6 ms·

I'm floored by the irony of Indian startups outsourcing their software development.

matwood 16y ago
India is no longer the place of cheap software development. The Philippines and parts of of the old Soviet Eastern Bloc are where the cheap labor now lies.
- ianl 16y ago
  If outsourced software in India is well known for being awful, I can't imagine what the quality must be like in the new frontier of cost savings.
  - acangiano 16y ago
    Actually, ex-Soviet nations have a huge emphasis on mathematics and similar scientific disciplines. You may get quite a few "Your requirement is stupid", but the code quality will probably be not that bad (assuming the code you need is heavy on algorithms).
    - dasil003 16y ago
      Actually that would be quite a breath of fresh air, because one of the biggest problems I remember in my experience with outsourcing to an Indian agency in '04/'05 was the complete lack of feedback or collaboration. They basically expected us to give exact details specs, and provided no evaluation of the product as they went. The code was alright, but it was as if they were doing a school programming assignment, seemingly without consciousness of the fact they were building a product that required people to interact with it. I can understand this as a strategy to maximize billable hours, but it doesn't do shit for building repeat business.
      - goombastic 16y ago
        Hmm, having handled some of these assignments, I would say it's not done to increase billing hours. People keep their traps shut for two reasons: deeply hierarchical Indian org structures that don't tolerate opinion, and wanting to reduce friction as much as possible. The times we have pushed back we have been faced with "well, what do you know?" When that happens, the first guy to get slammed is the guy who asked questions. Rinse and repeat over a couple of projects and you get teams that will unquestioningly build you a handcart with a rocket engine. Wanted to add, for every dollar an Indian firm makes, the average developer gets probably around 8-10 cents or less. When you are at a subsistence level like that, it's difficult to ask questions. You focus on the insecurity instead.
        dasil003 16y ago
        Hm yes, I recall an article about how there's a distinct cultural dichotomy where different countries tend to fall on one side or the other and the implications for management. How an Indian boss, for instance, knows that clues of things going awry are more subtle, and he must draw them out through questioning, whereas for an American boss that might be considered micro-management that would rub the employees the wrong way.
        kaiwren 16y ago
        For every dollar a good Indian firm makes, the average developer gets anywhere between 50 and 80 cents. Good devs are equally expensive anywhere, but oddly enough in India the salaries don't grow linearly when compared with first world salaries. A dev with a year of experience will cost 1/5 what he/she would cost in the first world. A (good) dev with 15 years of experience would cost 1/2 what he/she would cost in the US. This was something we covered in some detail in our talk at Rubyconf last year. Here's the link FWIW: http://speakerrate.com/talks/5120-india-ruby http://speakerrate.com/talks/5120-india-ruby
        chrisbennet 16y ago
        This is my ignorance showing, but are there actually Indian devs with 15 years experience? I was under the impression that the culture forced devs into management roles before they reached that point.
    - democracy 16y ago
      Good devs are expensive everywhere (especially when GazProm used to pay 300 euros an hour for SAP support person) and some jobs are outsourced to neighbours.
    - dagw 16y ago
      That sounds very much like my experience with outsourcing to Romania. The core library and algorithms where very solid, the actual UI and whole application experience was somewhat less so.
  - ericd 16y ago
    I've had some decent code written by people in the Bloc countries for a pittance. Was for pretty simple stuff, though, no idea how they would have fared on more challenging things.
  - nrbafna 16y ago
    The trick is to find the right people in India to outsource it too.
    - gaius 16y ago
      The right people in India to outsource to have all already moved to Silicon Valley.
