10 ms·

Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing (2016)

207 points by throwaway3157 7y ago

british_india 7y ago
Exhibit A for the dangers of outsourcing software development: Boeing's offshoring of the 737 MAX software.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925
discreteevent 7y ago
On India: I worked on a project outsourced to one of the big companies. A senior engineer there said that when people offshore, the person making the decision is a bean counter. So they only look at price. They take the cheapest and they get what they pay for. But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a much better job done.
- mathattack 7y ago
  Sometimes the math is “We can do it twice in India and still save 50%” Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows that the correlation between quality and price is very loose. The lowest cost provider is rarely great, but the high cost provider can also be selling you a lot of juniors.
  - raincom 7y ago
    Exactly this. Usually, they have a couple of guys who are really good in that team, along with lots of juniors who are there for billable hours.
    - ta1234567890 7y ago
      Sounds exactly like law firms.
    - mc32 7y ago
      They demo the skilled people and once they have the account they turn it over to the juniors... But that probably works in most cases/places anyway.
      - makr17 7y ago
        Yeah, but so does every US-based consulting outfit I've ever seen... IBM, Oracle, Accenture. The knowledgable Senior Dev answering your questions during the bid goes away _quickly_ once you sign. They're off to convince the next sucker...
        bradknowles 7y ago
        That's why you write the contract to the outsourcing company so that you lock in those experienced people for an extended period of time -- like years. But then the price mysteriously increases to the point where you might as well have hired them on-shore and you're not saving any money. So, do you want to save money by offshoring everything, or do you want to get good people to actually do the real work that needs to be done?
        watwut 7y ago
        Accenture wont sign that. And those more experienced people might not like to work on your project for years and there is nothing you can do to stop them from leaving. They got where they are by doing what they are doing. Spending years on your project is something else.
        blaser-waffle 7y ago
        I'll bite. Plenty of reasons to do that, esp. on small to mid size gigs. Write the spec well, get thorough, detailed planning done by seniors, and then throw the day-laborer-coders at it as needed. Rope in a senior to look at it / poke / guide things every once in a while, and let it go. I don't need to drag the building architects, master masons or master carpenters to help frame every wall of the house; ditto for code.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/news/79848-hertz-hits-accenture-32-million-lawsuit-over-failed.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/news/79848...
  - detaro 7y ago
    > Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows Probably why parent mentioned finding a smaller company. I don't know about the Indian outsourcing market specifically, but in many sectors it seems a few mid-sized companies are the best for this sort of thing. Which also means you need to find the right one for your problem, your purchasing department won't be set up with them, and you won't be able to just order as much capacity as you want, so getting there is hard.
  - markkanof 7y ago
    This isn't exclusively an Indian outsourcing issue. I used to do work for a small US based contracting company. At the time I was mid to senior with about 10 years experience. On all projects they would present me to the client as the level of developer that would work on their project, but would then also assign a few just out of bootcamp devs to work on the project and we were all billed out at the same high rate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a much better job done. The whole problem is nobody can hope to spot the real "smaller, higher-quality companies" in that chaotic, offshoring-driven environment. Race-to-the-bottom is the equilibrium outcome.
- macjohnmcc 7y ago
  The company I formerly worked for outsourced to India and we found a lot of accounting irregularities where we were be charged twice for the unnamed senior developers and later find out that it's the same person and that that person was not even spending 100% of their time working on our project. It wasn't a complete loss as some people really did a fantastic job but overall I'd never recommend it to others.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  I remember being brought in to operationalize the first version of Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail Gateways (NAVIEG) that would run on Solaris (this was in 1996). It was outsourced to an Indian company because no one in Symantec understood the first thing about programming on Unix. Turns out that the guys in India didn't understand programming on Unix, either. The Indian developers basically just transliterated the Windows code to Unix, and got it to compile. Then they shipped it. That's when the real problems started, and I was brought in. Now, I've never claimed to be a developer. At the time, I was a consultant and Unix sysadmin, but the concept of "DevOps" had yet to be born. What I could tell them was that, in 1996, basing your Unix implementation on Solaris 2.5 (not even Solaris 2.5.1) was a bad idea, because there was a whole host of things wrong with that ancient version of Solaris, and if they wanted to be on that platform then they needed to be on a much more modern version. Secondly, threading on Unix at that time was ... problematic ... and that was true even on the most modern versions of Unix that were available at the time. Multi-process programming worked well, however. On Windows, the reverse was apparently true. So, naturally the outsourcing developers used threading, and they used threading on an ancient version of Unix that had about the worst possible implementation of threading. Oy. Of course, learning these things at this stage didn't help Symantec. They had already outsourced their aircraft and gotten an Albatross back in return. I did help them develop a testing regime that could relatively accurately simulate a real-world distribution of mail message sizes and types, with a real-world distribution of supposedly infected messages, and then beat the holy living crap out of the server trying to push that volume through as quickly as possible. And I did get called back to teach a class on Unix to the lead QA team in Denver, so that they could try to support NAVIEG on Solaris 2.5. But so far as I know, the consulting company I worked for never got called back to help them actually fix their design problems with the code, and I think that project probably died a pretty quick and vicious death. Also, so far as I know, no one at Symantec ever again tried to develop or support any code that would run on any flavor of Unix or Unix-like OS.
  - mzi 7y ago
    Solaris 2.5 with pthreads was released in November 1995, 2.5.1 in May 1996. So it seems to be a modern version with thread support. It does not mean that the outsourcing had to be a success. edit: spelling
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Cost can be reported as a simple scalar. Quality cannot. This is why at most companies, cost counts far more than quality.
thrower123 7y ago
I do a lot of work with a few of the big outfits, as we often get pulled in to help setup a software product that they resell to Fortune 500 companies as part of their package contracts. I have never seen a case where they actually add value; it would always be much easier if we could just get directly connected with the end-customer.
cosmodisk 7y ago
Pretty much my experience re Indian outsourcing. What I used to find most annoying is that 'manager' mentality: I appreciate a lot of people like to boss people around and,as the author states, it's kind of safer (and better paid) step on a corporate ladder, but boy some of them are useless.. You talk to the guy, he agrees to pretty much anything,even If I'd ask to build a lift to mars.Then eventually he comes back with dev's questions.I provide very detail and explicit info on what I need(For anyone who has any knowledge in the tech they used it would almost be like asking to write a couple of loops).Again lots of yes,yes,yes.Then silence and again even more questions. Manager's function is absolutely useless in this case. Also, if the churn rate is low, the companies usually have very capable people who tend to know their shit.
- social_quotient 7y ago
