6 ms·

Its All a Sham - An Indian Techie's Take on Outsourcing

55 points by rams 18y ago

alecco 18y ago
The savings of outsourcing sometimes are more related to infrastructure cost and tax than salary. If only US workers would like to relocate to a cheaper place it would be a killer. Perhaps a Silicon Valley branch on a beach paradise in Mexico or Central America? Some place where half a US salary gives a significantly better life. Just a thought.
- ajross 18y ago
  Except that the value of all those "expensive" developers in Silicon Valley is precisely that they are not on a beach somewhere, but right "here" where they can be hired immediately. That is worth something to the people doing the hiring, which is why they are willing to pay the added costs of locating a business there. If outsourced development was always a win, areas like the bay area would disintegrate on their own. This is why no one worries about top-shelf product development jobs being "outsourced" for the most part. If developer talent was fungible in this way, we'd have seen rampant "outsourcing" to St. Louis and Pittsburgh long before it became popular in Bangalore or Beijing. The jobs at risk of being moved offshore are those doing lower-level "IT" jobs. These are the people who were complaining a decade ago about being replaced by contractors -- it's the same principle.
  - netcan 18y ago
    But should a competing centre emerge in Bangalore of Beijing, it'd be hard to beat.
    - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
      But would it stay competitive for very long?
      - netcan 18y ago
        I don't think cost of living in either of those is going to match the US's any time soon. Assuming that it contains enough of the right people & supporting services to build the right complexes, why not? How many of the bay area's mojo comes from people moving to the bay area for its mojo? They could go somewhere else. Keeping it should be easier then building it. But overall, the tech complex shouldn't be a whole lot more difficult to move then any other complex. I'd say moving the manufacturing complexes out of China would be harder. A tech company can be anywhere really, as long as they have the people. the complex can scale down to one & still be useful. It's more useful as a complex, but still quite useful without it. pg has some stuff on how to build a silicon valley (Take one cup of nerd, stir in a generous sprinkling of rich people & nerds, nice weather etc. etc.. I wonder how much of it is easier then he reckons. Surely there is some bias. The Auto manufacturing centres of US or Germany probably thought that they were impossible to move. Why not start a startup on a SE Asian island? Could live comfortably on 15k per year (including home visits). Assuming you bring your people with you & they are willing to be paid in lifestyle. It might be appealing to certain people. Nice beaches.
  - palish 18y ago
    Careful. I'm a quality developer who lives in St Louis. :P
sfamiliar 18y ago
it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the indian developers. the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for help. in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5 butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas developers are more 'technically competent'. you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.
- zhyder 18y ago
  In a small startup, everyone needs to take a lot of initiative. But in a BDC (big dumb corp), there are several roles where initiative doesn't matter much. In fact it's challenging to both encourage initiative as well as control chaos at a large scale. It's a slow cultural change: Indians are starting to feel more confident, and -subjectively- it looks like technology innovation in India is growing.
  - 13ren 18y ago
    Yes; arguably, the goal of initiative in startups is to reduce the need for it. Like programming.
- netcan 18y ago
  What to do attribute that to? The situation: They're an overseas code shop, strategic desicions are made in the US, etc or the corporate culture of the Indian office or something else.
newt0311 18y ago
Welcome to the world of mega corporations. The economies of scale in these are great but so are the dis-economies of scale often due to information defects. The nth upper level manager has no idea of the individual capabilities or the individual contract that people are hired under from across the world. Indeed, with several tens of thousands of employees spread out in (optimistically) four of five different legal jurisdiction, it is unreasonable to expect a human to keep track of all this information.
RKlophaus 18y ago
"I do not understand this logic of 1 guy with normal vision = 5 blind guys." Well phrased. The big problem I see with outsourcing is that it's difficult to cultivate passion in a remote team, and passion is what leads to attention to detail, refactoring, and all of the other things that make high quality software. This is what people miss when they say, "open source teams work from different countries all the time and produce high quality software, how is outsourcing so different?"
bigbang 18y ago
I know a lot of ppl in India who work in outsourced companies. They are pretty smart than many American counterparts I've seen, but they lack confidence and decision making. Thier confidence also gets shattered by doing crappy report generation,formatting,testing kind of work while only some of them are motivated enough to side projects.
- nailer 18y ago
  I've had jobs in Western countries involving report generation, formatting, testing. These are indeed boring. I've given myself a challenge of automating the living shit out of them: * First time I learnt bash was to work out how to make server documentation with it (I'd built some shell functions to handle headings, tables, columns, etc. * First time I learnt xPath was to fix 60,000 GECOS fields of a customers Linux hosts when the customer refused to give us programmatic access to the corporate directory. You'll be appreciated for the labor you save (if not, leave). Then go off, find some more interesting problem, and work on that. With good managers, they'll pick up you're a 'self starter'.
gaius 18y ago
If you are in the situation where a company is offering people a decent amount of money to leave, there are only two choices. Leave now with the money. Leave later with nothing.