      - statictype 16y ago
        Not true. There are good software companies in India to whom you can outsource your work and be somewhat confident that it's done in a reasonable manner. Many people won't go to them because they are not cheap.
        enry_straker 16y ago
        Part of the problem is also the relationship between the managers and the outsourced programming team. If you spend time in terms of vetting the team for people you are comfortable with, take the time to be as clear and detailed as possible with the requirements, have a good continuous build system so that you can see the software being developed daily, and have direct, continuous communication channels to the coders, one would have a far better experience.
      - nrbafna 16y ago
        Untrue. They represent only a part of the talented people. I know, we constantly hear about the quirkiness of people at the freelance sites and forums. Perhaps, that's not the best place to look. If you're not looking for an overtly complicated project, try hiring undergraduate students. Not from any university though. Try the students IIT's and BITS Pilani. These are the foremost technical institute in the country. So, how do get in contact with them? Visit their Computer Science Association websites, contact their student president to help you out. More often than not, you will find brilliant programming talent this way. Some of them will value a letter of recommendation (that may help in their MS or PhD) very highly. If not that way, always insist on seeing the portfolio/previous work of the guy you'll be outsourcing too. Else chances are you might end up outsourcing, say a e-commerce implementation, to someone just learnt how to echo in php.
gvb 16y ago
Good. Cheap. Pick one. In a previous life we outsourced to Indian companies because it saved a lot of money (on paper)[1]. The good ones seemed competent, but they weren't cheap so we didn't use them. The cheap ones we did use (disclaimer: limited experience and observations) were staffed by young, inexperienced engineers. The code I worked with, I would put at second year CompSci level. Incidentally, coding standards are quite limited in their ability to raise the competence level of software. One example was the coding standard requirement that the number of global variables was to be minimized. In this particular application, there was only one global variable. Minimized pretty well... until I saw it was a typedefed struct, the struct was huge and had several nested structs in it. Abort Retry [FAIL]. Another example in the same application, there were several (not one, not two, but several) funny looking loops that called a function, passing a bunch of parameters. After puzzling through the code, I realized that the code had failed the McCabe complexity measurement, so they had simply cut out the guts of the loop and made it a called function. That wasn't the worst of it... the icing was that they passed the loop counter as a pointer and side-effect modified it in the called function. Owwwwwwwwww! [1] My gross observation was that it took 3x longer to get a job done, but we paid the outsource company 1/2 as much as the internal engineers. The way accountants run numbers, the longer it took an outsource company to get the job done, the more they thought the company saved.
- hartror 16y ago
  Isn't it: Quality, price, speed pick any two.
  - anujkk 16y ago
    Very true.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    I don't think quality and cheap are compatible. I can't envision a scenario whereby a project taking a long time will allow it to be done cheaply and well.
    - 16y ago
cubicle67 16y ago
see the comment about the Indian company outsourcing their IT to America?
paraschopra 16y ago
India was never known for outsourcing "startup-quality" products. Most of the times it is either an enterprise software or a website.
rams 16y ago
I have been predicting this to friends for a couple of years now - there's absolutely no depth. Infosys, for instance makes only ~15% of their revenue through app development, per their latest quarterly report. When the IT boom started, it was mostly all s/w dev and maintenance. Slowly it has been replaced by non s/w dev activity to the point that s/w dev is only a minor activity (revenue wise).