  Change your understanding of “yes” to be “okay” . It will save you headaches a tons of money. Confirmation that they heard you doesn’t mean they understand or comprehend. You gotta jump right past the yes, to parrot it back to me or say it back differently to me. #protips
  - teddyuk 7y ago
    This is the most actionable advice I’ve ever seen for dealing with outsourcing in India which can have a massive difference
- crystaldev 7y ago
  It's probably because engineers are not good at dealing with customers. Edit: Apparently nobody gets this reference anymore, and I'm old.
  - alatkins 7y ago
    Take my upvote fellow oldie. Office Space can't be mandatory school curriculum any more :-)
  - inkeddeveloper 7y ago
admn2 7y ago
I heard Argentina as a popular place for "near-shoring", which likely wasn't very popular when this was written 3 years ago. Anyone here been using Argentinian tech talent?
- powvans 7y ago
  I'm based in the US and worked with a remote team in Argentina from 2013 to 2015. They were fantastic. Most of the team was based out of the company's office in Cordoba, but we also had some remote devs who lived in Buenos Aires rotate into the team. The offshore firm took great care to make sure that everyone on the team was well trained on the specifics of our project and general development processes. Last I heard they were purchased by Mercado Libre in what I'd assume was an acquihire.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  I've worked with a number of Argentinian developers through using Avanade and Accenture on projects. The developers were great, even spoke decent English, but since it was through Avanade or Accenture, after 3 years of the managerial-interference, overhead, cost overruns, and contract disputes with what is considered in-scope/out-of-scope, the projects were eventually canceled. Had we just been able to hire the developers on an hourly basis, everyone would have been happy... well except the sales managers, delivery managers, development managers, and project managers. That said, I didn't care for the way that our company was billed $75-150/hr for a developer that makes $350-1200/mo, and that the developers made so little when their managers were billing so high. Early in my career, I was livid when I found out that my time was billed to the client 3x what I made, so I cant imagine how demoralizing it would be knowing you are paid 20x less than you are billed out.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    This, sometimes has very interesting consequences. A friend worked for a company that basically moved parts of sales/customer service to a Northen African country.They hired people on a few hundred dollars a month(if that much) to sell high ticket hotel bookings sometimes going for thousands/day.The team struggled to comprehend that anyone could get a room that costs 10 times more their monthly wage.This highly affected their ability to service/sell. Eventually the entire thing got canned and moved to Europe.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
Hiring good offshore developers directly as remote employees is a much better option, in my experience. It requires more up front work to identify, hire, and retain the remote employees, but you need far fewer developers when you can appeal to the best developers who know what they're doing. This doesn't work if your company has any attachment to headcount, though. It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the numbers.
- MarkMc 7y ago
  > It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the numbers. Can you expand on this? I would have thought it was cheaper to hire the remote employees directly than hire the outsourcing company... Edit: I think I understand now: the 'remote employees' are based in say the US while the outsourcing company is based in say India
  - chii 7y ago
    The premise is that an excellent developer can command a high price, whether remote or not. Some developers place a premium in remote friendliness, and thus allow a slightly lower salary for it, but only up to some amount.
  - ska 7y ago
    I suspect the argument is that workers are just not fungible, but the outsourcing approach sort of assumes they are.
- krzat 7y ago
  That's right. Offshore companies are a waste of time: their management adds unnecessary overhead and their good devs can leave at any time due to poor salary. I know because I work for one.
- johnbellone 7y ago
  It pays in dividends for when your organization decides to leverage more offshore talent in the future. Unfortunately there may not have been enough foresight here originally so you're now iceskating uphill to make the call to staff up an office in Mumbai/Hyderabad.
starky 7y ago
My experience with working with Asia off-shoring is with physical products, so this was interesting to see the software perspective where there are multiple programmers working on something in parallel, whereas my experience is more serial with the (English speaking) sales contact communicating with the various engineering teams as the project gets passed along. Definitely agree with the can-do attitude of China. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, other times a vendor thinks they are doing us good and screw us over by completing work before we have agreed to it. This is mostly a temporary issue until you build a relationship with the vendor (in China, relationship is everything) and know each other's expectations. While I've never worked with an Indian vendor directly, it is interesting to hear about how people there have very narrow knowledge bases. This is something I've noticed with people I've interviewed that are recent immigrants, they know their area, but when asked about the rest of what we would be asking them to do they have zero clue. This is also (lesser so) a case with recent Chinese immigrants. Not great when we are essentially hiring a mechanical equivalent of a full stack engineer.
iamsb 7y ago
It is quite interesting to re-read this after the zoom ipo. Zoom built a huge team in China, effectively outsourcing most of the development to lower cost countries, that gave them leverage in terms of being able to deploy capital more efficiently. There are certainly ways to work around most of the problems the author outlines. They are definitely real problems, same as spending 5x for onshore resources. Ideally you should build onshore teams, if you can spend the money. But if you can not, then do not get discouraged by these problems. Employee churns are not that difficult to mitigate, just matter contracting properly with the employees and providing enough consideration in the contracts.
throwawayesteu 7y ago
How to do the outsourcing business if you want to provide premium service? Even if the field requires specialization, say machine learning / data engineering, it’s hard to justify the price that is 40% more than average for the area (say Eastern Europe). Example: I work for a company that does ML/DE services, and I believe that everyone in the company (we’re small company in Eastern Europe) tries their best to do the great job and do what is best for our clients; plus seniority and talent is way above average for the market (mostly due to specialization). But we’re still having hard time increasing our hourly rate. What is something that we can do that would say “these people are worth it, let’s go with them even though they are more expensive”?
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Higher prices!= higher quality. Here's how your post reads: we have senior devs+ we try charge 40% more,yet clients don't buy in. You know what? Every shop in town has senior devs and most of them are passionate. Depending on which Eastern European country you are based in, even the entire team full of PhDs in ML with 10 years experience may not sound that extraordinary. You need to find the reason why you are ACTUALLY better than your competition.Do you have tons of white papers or cases studies on your website that clearly show how and why you are solving these problems? What are you doing differently compared to the guys from the shop across the road? You need to be very very comfortable with saying " fuck yes, we are 40,50 maybe even 100% more expensive than any other company you'll be speaking, but here's 25 reasons why you search for ML experts stops here". These things are learnable, however if there's no strong sales culture in the business,I'd advice to start looking for someone who could deliver these messages to your prospects.My experience: work for a company that operates in a low entry, saturated market and sells services almost 3 times the average price in the country.
cbg0 7y ago
I work remotely from Europe for a North American company, so here's my two cents on this topic: Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless of where they live. While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area, you're most likely not hiring only the best. I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." - most would trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies. If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs, don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.
