for including this "Current worker been offered to join us but he refused" throughout the rest of your comment I was thinking "Why didn't you hire the engineer?" Totally makes sense to avoid this consultancy from becoming a potential competitor.

bradknowles 7y ago
At my employer, there are various consulting/contracting companies we’ve used. Some made it easy to convert those workers we wanted to hire as full time team members, some made it hard — or virtually impossible. We generally don’t work any more with the contracting/consulting companies that make it hard. We’ve dealt with plenty of overseas contracting companies. The horror stories are too numerous to go into, but suffice it to say that there is no amount of cost savings that could make up for the negative externalities they have caused. Sure, the outsourcing companies will demo well. Everyone demos well. But once they’ve hooked you, they will replace the people who did the demo. Odds are, they will lose those people in a couple of months, even if they don’t replace them on their own. And thus begins the slide into a new kind of hell.

codingdave 7y ago

> The Indian provider is very professional. We met him in person and had interview. The Indian provider will be a new person every 6 months. I'm basing this solely on my experience having a team from India. This being HN, actual residents of India might be in this thread, and may be able to offer a different perspective. That being said, my experience showed that their working culture is to constantly seek promotions, and if you want a long-term team member, it causes conflict. When they talk about ability to scale, they mean that your original dev wants to take over as manager, and hire new devs. Who, in a year, will want to be managers and hire their own devs. And if you aren't growing fast enough to meet their career goals, they'll go somewhere else and you end up with new devs anyway. All of this is manageable, but you have to be sure the project is documented and structured well enough that if you onboard a new dev team every 6 months, it doesn't kill the project.

Accujack 7y ago

In my experience, the Indian contractors are going to be lower rated technically, but for 1/4 the price you can question whether you NEED someone who's a 4/5 or whether you can get by with a 2 or 3. Determining what functions need top technical people is something most managers figure out after offshoring, when the damage is already done. Contractors are incredibly valuable in certain respects, but one thing they don't do generally is write code for future maintainability... they're under a lot of pressure to produce workable results quickly, which opposes planning for the long term technically speaking. Like offshoring itself, that may not matter depending on the company and what it does.

Trias11 7y ago
After desperately trying to find local consultants to do $75K gig, we hired remote Indian person who did it for ~$13K. The delivered quality and timing exceeded our expectations. And honestly it changed the way i used to view remote offshore consultants.
- southern_cross 7y ago
  Did you consider remote, on-shore resources? Perhaps work-at-home folks, or those working remotely from other US cities? I ask because I've run into people who would otherwise normally insist that their domestic resources be local and in-house, but then would end up off-shoring stuff instead. WTF?
  - Trias11 7y ago
    I absolutely did and will. Local are often preferred.

southern_cross 7y ago

My experience dealing with such folks 10 or 15 years ago was that even if the person presented to you as the "provider" was actually the person doing the work (and not just a frontman for others), you were lucky to be able to hold onto them for a year. I see that others here are saying just six months, though. Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India. We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though. The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though. Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!

dplgk 7y ago

That person won't be the one doing the work. You'll have to lay out every single microscopic detail for the work to be done anywhere close to correct. You'll find out how expensive cheap developers are.

teddyuk 7y ago

For outsourcing like this to work you have to be very explicit about what it is you want and expect and then you need to check regularly that is what you are getting. I saw one app that was meant to be a three tier web app - it was two tier so when it was delivered the customer complained and a proxy tier was hacked in that only served to slow down the application - they could have just deployed a service onto the app boxes that did nothing and it would have been better.