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Wife works in a bank (not gonna name it here) who outsourced development to India. Everyday I hear horror stories, from logistical problem to admin problem to

Wife works in a bank (not gonna name it here) who outsourced development to India. Everyday I hear horror stories, from logistical problem to admin problem to losing money in the millions problem, morale fading away and people are leaving. Heck, there was one month where my wife couldn’t work at all due to email problems because of that. One month free salary, we’ll take it. It’s been 2 years and still a shitshow.

seibelj 4y ago
The sign of someone who doesn’t know anything about software dev is when they suggest outsourcing as an easy way to cut costs, regardless of country. “We can get 10 people there for every person here!” Alarm bells should start ringing. It can be done but it takes very strong planning and foresight. Otherwise start dusting off the resume.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Agree. If you identify a great talent who happens to live on the other side of the globe, hire that individual as an FTE. Outsourcing to some body-shop firm is always a mistake. At least I've never seen it work.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  ...and only requires triple the management, analysis, oversight, and QC. I guess they assume their onshore people will work harder. What also isn't appreciated besides the immediate dead pool effect outsourcing creates, is that it creates a scapegoat for the onshore people. When your IT department is down the hall and you throw them under the rug, they walk down and ... meetings... ensue. When they are around the world and subservient (because they are cheap and everyone knows it, so it's assumed they're bad and you can blame anything on them), then everyone will use that as an excuse, ESPECIALLY since all the extra management/requirements/analysis burden falls on them. The issue with failed projects in the mythical man month is and has ALWAYS been communication and understanding. 10 time zones and a language and cultural barrier does not make up for that. It is amazing a 1970s era book remains so ignored. It should be taught in MBA school. No I mean MBA not MIS. I highly doubt it is. It amazes me that accounting is treated as a core subject of MBA, while basic IT literacy and process is not, even though there is FAR more IT that accounting in a modern enterprise.
  - immigrantheart 4y ago
    This. The outsourced team continued to kick the can down the road. It is almost as if they themselves are milking the US company for paychecks lol. These companies deserve each other.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      And the 10 people for every person here... You can hire 10 minimum wage Americans for a good software dev. I would actually guess for QA I could do that and beat the Indian outsourcing team if you looked from any degree of competence. Which brings me back to the nearshoring. It would be fascinating to try to do some nearshoring in a small rural town, just for devops and other things. There is a lot of people with technical aptitude in the rurals, I know we dump on the US education system but it still is passable, and likely better than India's.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  Unfortunately the MBA who pushed for offshoring has usually switched jobs before the project inevitably blows up in their face. One horror story I had some tangential knowledge of involved hiring a team of ~20 full-time Indian devs, based on that logic that they were a fraction of the cost. After months of receiving bug-riddled junk, the company started looking into what the problem was. Upon investigation, it turned out that several of the devs only existed on paper, the rest were mostly triple or quadruple assigned to multiple projects (despite paying for them being full-time), and it was really 2-3 guys who would write code, email it to the other devs, and have them commit it in order to make it look like the whole team was working. The end result was months of wasted time, an awful lot of wasted money, and no way of getting it back, thanks to India's notoriously corrupt judicial system.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    My favorite Indian outsource story was when I was consulting for a local firm and they paid me to design and plan how to kick off a project. I recommended hiring 5 skilled US software engineers and it could be done within a year. CEO wound up hiring 80 (yes 80!) full time Indian devs on the recommendation of his Indian CTO. They paid me to review the commits after a week and a quick scan showed it was totally plagiarized from a public repo and had zero value. The CTO responded by firing me. 6 months later the CEO asks me to get drinks. The CTO turned out to be a scam artist, all the devs were junk, wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for an army or worthless devs, and the CTO sued the CEO for fraud (???) perhaps as a first strike in a potential lawsuit he knew would come.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Anecdotally, I only keep hearing horror stories of Indian outsourced dev work. Yet Indian outsourcing companies continue to show record profits and revenue every year. Why do they continue getting fat contracts even if the general consensus is that it doesn’t work out well? Is it just another “no one gets fired for using IBM” scenario?
- ushakov 4y ago
  they continue getting fat contracts for blaming rights
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Why do they continue getting fat contracts even if the general consensus is that it doesn’t work out well? Because usually even the sum of a "fat contract" + cost of dealing with issues is lower than the amount of money saved by outsourcing, or at the very least the amount of money spent on dealing with issues is part of the general company "administrative/dealing with bullshit overhead" estimate and so doesn't show up on the balance sheet anywhere.
- addicted 4y ago
  Because outsourcing anything sucks, whether to India or within the U.S. The only reason you don’t hear horror stories about outsourcing to the US is because no one does that since there is no reason to. Most companies that are offshoring to India are doing really well (which is almost every major IT company). The difference is that they aren’t “outsourcing”. They’re simply developing teams there that work in collaboration with and using the same principles as their teams in the US. As long as you offshore in a way that keeps incentives aligned (which is rarely the case with outsourcing), you will probably do equally well.
  - aledalgrande 4y ago
    I tend to agree with this. I remember seeing outsourced work done by a Canadian consultancy for a Canadian startup, where in the contract it was required to write passing tests: the tests where testing nothing and were tautologies, so of course always passing.
the_only_law 4y ago
One of my first jobs gave me a task to work on and integrate some stuff they outsourced for dirt cheap. Almost immediately I found what was either a backdoor, or the most glaring security vulnerability I've seen in a while. The application had a way, accessible by anyone who can access the URL (anyone with internet access) to disable a number of security features that were there to prevent certain types of attack.