- numbsafari 7y ago
  I think this is a really valuable perspective. Would be curious to hear from more folks on “the other side” about their experiences. I’ve often considered doing the expat thing and trying to work in or setup such a shop.
  - kavalg 7y ago
    My experience is that it is pretty easy to find a remote job as a single developer/freelancer, but a lot harder to find a decent project for a small, well-knit team. I now live in Eastern Europe (EU) and I easily find offers at EUR 450-600 / day for consulting gigs (e.g. on-site + remote work). However, I often struggle to find a project for a team of 3 Java/JavaScript/Python/PHP developers, event at rates as low as EUR 250 / day. I guess lots of recruiters are only interested in hiring individual contractors, but not teams.
gentleman11 7y ago
Lets assume that the situation changes over the next 15 years and these outsourcing places get really legitimately good at making software. What can we, the highly paid locals, can do to justify our high salaries at that hypothetical future point? (playing starcraft taught me a tremendous amount of respect for East Asian creativity and work ethic)
- user5994461 7y ago
  What do you mean by highly paid locals? With the exception of the Silicon Valley or NYC bubble, developers in big cities in developed countries are approaching US and European salaries and they are increasing quickly. Well, truth be told they're already surpassed us. If you want cheaper, you might as well go to Spain or Italy or even France.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    That's not really true man. I've worked with devs from Argentina and Ghana, and let's just say we were all surprised at how much the managers at my company were paying to those consulting firms. Think devs getting USD350 to USD1500 per month while I knew for a fact that USD50 to USD225 per hour was being paid out. I think a lot of devs in the West would be almost shocked at the amount of money devs make in other places.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  What differentiates US (most big software names come from there) from the rest of the world is their ability to sell. There are already enough countries on this planet that can produce high quality software that could be sold as hot buns.What most of those countries don't have is the huge VC industry+ tons of people who know how and who to sell be it B2B or B2C. This, however is changing slowly and you can expect much more level field over the next 10-15 years.
  - pm90 7y ago
    This is not accurate at all. What really differentiates the US is: * fucking largest economy by far as your domestic market ie no import duties or import/export taxes * truly massive investment by Government and Private sector into CS research * high tech economy focused mostly on services which demands all tools it can get to improve business processes * high disposable income via financial instruments for cheap debt (also less taxes than most developed countries) * largest talent pool of Universities that keeps bringing in the best and brightest across the world The ability to sell is far far less important than the systemic reasons listed above that give the US an incredible edge in the software industry.
anthony_barker 7y ago
He misses some stuff. 1) 4 hours of time overlap rule - you need to have overlap of 4 hours between teams 2) Requirements need to be much tighter with outsourcing. Often you need a full BA whereas with some devs you can work without a formal spec but some wireframes etc
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  No, Troy specifically mentions differing requirements depending on the country that the ousource firm is located in. >Another pattern I found time and time again when outsourcing to India was that they'd want really detailed documentation. This is always going to be a contentious issue and there are many different views of how much should be done under what circumstances. But more so in India than the other two locations I'll talk about shortly, detail was important to them. There were many occasions where we would make assumptions that a feature requirement clearly implied certain things only to later discover they was deemed "out of scope". Now that can happen in any project in any part of the world, but it was extremely prevalent in India. > On the plus side for China though, one of their strengths (particularly over India) was the ability to get down to work with minimal documentation.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
The worst I've ever seen: Not only did the contractor deliver a buggy, half-finished product, he also used our printer to print out an offer to a competitor to sell them our source code!
- mlvljr 7y ago
  Bookmarking via a comment, pure gold.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I really don’t understand why US companies are outsourcing to India. The time difference alone pretty much sets you up for fail unless people want to be working at midnight all the time. I find it much easier to work with Costa Rica it South America where you can quickly make calls during the day. Especially with outsourcing you need to do a lot of handholding to get things going so you need good direct communication. The whole idea of sending a big pile of requirements and then getting something useful back simply doesn’t work. You need direct communication without middlemen.
- lowercased 7y ago
  worked at a place in the south (think Georgia) that opened an Indian office. about ~40 devs in the US office, they brought in.. 5? to the Indian office. It was primarily for the time difference, and their primary role was to triage and research issues during the 'off hours'. Anything they couldn't figure out bubbled up to the US, usually after several hours of initial research. It wasn't a horrible approach, and I think it worked OK because it was intentional.
- unishark 7y ago
  Outsourcing in south america is growing pretty fast. I think a big part of it has been the local govts and laws. Sometimes in the past they flatly outlawed it or else charged exorbitant taxes (some still do from what I've seen). But they have been wising up and making the laws more friendly to attract outsourcing.
shruubi 7y ago
I just came out of being forced into running an offshore team from the Phillipines for roughly six-ish months, my experience was that they were very affable with good english skills and worked hard, there was a noticeable problem with technical skill which caused a number of bugs to occur to the point where I would just spend the time fixing them myself than throw them back at the team where they would cause more problems. The biggest problem however, was that no matter how many times I asked or provided documentation/feedback, they would ignore established coding standards and established processes and just do things their way, and when I would ask about this, I would just get shrugs. Finally, we got saddled with a "Project Manager", which I put in quotes as their contribution to the process was giving daily excuses as to not turn up to our daily progress calls, and the ones he did turn up to, he would visibly fall asleep. When I eventually pulled him up on this his response was that "he wasn't directly paid for but an included part of the cost so you can't complain about what you get." Admittedly all of the above is rather negative, but I think this highlights the "get what you pay for" aspect of offshore outsourcing.
- watwut 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are "established coding standards and established processes" for you?
freepor 7y ago
My favorite place to offshore is Eastern Europe. Genuinely love working with those guys.
freepor 7y ago
With China and India getting more and more product companies like Baidu/Tencent/ByteDance/Flipkart/Paytm/etc, the average engineer left in outsourcing gets worse every month.
MarkMc 7y ago
"I remember one case quite clearly where the project's dollar estimate was identical to a local vendor in Australia yet the man hours were an order of magnitude greater. Yet even then, there was organisational push-back on the local vendor due to their high hourly rate" That's very strange - I would have assumed that the code quality of the Australian outfit would be higher
tempestn 7y ago
