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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 i

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
    That's pretty much the model amongs most vendors. Just so recently we were implementing a new system. Our account is small,so obviously we don't get the level of people some big corp would do. A junior,yet capable, consultant was working on the majority of the project. However as soon as we started having some more serious technical issues, it was like 'emm, I'm not sure'. Then we end up on a conference call, 8 people in total. Bloody hell,I thought I'll pull all my hair at the end of the call. Absolutely no value or capabilities to explain how we get out of this situation. Eventually, after our CEO suggested we drop this thing all together, we did get some senior person involved. Honestly, if I'd ever had a business,I'd hire on spot.The ability to talk to different business people in a way they could understand, technical knowledge and business acumen was fantastic. Shame all companies only have one or two of these people...
- 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.

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
  That's pretty much the model amongs most vendors. Just so recently we were implementing a new system. Our account is small,so obviously we don't get the level of people some big corp would do. A junior,yet capable, consultant was working on the majority of the project. However as soon as we started having some more serious technical issues, it was like 'emm, I'm not sure'. Then we end up on a conference call, 8 people in total. Bloody hell,I thought I'll pull all my hair at the end of the call. Absolutely no value or capabilities to explain how we get out of this situation. Eventually, after our CEO suggested we drop this thing all together, we did get some senior person involved. Honestly, if I'd ever had a business,I'd hire on spot.The ability to talk to different business people in a way they could understand, technical knowledge and business acumen was fantastic. Shame all companies only have one or two of these people...
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.