55 points by rams 18y ago

The savings of outsourcing sometimes are more related to infrastructure cost and tax than salary. If only US workers would like to relocate to a cheaper place it would be a killer. Perhaps a Silicon Valley branch on a beach paradise in Mexico or Central America? Some place where half a US salary gives a significantly better life. Just a thought.

ajross 18y ago
Except that the value of all those "expensive" developers in Silicon Valley is precisely that they are not on a beach somewhere, but right "here" where they can be hired immediately. That is worth something to the people doing the hiring, which is why they are willing to pay the added costs of locating a business there. If outsourced development was always a win, areas like the bay area would disintegrate on their own. This is why no one worries about top-shelf product development jobs being "outsourced" for the most part. If developer talent was fungible in this way, we'd have seen rampant "outsourcing" to St. Louis and Pittsburgh long before it became popular in Bangalore or Beijing. The jobs at risk of being moved offshore are those doing lower-level "IT" jobs. These are the people who were complaining a decade ago about being replaced by contractors -- it's the same principle.
- netcan 18y ago
  But should a competing centre emerge in Bangalore of Beijing, it'd be hard to beat.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    But would it stay competitive for very long?
    - netcan 18y ago
      I don't think cost of living in either of those is going to match the US's any time soon. Assuming that it contains enough of the right people & supporting services to build the right complexes, why not? How many of the bay area's mojo comes from people moving to the bay area for its mojo? They could go somewhere else. Keeping it should be easier then building it. But overall, the tech complex shouldn't be a whole lot more difficult to move then any other complex. I'd say moving the manufacturing complexes out of China would be harder. A tech company can be anywhere really, as long as they have the people. the complex can scale down to one & still be useful. It's more useful as a complex, but still quite useful without it. pg has some stuff on how to build a silicon valley (Take one cup of nerd, stir in a generous sprinkling of rich people & nerds, nice weather etc. etc.. I wonder how much of it is easier then he reckons. Surely there is some bias. The Auto manufacturing centres of US or Germany probably thought that they were impossible to move. Why not start a startup on a SE Asian island? Could live comfortably on 15k per year (including home visits). Assuming you bring your people with you & they are willing to be paid in lifestyle. It might be appealing to certain people. Nice beaches.
- palish 18y ago
  Careful. I'm a quality developer who lives in St Louis. :P

sfamiliar 18y ago

it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the indian developers. the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for help. in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5 butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas developers are more 'technically competent'. you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.

zhyder 18y ago
In a small startup, everyone needs to take a lot of initiative. But in a BDC (big dumb corp), there are several roles where initiative doesn't matter much. In fact it's challenging to both encourage initiative as well as control chaos at a large scale. It's a slow cultural change: Indians are starting to feel more confident, and -subjectively- it looks like technology innovation in India is growing.
- 13ren 18y ago
  Yes; arguably, the goal of initiative in startups is to reduce the need for it. Like programming.
netcan 18y ago
What to do attribute that to? The situation: They're an overseas code shop, strategic desicions are made in the US, etc or the corporate culture of the Indian office or something else.

newt0311 18y ago

Welcome to the world of mega corporations. The economies of scale in these are great but so are the dis-economies of scale often due to information defects. The nth upper level manager has no idea of the individual capabilities or the individual contract that people are hired under from across the world. Indeed, with several tens of thousands of employees spread out in (optimistically) four of five different legal jurisdiction, it is unreasonable to expect a human to keep track of all this information.

RKlophaus 18y ago

"I do not understand this logic of 1 guy with normal vision = 5 blind guys." Well phrased. The big problem I see with outsourcing is that it's difficult to cultivate passion in a remote team, and passion is what leads to attention to detail, refactoring, and all of the other things that make high quality software. This is what people miss when they say, "open source teams work from different countries all the time and produce high quality software, how is outsourcing so different?"

bigbang 18y ago

I know a lot of ppl in India who work in outsourced companies. They are pretty smart than many American counterparts I've seen, but they lack confidence and decision making. Thier confidence also gets shattered by doing crappy report generation,formatting,testing kind of work while only some of them are motivated enough to side projects.

nailer 18y ago
I've had jobs in Western countries involving report generation, formatting, testing. These are indeed boring. I've given myself a challenge of automating the living shit out of them: * First time I learnt bash was to work out how to make server documentation with it (I'd built some shell functions to handle headings, tables, columns, etc. * First time I learnt xPath was to fix 60,000 GECOS fields of a customers Linux hosts when the customer refused to give us programmatic access to the corporate directory. You'll be appreciated for the labor you save (if not, leave). Then go off, find some more interesting problem, and work on that. With good managers, they'll pick up you're a 'self starter'.

gaius 18y ago

If you are in the situation where a company is offering people a decent amount of money to leave, there are only two choices. Leave now with the money. Leave later with nothing.