Whenever offshoring comes up I'm reminded of my experience trying out an Indian development firm some years back. I decided to give it a try with an extremely simple feature for autotempest.com, just opening up a modal window with some advanced search features. Specified what exactly should be included, and it was nice and encapsulated so I figured it would be a perfect test. To summarize, the results were literally comically bad. All kinds of hand massaged spacing using nbsp's and weird off by one pixel issues and such—things that to do wrong as they did must have taken an order of magnitude longer than it would have to do them correctly. So, I went through several rounds of pointing out really obvious issues and asking for revisions. They would apologize profusely and say essentially that the person who had been working on it previously had been a junior developer, but they'll put someone much more senior on it now. Never really made a difference. But here's the one that really blew my mind. The site color scheme at the time was greens and whites. For some reason though they decided that the heading of the modal box should have a thick orange underline. How did they create this ~4px underline? By embedding an enormous image of a sunset and cropping it to a 4px orange line. No exaggeration. This was like a 2560x1440px image of a sunset, which they'd cropped to a sliver in the top corner to show an orange line. I have to assume the developer(s) got sick of my nitpicking and decided to do something so ridiculous I'd just go away. It worked.
- bowmessage 7y ago
  literally sunsetting a project. I like it.
- asquabventured 7y ago
  Pruned code from some other site shoehorned to work on yours, perhaps?
obiefernandez 7y ago
"Nearshoring" in Mexico is successful primarily (IMO) because of cultural compatibilities. Plug: my firm https://magmalabs.io https://magmalabs.io When I was CTO of Andela one of my main claims to fame is pioneering the "month one" curriculum, based on principles of Applied Improv -- taking comedic improvisation education and setting it in a business context. Nigeria is definitely one of those cultures where junior people are culturally ingrained in them not to disagree with their superiors. Extremely important to break them of that practice if they're going to succeed as software consultants.
- _JC_Denton 7y ago
  Heads up - I am getting an invalid certificate warning in your site. iOS Safari.
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    And in Firefox: "Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for magmalabs.io. The certificate is only valid for the following names: m.magmalabs.io, www.magmalabs.io Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN https://magmalabs.io/ https://magmalabs.io/ produces the error. https://www.magmalabs.io/ https://www.magmalabs.io/ does not. https://magmalabs.io/ https://magmalabs.io/ works in Chrome. Does Chrome delay the certificate validity check until after the HTTP redirect?
    - cpeterso 7y ago
      I filed a Firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987 Chrome has a heuristic they call SSLCommonNameMismatchHandling: if Chrome tries to connect to a site like "https://example.com" https://example.com" but the returned cert is for the "www." subdomain of the same domain, Chrome will silently redirect to "https://www.example.com" https://www.example.com".
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
>>> Low hourly rates only make sense when you're comparing a similar number of hours!
edoo 7y ago
Very early in my career I worked for a dev shop that would literally hire 2-3 Indian teams to do the same project in the hopes one would turn out ok and it was still way cheaper than domestic labor. I was often brought in to fix bugs and performance problems. It was during this period I saw the worst code of my life: Pulling every record from a sql database table with a 'select * from table' then a strcmp on each numerical (and indexed) `id` field to find the record. It had worked in testing but blew up in production. It was truly unreal to see that. The other interesting thing I got to see was a shakedown of our company after we poached talent from a connected local company. We had the option (which we took) to pay several years worth of the average per capita income to local government henchmen to be allowed to stay in business.
williesleg 7y ago
They all write shit code. There's a reason why their countries are all fucked up. Too bad, some of them are nice people. Most of them lie and cheat though. I love looking at their resumes and then asking them questions about what they say they know. Always, without exception, they have no clue.
sulam 7y ago
My classic offshoring story is of a team of people we brought in to do QA (literally to write the unit tests that Troy's blog post no one ever writes). This team was very bullish on getting to do more than "just" testing. My CEO wanted to let them take a crack at it, and I had more than enough to do so we tried it out. I had written some domain models for dealing with users and I needed equivalent models for dealing with notifications. So I asked them to take the work I'd done and use it as a template for the new stuff. I got back code with the method and variable names search and replaced, pretty much exactly like what I expected. What they _hadn't_ bother to modify was the SQL that actually operated on the data (yes, I had to write it out like a cave man). So I had a bunch of notifications domain objects that operated on the USER table. That experiment terminated early.
watwut 7y ago
I don't think all those people are leaving after a year to become managers. That is highly unlikely. More likely is that those positions sux whether you have passion for development or not - and that developers who have passion for development will run away first from projects like this. Like with Avni, if she really had a baby and went to have baby, the relationships were nowhere near for anyone to know it. Which again, to the extend people stay in positions due to liking people there, that sort of "keep me there" relationships were not present. I suspect this also because we had projects where more western company outsourced their project on us - coders here, analysts, management and decision makers there. The more skilled developer, the sooner they were leaving or were very particular about what exactly they will work on. Even those who stayed (because some perks and good relationships in our local company) dont like the projects they work on. It is more about frustrations and politics then about being proud what you do. I can only imagine that it would be even worst in outsource only company that aims for cheap and does not have perks. And it is even harder to find good managers willing to work in such setup, they tend to avoid it too.
PouyaL 7y ago
Thanks for sharing. Got almost the same experience in middle-east where a part of culture within SW engineers came to low quality of development and higher time spans. Though I guess the article wasn't consider the concept #TL;DR.
lmilcin 7y ago
I have some experience with offshoring to India and China. Pretty much as described in the lessons. One important point, setting up the cooperation is critical and you can't hope to get any positive results without considerable effort into setting up and maintaining the cooperation and close vigilance over what is happening. There is tendency for the quality to fall the moment the team figures out you are not paying attention. Basically, anything goes unless you are constantly showing you are caring and monitoring.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I worked with quite a few overseas developers over the last decade. In our case we worked with two outsourcing firms in Russia, EPAM and Distillery. Our relationship worked very well but we had to approach it correctly. In our case we treated the outsourcing firms mostly as recruiting firms. They pre-screened candidates and then we interviewed them just as if we were interviewing and on-site employee. Now, people are people and are imperfect, But the reality was that from both EPAM and Distillery, The candidates that they brought to us were always the highest quality. Something about how they work internally makes it a lot easier to hire through them instead of the normal American way of hiring a software developer. One more thing: I was part of the team that chose EPAM over some of the other contracting firms. we basically interviewed one of their engineers as if he was going to be a new hire, and we did the same for other firms. The reason why our relationship was so successful was because we we're methodical and carefully chose who we used for outsourcing. IMO, most of the complaints about outsourcing come from people who didn't screen their contractors very well.
bluekite2000 7y ago
Anyone interested in Vietnam? I spent tons of time there (Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi) recruiting Vietnamese software developers recently for my own projects and am seriously thinking of parlaying that skillset into helping US companies setting up in house engineering sites there.