seibelj 4y ago

The sign of someone who doesn’t know anything about software dev is when they suggest outsourcing as an easy way to cut costs, regardless of country. “We can get 10 people there for every person here!” Alarm bells should start ringing. It can be done but it takes very strong planning and foresight. Otherwise start dusting off the resume.

jcadam 4y ago
Agree. If you identify a great talent who happens to live on the other side of the globe, hire that individual as an FTE. Outsourcing to some body-shop firm is always a mistake. At least I've never seen it work.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
...and only requires triple the management, analysis, oversight, and QC. I guess they assume their onshore people will work harder. What also isn't appreciated besides the immediate dead pool effect outsourcing creates, is that it creates a scapegoat for the onshore people. When your IT department is down the hall and you throw them under the rug, they walk down and ... meetings... ensue. When they are around the world and subservient (because they are cheap and everyone knows it, so it's assumed they're bad and you can blame anything on them), then everyone will use that as an excuse, ESPECIALLY since all the extra management/requirements/analysis burden falls on them. The issue with failed projects in the mythical man month is and has ALWAYS been communication and understanding. 10 time zones and a language and cultural barrier does not make up for that. It is amazing a 1970s era book remains so ignored. It should be taught in MBA school. No I mean MBA not MIS. I highly doubt it is. It amazes me that accounting is treated as a core subject of MBA, while basic IT literacy and process is not, even though there is FAR more IT that accounting in a modern enterprise.
- immigrantheart 4y ago
  This. The outsourced team continued to kick the can down the road. It is almost as if they themselves are milking the US company for paychecks lol. These companies deserve each other.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    And the 10 people for every person here... You can hire 10 minimum wage Americans for a good software dev. I would actually guess for QA I could do that and beat the Indian outsourcing team if you looked from any degree of competence. Which brings me back to the nearshoring. It would be fascinating to try to do some nearshoring in a small rural town, just for devops and other things. There is a lot of people with technical aptitude in the rurals, I know we dump on the US education system but it still is passable, and likely better than India's.
pseudo0 4y ago
Unfortunately the MBA who pushed for offshoring has usually switched jobs before the project inevitably blows up in their face. One horror story I had some tangential knowledge of involved hiring a team of ~20 full-time Indian devs, based on that logic that they were a fraction of the cost. After months of receiving bug-riddled junk, the company started looking into what the problem was. Upon investigation, it turned out that several of the devs only existed on paper, the rest were mostly triple or quadruple assigned to multiple projects (despite paying for them being full-time), and it was really 2-3 guys who would write code, email it to the other devs, and have them commit it in order to make it look like the whole team was working. The end result was months of wasted time, an awful lot of wasted money, and no way of getting it back, thanks to India's notoriously corrupt judicial system.
- seibelj 4y ago
  My favorite Indian outsource story was when I was consulting for a local firm and they paid me to design and plan how to kick off a project. I recommended hiring 5 skilled US software engineers and it could be done within a year. CEO wound up hiring 80 (yes 80!) full time Indian devs on the recommendation of his Indian CTO. They paid me to review the commits after a week and a quick scan showed it was totally plagiarized from a public repo and had zero value. The CTO responded by firing me. 6 months later the CEO asks me to get drinks. The CTO turned out to be a scam artist, all the devs were junk, wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for an army or worthless devs, and the CTO sued the CEO for fraud (???) perhaps as a first strike in a potential lawsuit he knew would come.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Anecdotally, I only keep hearing horror stories of Indian outsourced dev work. Yet Indian outsourcing companies continue to show record profits and revenue every year. Why do they continue getting fat contracts even if the general consensus is that it doesn’t work out well? Is it just another “no one gets fired for using IBM” scenario?

ushakov 4y ago
they continue getting fat contracts for blaming rights
mschuster91 4y ago
> Why do they continue getting fat contracts even if the general consensus is that it doesn’t work out well? Because usually even the sum of a "fat contract" + cost of dealing with issues is lower than the amount of money saved by outsourcing, or at the very least the amount of money spent on dealing with issues is part of the general company "administrative/dealing with bullshit overhead" estimate and so doesn't show up on the balance sheet anywhere.
addicted 4y ago
Because outsourcing anything sucks, whether to India or within the U.S. The only reason you don’t hear horror stories about outsourcing to the US is because no one does that since there is no reason to. Most companies that are offshoring to India are doing really well (which is almost every major IT company). The difference is that they aren’t “outsourcing”. They’re simply developing teams there that work in collaboration with and using the same principles as their teams in the US. As long as you offshore in a way that keeps incentives aligned (which is rarely the case with outsourcing), you will probably do equally well.
- aledalgrande 4y ago
  I tend to agree with this. I remember seeing outsourced work done by a Canadian consultancy for a Canadian startup, where in the contract it was required to write passing tests: the tests where testing nothing and were tautologies, so of course always passing.

the_only_law 4y ago

One of my first jobs gave me a task to work on and integrate some stuff they outsourced for dirt cheap. Almost immediately I found what was either a backdoor, or the most glaring security vulnerability I've seen in a while. The application had a way, accessible by anyone who can access the URL (anyone with internet access) to disable a number of security features that were there to prevent certain types of attack.