India is no longer the place of cheap software development. The Philippines and parts of of the old Soviet Eastern Bloc are where the cheap labor now lies.

ianl 16y ago
If outsourced software in India is well known for being awful, I can't imagine what the quality must be like in the new frontier of cost savings.
- acangiano 16y ago
  Actually, ex-Soviet nations have a huge emphasis on mathematics and similar scientific disciplines. You may get quite a few "Your requirement is stupid", but the code quality will probably be not that bad (assuming the code you need is heavy on algorithms).
  - dasil003 16y ago
    Actually that would be quite a breath of fresh air, because one of the biggest problems I remember in my experience with outsourcing to an Indian agency in '04/'05 was the complete lack of feedback or collaboration. They basically expected us to give exact details specs, and provided no evaluation of the product as they went. The code was alright, but it was as if they were doing a school programming assignment, seemingly without consciousness of the fact they were building a product that required people to interact with it. I can understand this as a strategy to maximize billable hours, but it doesn't do shit for building repeat business.
    - goombastic 16y ago
      Hmm, having handled some of these assignments, I would say it's not done to increase billing hours. People keep their traps shut for two reasons: deeply hierarchical Indian org structures that don't tolerate opinion, and wanting to reduce friction as much as possible. The times we have pushed back we have been faced with "well, what do you know?" When that happens, the first guy to get slammed is the guy who asked questions. Rinse and repeat over a couple of projects and you get teams that will unquestioningly build you a handcart with a rocket engine. Wanted to add, for every dollar an Indian firm makes, the average developer gets probably around 8-10 cents or less. When you are at a subsistence level like that, it's difficult to ask questions. You focus on the insecurity instead.
      - dasil003 16y ago
        Hm yes, I recall an article about how there's a distinct cultural dichotomy where different countries tend to fall on one side or the other and the implications for management. How an Indian boss, for instance, knows that clues of things going awry are more subtle, and he must draw them out through questioning, whereas for an American boss that might be considered micro-management that would rub the employees the wrong way.
      - kaiwren 16y ago
        For every dollar a good Indian firm makes, the average developer gets anywhere between 50 and 80 cents. Good devs are equally expensive anywhere, but oddly enough in India the salaries don't grow linearly when compared with first world salaries. A dev with a year of experience will cost 1/5 what he/she would cost in the first world. A (good) dev with 15 years of experience would cost 1/2 what he/she would cost in the US. This was something we covered in some detail in our talk at Rubyconf last year. Here's the link FWIW: http://speakerrate.com/talks/5120-india-ruby http://speakerrate.com/talks/5120-india-ruby
        chrisbennet 16y ago
        This is my ignorance showing, but are there actually Indian devs with 15 years experience? I was under the impression that the culture forced devs into management roles before they reached that point.
  - democracy 16y ago
    Good devs are expensive everywhere (especially when GazProm used to pay 300 euros an hour for SAP support person) and some jobs are outsourced to neighbours.
  - dagw 16y ago
    That sounds very much like my experience with outsourcing to Romania. The core library and algorithms where very solid, the actual UI and whole application experience was somewhat less so.
- ericd 16y ago
  I've had some decent code written by people in the Bloc countries for a pittance. Was for pretty simple stuff, though, no idea how they would have fared on more challenging things.
- nrbafna 16y ago
  The trick is to find the right people in India to outsource it too.
  - gaius 16y ago
    The right people in India to outsource to have all already moved to Silicon Valley.
    - statictype 16y ago
      Not true. There are good software companies in India to whom you can outsource your work and be somewhat confident that it's done in a reasonable manner. Many people won't go to them because they are not cheap.
      - enry_straker 16y ago
        Part of the problem is also the relationship between the managers and the outsourced programming team. If you spend time in terms of vetting the team for people you are comfortable with, take the time to be as clear and detailed as possible with the requirements, have a good continuous build system so that you can see the software being developed daily, and have direct, continuous communication channels to the coders, one would have a far better experience.
    - nrbafna 16y ago
      Untrue. They represent only a part of the talented people. I know, we constantly hear about the quirkiness of people at the freelance sites and forums. Perhaps, that's not the best place to look. If you're not looking for an overtly complicated project, try hiring undergraduate students. Not from any university though. Try the students IIT's and BITS Pilani. These are the foremost technical institute in the country. So, how do get in contact with them? Visit their Computer Science Association websites, contact their student president to help you out. More often than not, you will find brilliant programming talent this way. Some of them will value a letter of recommendation (that may help in their MS or PhD) very highly. If not that way, always insist on seeing the portfolio/previous work of the guy you'll be outsourcing too. Else chances are you might end up outsourcing, say a e-commerce implementation, to someone just learnt how to echo in php.

gvb 16y ago

Good. Cheap. Pick one. In a previous life we outsourced to Indian companies because it saved a lot of money (on paper)[1]. The good ones seemed competent, but they weren't cheap so we didn't use them. The cheap ones we did use (disclaimer: limited experience and observations) were staffed by young, inexperienced engineers. The code I worked with, I would put at second year CompSci level. Incidentally, coding standards are quite limited in their ability to raise the competence level of software. One example was the coding standard requirement that the number of global variables was to be minimized. In this particular application, there was only one global variable. Minimized pretty well... until I saw it was a typedefed struct, the struct was huge and had several nested structs in it. Abort Retry [FAIL]. Another example in the same application, there were several (not one, not two, but several) funny looking loops that called a function, passing a bunch of parameters. After puzzling through the code, I realized that the code had failed the McCabe complexity measurement, so they had simply cut out the guts of the loop and made it a called function. That wasn't the worst of it... the icing was that they passed the loop counter as a pointer and side-effect modified it in the called function. Owwwwwwwwww! [1] My gross observation was that it took 3x longer to get a job done, but we paid the outsource company 1/2 as much as the internal engineers. The way accountants run numbers, the longer it took an outsource company to get the job done, the more they thought the company saved.

hartror 16y ago
Isn't it: Quality, price, speed pick any two.
- anujkk 16y ago
  Very true.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  I don't think quality and cheap are compatible. I can't envision a scenario whereby a project taking a long time will allow it to be done cheaply and well.
  - 16y ago

cubicle67 16y ago

see the comment about the Indian company outsourcing their IT to America?

paraschopra 16y ago

India was never known for outsourcing "startup-quality" products. Most of the times it is either an enterprise software or a website.

rams 16y ago

I have been predicting this to friends for a couple of years now - there's absolutely no depth. Infosys, for instance makes only ~15% of their revenue through app development, per their latest quarterly report. When the IT boom started, it was mostly all s/w dev and maintenance. Slowly it has been replaced by non s/w dev activity to the point that s/w dev is only a minor activity (revenue wise).