207 points by throwaway3157 7y ago

british_india 7y ago

Exhibit A for the dangers of outsourcing software development: Boeing's offshoring of the 737 MAX software.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925

discreteevent 7y ago

On India: I worked on a project outsourced to one of the big companies. A senior engineer there said that when people offshore, the person making the decision is a bean counter. So they only look at price. They take the cheapest and they get what they pay for. But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a much better job done.

mathattack 7y ago
Sometimes the math is “We can do it twice in India and still save 50%” Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows that the correlation between quality and price is very loose. The lowest cost provider is rarely great, but the high cost provider can also be selling you a lot of juniors.
- raincom 7y ago
  Exactly this. Usually, they have a couple of guys who are really good in that team, along with lots of juniors who are there for billable hours.
  - ta1234567890 7y ago
    Sounds exactly like law firms.
  - mc32 7y ago
    They demo the skilled people and once they have the account they turn it over to the juniors... But that probably works in most cases/places anyway.
    - makr17 7y ago
      Yeah, but so does every US-based consulting outfit I've ever seen... IBM, Oracle, Accenture. The knowledgable Senior Dev answering your questions during the bid goes away _quickly_ once you sign. They're off to convince the next sucker...
      - bradknowles 7y ago
        That's why you write the contract to the outsourcing company so that you lock in those experienced people for an extended period of time -- like years. But then the price mysteriously increases to the point where you might as well have hired them on-shore and you're not saving any money. So, do you want to save money by offshoring everything, or do you want to get good people to actually do the real work that needs to be done?
        watwut 7y ago
        Accenture wont sign that. And those more experienced people might not like to work on your project for years and there is nothing you can do to stop them from leaving. They got where they are by doing what they are doing. Spending years on your project is something else.
      - blaser-waffle 7y ago
        I'll bite. Plenty of reasons to do that, esp. on small to mid size gigs. Write the spec well, get thorough, detailed planning done by seniors, and then throw the day-laborer-coders at it as needed. Rope in a senior to look at it / poke / guide things every once in a while, and let it go. I don't need to drag the building architects, master masons or master carpenters to help frame every wall of the house; ditto for code.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/news/79848-hertz-hits-accenture-32-million-lawsuit-over-failed.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/news/79848...
- detaro 7y ago
  > Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows Probably why parent mentioned finding a smaller company. I don't know about the Indian outsourcing market specifically, but in many sectors it seems a few mid-sized companies are the best for this sort of thing. Which also means you need to find the right one for your problem, your purchasing department won't be set up with them, and you won't be able to just order as much capacity as you want, so getting there is hard.
- markkanof 7y ago
  This isn't exclusively an Indian outsourcing issue. I used to do work for a small US based contracting company. At the time I was mid to senior with about 10 years experience. On all projects they would present me to the client as the level of developer that would work on their project, but would then also assign a few just out of bootcamp devs to work on the project and we were all billed out at the same high rate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot234 7y ago
> But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a much better job done. The whole problem is nobody can hope to spot the real "smaller, higher-quality companies" in that chaotic, offshoring-driven environment. Race-to-the-bottom is the equilibrium outcome.
macjohnmcc 7y ago
The company I formerly worked for outsourced to India and we found a lot of accounting irregularities where we were be charged twice for the unnamed senior developers and later find out that it's the same person and that that person was not even spending 100% of their time working on our project. It wasn't a complete loss as some people really did a fantastic job but overall I'd never recommend it to others.
bradknowles 7y ago
I remember being brought in to operationalize the first version of Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail Gateways (NAVIEG) that would run on Solaris (this was in 1996). It was outsourced to an Indian company because no one in Symantec understood the first thing about programming on Unix. Turns out that the guys in India didn't understand programming on Unix, either. The Indian developers basically just transliterated the Windows code to Unix, and got it to compile. Then they shipped it. That's when the real problems started, and I was brought in. Now, I've never claimed to be a developer. At the time, I was a consultant and Unix sysadmin, but the concept of "DevOps" had yet to be born. What I could tell them was that, in 1996, basing your Unix implementation on Solaris 2.5 (not even Solaris 2.5.1) was a bad idea, because there was a whole host of things wrong with that ancient version of Solaris, and if they wanted to be on that platform then they needed to be on a much more modern version. Secondly, threading on Unix at that time was ... problematic ... and that was true even on the most modern versions of Unix that were available at the time. Multi-process programming worked well, however. On Windows, the reverse was apparently true. So, naturally the outsourcing developers used threading, and they used threading on an ancient version of Unix that had about the worst possible implementation of threading. Oy. Of course, learning these things at this stage didn't help Symantec. They had already outsourced their aircraft and gotten an Albatross back in return. I did help them develop a testing regime that could relatively accurately simulate a real-world distribution of mail message sizes and types, with a real-world distribution of supposedly infected messages, and then beat the holy living crap out of the server trying to push that volume through as quickly as possible. And I did get called back to teach a class on Unix to the lead QA team in Denver, so that they could try to support NAVIEG on Solaris 2.5. But so far as I know, the consulting company I worked for never got called back to help them actually fix their design problems with the code, and I think that project probably died a pretty quick and vicious death. Also, so far as I know, no one at Symantec ever again tried to develop or support any code that would run on any flavor of Unix or Unix-like OS.
- mzi 7y ago
  Solaris 2.5 with pthreads was released in November 1995, 2.5.1 in May 1996. So it seems to be a modern version with thread support. It does not mean that the outsourcing had to be a success. edit: spelling
dreamcompiler 7y ago
Cost can be reported as a simple scalar. Quality cannot. This is why at most companies, cost counts far more than quality.

thrower123 7y ago

I do a lot of work with a few of the big outfits, as we often get pulled in to help setup a software product that they resell to Fortune 500 companies as part of their package contracts. I have never seen a case where they actually add value; it would always be much easier if we could just get directly connected with the end-customer.

cosmodisk 7y ago

Pretty much my experience re Indian outsourcing. What I used to find most annoying is that 'manager' mentality: I appreciate a lot of people like to boss people around and,as the author states, it's kind of safer (and better paid) step on a corporate ladder, but boy some of them are useless.. You talk to the guy, he agrees to pretty much anything,even If I'd ask to build a lift to mars.Then eventually he comes back with dev's questions.I provide very detail and explicit info on what I need(For anyone who has any knowledge in the tech they used it would almost be like asking to write a couple of loops).Again lots of yes,yes,yes.Then silence and again even more questions. Manager's function is absolutely useless in this case. Also, if the churn rate is low, the companies usually have very capable people who tend to know their shit.

social_quotient 7y ago
Change your understanding of “yes” to be “okay” . It will save you headaches a tons of money. Confirmation that they heard you doesn’t mean they understand or comprehend. You gotta jump right past the yes, to parrot it back to me or say it back differently to me. #protips
- teddyuk 7y ago
  This is the most actionable advice I’ve ever seen for dealing with outsourcing in India which can have a massive difference
crystaldev 7y ago
It's probably because engineers are not good at dealing with customers. Edit: Apparently nobody gets this reference anymore, and I'm old.
- alatkins 7y ago
  Take my upvote fellow oldie. Office Space can't be mandatory school curriculum any more :-)
- inkeddeveloper 7y ago

admn2 7y ago

I heard Argentina as a popular place for "near-shoring", which likely wasn't very popular when this was written 3 years ago. Anyone here been using Argentinian tech talent?

powvans 7y ago
I'm based in the US and worked with a remote team in Argentina from 2013 to 2015. They were fantastic. Most of the team was based out of the company's office in Cordoba, but we also had some remote devs who lived in Buenos Aires rotate into the team. The offshore firm took great care to make sure that everyone on the team was well trained on the specifics of our project and general development processes. Last I heard they were purchased by Mercado Libre in what I'd assume was an acquihire.
jermaustin1 7y ago
I've worked with a number of Argentinian developers through using Avanade and Accenture on projects. The developers were great, even spoke decent English, but since it was through Avanade or Accenture, after 3 years of the managerial-interference, overhead, cost overruns, and contract disputes with what is considered in-scope/out-of-scope, the projects were eventually canceled. Had we just been able to hire the developers on an hourly basis, everyone would have been happy... well except the sales managers, delivery managers, development managers, and project managers. That said, I didn't care for the way that our company was billed $75-150/hr for a developer that makes $350-1200/mo, and that the developers made so little when their managers were billing so high. Early in my career, I was livid when I found out that my time was billed to the client 3x what I made, so I cant imagine how demoralizing it would be knowing you are paid 20x less than you are billed out.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  This, sometimes has very interesting consequences. A friend worked for a company that basically moved parts of sales/customer service to a Northen African country.They hired people on a few hundred dollars a month(if that much) to sell high ticket hotel bookings sometimes going for thousands/day.The team struggled to comprehend that anyone could get a room that costs 10 times more their monthly wage.This highly affected their ability to service/sell. Eventually the entire thing got canned and moved to Europe.

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

Hiring good offshore developers directly as remote employees is a much better option, in my experience. It requires more up front work to identify, hire, and retain the remote employees, but you need far fewer developers when you can appeal to the best developers who know what they're doing. This doesn't work if your company has any attachment to headcount, though. It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the numbers.

MarkMc 7y ago
> It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the numbers. Can you expand on this? I would have thought it was cheaper to hire the remote employees directly than hire the outsourcing company... Edit: I think I understand now: the 'remote employees' are based in say the US while the outsourcing company is based in say India
- chii 7y ago
  The premise is that an excellent developer can command a high price, whether remote or not. Some developers place a premium in remote friendliness, and thus allow a slightly lower salary for it, but only up to some amount.
- ska 7y ago
  I suspect the argument is that workers are just not fungible, but the outsourcing approach sort of assumes they are.
krzat 7y ago
That's right. Offshore companies are a waste of time: their management adds unnecessary overhead and their good devs can leave at any time due to poor salary. I know because I work for one.
johnbellone 7y ago
It pays in dividends for when your organization decides to leverage more offshore talent in the future. Unfortunately there may not have been enough foresight here originally so you're now iceskating uphill to make the call to staff up an office in Mumbai/Hyderabad.

starky 7y ago

My experience with working with Asia off-shoring is with physical products, so this was interesting to see the software perspective where there are multiple programmers working on something in parallel, whereas my experience is more serial with the (English speaking) sales contact communicating with the various engineering teams as the project gets passed along. Definitely agree with the can-do attitude of China. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, other times a vendor thinks they are doing us good and screw us over by completing work before we have agreed to it. This is mostly a temporary issue until you build a relationship with the vendor (in China, relationship is everything) and know each other's expectations. While I've never worked with an Indian vendor directly, it is interesting to hear about how people there have very narrow knowledge bases. This is something I've noticed with people I've interviewed that are recent immigrants, they know their area, but when asked about the rest of what we would be asking them to do they have zero clue. This is also (lesser so) a case with recent Chinese immigrants. Not great when we are essentially hiring a mechanical equivalent of a full stack engineer.

iamsb 7y ago

It is quite interesting to re-read this after the zoom ipo. Zoom built a huge team in China, effectively outsourcing most of the development to lower cost countries, that gave them leverage in terms of being able to deploy capital more efficiently. There are certainly ways to work around most of the problems the author outlines. They are definitely real problems, same as spending 5x for onshore resources. Ideally you should build onshore teams, if you can spend the money. But if you can not, then do not get discouraged by these problems. Employee churns are not that difficult to mitigate, just matter contracting properly with the employees and providing enough consideration in the contracts.

throwawayesteu 7y ago

How to do the outsourcing business if you want to provide premium service? Even if the field requires specialization, say machine learning / data engineering, it’s hard to justify the price that is 40% more than average for the area (say Eastern Europe). Example: I work for a company that does ML/DE services, and I believe that everyone in the company (we’re small company in Eastern Europe) tries their best to do the great job and do what is best for our clients; plus seniority and talent is way above average for the market (mostly due to specialization). But we’re still having hard time increasing our hourly rate. What is something that we can do that would say “these people are worth it, let’s go with them even though they are more expensive”?

cosmodisk 7y ago
Higher prices!= higher quality. Here's how your post reads: we have senior devs+ we try charge 40% more,yet clients don't buy in. You know what? Every shop in town has senior devs and most of them are passionate. Depending on which Eastern European country you are based in, even the entire team full of PhDs in ML with 10 years experience may not sound that extraordinary. You need to find the reason why you are ACTUALLY better than your competition.Do you have tons of white papers or cases studies on your website that clearly show how and why you are solving these problems? What are you doing differently compared to the guys from the shop across the road? You need to be very very comfortable with saying " fuck yes, we are 40,50 maybe even 100% more expensive than any other company you'll be speaking, but here's 25 reasons why you search for ML experts stops here". These things are learnable, however if there's no strong sales culture in the business,I'd advice to start looking for someone who could deliver these messages to your prospects.My experience: work for a company that operates in a low entry, saturated market and sells services almost 3 times the average price in the country.

cbg0 7y ago

I work remotely from Europe for a North American company, so here's my two cents on this topic: Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless of where they live. While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area, you're most likely not hiring only the best. I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." - most would trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies. If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs, don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.

numbsafari 7y ago
I think this is a really valuable perspective. Would be curious to hear from more folks on “the other side” about their experiences. I’ve often considered doing the expat thing and trying to work in or setup such a shop.
- kavalg 7y ago
  My experience is that it is pretty easy to find a remote job as a single developer/freelancer, but a lot harder to find a decent project for a small, well-knit team. I now live in Eastern Europe (EU) and I easily find offers at EUR 450-600 / day for consulting gigs (e.g. on-site + remote work). However, I often struggle to find a project for a team of 3 Java/JavaScript/Python/PHP developers, event at rates as low as EUR 250 / day. I guess lots of recruiters are only interested in hiring individual contractors, but not teams.

gentleman11 7y ago

Lets assume that the situation changes over the next 15 years and these outsourcing places get really legitimately good at making software. What can we, the highly paid locals, can do to justify our high salaries at that hypothetical future point? (playing starcraft taught me a tremendous amount of respect for East Asian creativity and work ethic)

user5994461 7y ago
What do you mean by highly paid locals? With the exception of the Silicon Valley or NYC bubble, developers in big cities in developed countries are approaching US and European salaries and they are increasing quickly. Well, truth be told they're already surpassed us. If you want cheaper, you might as well go to Spain or Italy or even France.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  That's not really true man. I've worked with devs from Argentina and Ghana, and let's just say we were all surprised at how much the managers at my company were paying to those consulting firms. Think devs getting USD350 to USD1500 per month while I knew for a fact that USD50 to USD225 per hour was being paid out. I think a lot of devs in the West would be almost shocked at the amount of money devs make in other places.
cosmodisk 7y ago
What differentiates US (most big software names come from there) from the rest of the world is their ability to sell. There are already enough countries on this planet that can produce high quality software that could be sold as hot buns.What most of those countries don't have is the huge VC industry+ tons of people who know how and who to sell be it B2B or B2C. This, however is changing slowly and you can expect much more level field over the next 10-15 years.
- pm90 7y ago
  This is not accurate at all. What really differentiates the US is: * fucking largest economy by far as your domestic market ie no import duties or import/export taxes * truly massive investment by Government and Private sector into CS research * high tech economy focused mostly on services which demands all tools it can get to improve business processes * high disposable income via financial instruments for cheap debt (also less taxes than most developed countries) * largest talent pool of Universities that keeps bringing in the best and brightest across the world The ability to sell is far far less important than the systemic reasons listed above that give the US an incredible edge in the software industry.

anthony_barker 7y ago

He misses some stuff. 1) 4 hours of time overlap rule - you need to have overlap of 4 hours between teams 2) Requirements need to be much tighter with outsourcing. Often you need a full BA whereas with some devs you can work without a formal spec but some wireframes etc

SamuelAdams 7y ago
No, Troy specifically mentions differing requirements depending on the country that the ousource firm is located in. >Another pattern I found time and time again when outsourcing to India was that they'd want really detailed documentation. This is always going to be a contentious issue and there are many different views of how much should be done under what circumstances. But more so in India than the other two locations I'll talk about shortly, detail was important to them. There were many occasions where we would make assumptions that a feature requirement clearly implied certain things only to later discover they was deemed "out of scope". Now that can happen in any project in any part of the world, but it was extremely prevalent in India. > On the plus side for China though, one of their strengths (particularly over India) was the ability to get down to work with minimal documentation.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

The worst I've ever seen: Not only did the contractor deliver a buggy, half-finished product, he also used our printer to print out an offer to a competitor to sell them our source code!

mlvljr 7y ago
Bookmarking via a comment, pure gold.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I really don’t understand why US companies are outsourcing to India. The time difference alone pretty much sets you up for fail unless people want to be working at midnight all the time. I find it much easier to work with Costa Rica it South America where you can quickly make calls during the day. Especially with outsourcing you need to do a lot of handholding to get things going so you need good direct communication. The whole idea of sending a big pile of requirements and then getting something useful back simply doesn’t work. You need direct communication without middlemen.

lowercased 7y ago
worked at a place in the south (think Georgia) that opened an Indian office. about ~40 devs in the US office, they brought in.. 5? to the Indian office. It was primarily for the time difference, and their primary role was to triage and research issues during the 'off hours'. Anything they couldn't figure out bubbled up to the US, usually after several hours of initial research. It wasn't a horrible approach, and I think it worked OK because it was intentional.
unishark 7y ago
Outsourcing in south america is growing pretty fast. I think a big part of it has been the local govts and laws. Sometimes in the past they flatly outlawed it or else charged exorbitant taxes (some still do from what I've seen). But they have been wising up and making the laws more friendly to attract outsourcing.

shruubi 7y ago

I just came out of being forced into running an offshore team from the Phillipines for roughly six-ish months, my experience was that they were very affable with good english skills and worked hard, there was a noticeable problem with technical skill which caused a number of bugs to occur to the point where I would just spend the time fixing them myself than throw them back at the team where they would cause more problems. The biggest problem however, was that no matter how many times I asked or provided documentation/feedback, they would ignore established coding standards and established processes and just do things their way, and when I would ask about this, I would just get shrugs. Finally, we got saddled with a "Project Manager", which I put in quotes as their contribution to the process was giving daily excuses as to not turn up to our daily progress calls, and the ones he did turn up to, he would visibly fall asleep. When I eventually pulled him up on this his response was that "he wasn't directly paid for but an included part of the cost so you can't complain about what you get." Admittedly all of the above is rather negative, but I think this highlights the "get what you pay for" aspect of offshore outsourcing.

watwut 7y ago
Out of curiosity, what are "established coding standards and established processes" for you?

freepor 7y ago

My favorite place to offshore is Eastern Europe. Genuinely love working with those guys.

freepor 7y ago

With China and India getting more and more product companies like Baidu/Tencent/ByteDance/Flipkart/Paytm/etc, the average engineer left in outsourcing gets worse every month.

MarkMc 7y ago

"I remember one case quite clearly where the project's dollar estimate was identical to a local vendor in Australia yet the man hours were an order of magnitude greater. Yet even then, there was organisational push-back on the local vendor due to their high hourly rate" That's very strange - I would have assumed that the code quality of the Australian outfit would be higher

tempestn 7y ago

Whenever offshoring comes up I'm reminded of my experience trying out an Indian development firm some years back. I decided to give it a try with an extremely simple feature for autotempest.com, just opening up a modal window with some advanced search features. Specified what exactly should be included, and it was nice and encapsulated so I figured it would be a perfect test. To summarize, the results were literally comically bad. All kinds of hand massaged spacing using nbsp's and weird off by one pixel issues and such—things that to do wrong as they did must have taken an order of magnitude longer than it would have to do them correctly. So, I went through several rounds of pointing out really obvious issues and asking for revisions. They would apologize profusely and say essentially that the person who had been working on it previously had been a junior developer, but they'll put someone much more senior on it now. Never really made a difference. But here's the one that really blew my mind. The site color scheme at the time was greens and whites. For some reason though they decided that the heading of the modal box should have a thick orange underline. How did they create this ~4px underline? By embedding an enormous image of a sunset and cropping it to a 4px orange line. No exaggeration. This was like a 2560x1440px image of a sunset, which they'd cropped to a sliver in the top corner to show an orange line. I have to assume the developer(s) got sick of my nitpicking and decided to do something so ridiculous I'd just go away. It worked.

bowmessage 7y ago
literally sunsetting a project. I like it.
asquabventured 7y ago
Pruned code from some other site shoehorned to work on yours, perhaps?

obiefernandez 7y ago

"Nearshoring" in Mexico is successful primarily (IMO) because of cultural compatibilities. Plug: my firm https://magmalabs.io https://magmalabs.io When I was CTO of Andela one of my main claims to fame is pioneering the "month one" curriculum, based on principles of Applied Improv -- taking comedic improvisation education and setting it in a business context. Nigeria is definitely one of those cultures where junior people are culturally ingrained in them not to disagree with their superiors. Extremely important to break them of that practice if they're going to succeed as software consultants.

_JC_Denton 7y ago
Heads up - I am getting an invalid certificate warning in your site. iOS Safari.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  And in Firefox: "Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for magmalabs.io. The certificate is only valid for the following names: m.magmalabs.io, www.magmalabs.io Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN https://magmalabs.io/ https://magmalabs.io/ produces the error. https://www.magmalabs.io/ https://www.magmalabs.io/ does not. https://magmalabs.io/ https://magmalabs.io/ works in Chrome. Does Chrome delay the certificate validity check until after the HTTP redirect?
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    I filed a Firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987 Chrome has a heuristic they call SSLCommonNameMismatchHandling: if Chrome tries to connect to a site like "https://example.com" https://example.com" but the returned cert is for the "www." subdomain of the same domain, Chrome will silently redirect to "https://www.example.com" https://www.example.com".

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

>>> Low hourly rates only make sense when you're comparing a similar number of hours!

edoo 7y ago

Very early in my career I worked for a dev shop that would literally hire 2-3 Indian teams to do the same project in the hopes one would turn out ok and it was still way cheaper than domestic labor. I was often brought in to fix bugs and performance problems. It was during this period I saw the worst code of my life: Pulling every record from a sql database table with a 'select * from table' then a strcmp on each numerical (and indexed) `id` field to find the record. It had worked in testing but blew up in production. It was truly unreal to see that. The other interesting thing I got to see was a shakedown of our company after we poached talent from a connected local company. We had the option (which we took) to pay several years worth of the average per capita income to local government henchmen to be allowed to stay in business.

williesleg 7y ago

They all write shit code. There's a reason why their countries are all fucked up. Too bad, some of them are nice people. Most of them lie and cheat though. I love looking at their resumes and then asking them questions about what they say they know. Always, without exception, they have no clue.

sulam 7y ago

My classic offshoring story is of a team of people we brought in to do QA (literally to write the unit tests that Troy's blog post no one ever writes). This team was very bullish on getting to do more than "just" testing. My CEO wanted to let them take a crack at it, and I had more than enough to do so we tried it out. I had written some domain models for dealing with users and I needed equivalent models for dealing with notifications. So I asked them to take the work I'd done and use it as a template for the new stuff. I got back code with the method and variable names search and replaced, pretty much exactly like what I expected. What they _hadn't_ bother to modify was the SQL that actually operated on the data (yes, I had to write it out like a cave man). So I had a bunch of notifications domain objects that operated on the USER table. That experiment terminated early.

watwut 7y ago

I don't think all those people are leaving after a year to become managers. That is highly unlikely. More likely is that those positions sux whether you have passion for development or not - and that developers who have passion for development will run away first from projects like this. Like with Avni, if she really had a baby and went to have baby, the relationships were nowhere near for anyone to know it. Which again, to the extend people stay in positions due to liking people there, that sort of "keep me there" relationships were not present. I suspect this also because we had projects where more western company outsourced their project on us - coders here, analysts, management and decision makers there. The more skilled developer, the sooner they were leaving or were very particular about what exactly they will work on. Even those who stayed (because some perks and good relationships in our local company) dont like the projects they work on. It is more about frustrations and politics then about being proud what you do. I can only imagine that it would be even worst in outsource only company that aims for cheap and does not have perks. And it is even harder to find good managers willing to work in such setup, they tend to avoid it too.

PouyaL 7y ago

Thanks for sharing. Got almost the same experience in middle-east where a part of culture within SW engineers came to low quality of development and higher time spans. Though I guess the article wasn't consider the concept #TL;DR.

lmilcin 7y ago

I have some experience with offshoring to India and China. Pretty much as described in the lessons. One important point, setting up the cooperation is critical and you can't hope to get any positive results without considerable effort into setting up and maintaining the cooperation and close vigilance over what is happening. There is tendency for the quality to fall the moment the team figures out you are not paying attention. Basically, anything goes unless you are constantly showing you are caring and monitoring.

gwbas1c 7y ago

I worked with quite a few overseas developers over the last decade. In our case we worked with two outsourcing firms in Russia, EPAM and Distillery. Our relationship worked very well but we had to approach it correctly. In our case we treated the outsourcing firms mostly as recruiting firms. They pre-screened candidates and then we interviewed them just as if we were interviewing and on-site employee. Now, people are people and are imperfect, But the reality was that from both EPAM and Distillery, The candidates that they brought to us were always the highest quality. Something about how they work internally makes it a lot easier to hire through them instead of the normal American way of hiring a software developer. One more thing: I was part of the team that chose EPAM over some of the other contracting firms. we basically interviewed one of their engineers as if he was going to be a new hire, and we did the same for other firms. The reason why our relationship was so successful was because we we're methodical and carefully chose who we used for outsourcing. IMO, most of the complaints about outsourcing come from people who didn't screen their contractors very well.

bluekite2000 7y ago

Anyone interested in Vietnam? I spent tons of time there (Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi) recruiting Vietnamese software developers recently for my own projects and am seriously thinking of parlaying that skillset into helping US companies setting up in house engineering sites there.