3 ms·

I used to be in the camp "let's outsource it" and I found out, it is not working. Code which you get is mostly useless and needs to be integrated into whole sol

I used to be in the camp "let's outsource it" and I found out, it is not working. Code which you get is mostly useless and needs to be integrated into whole solution and you are potentially letting others to stole your IP and sell it to somebody else.

eagsalazar2 4y ago
Just because it didn't work for you once doesn't mean it can't work. I know of many US companies using Eastern European and south American people very successfully and getting high quality contributions.
nootropicat 4y ago
From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.
- Viliam1234 4y ago
  Exactly this. I had a few Indian colleagues, contracted individually, and they were very smart and capable and a pleasure to work with. I also had an entire team contracted using a middleman Indian company, and they were barely competent. First they impressed us with an awesome demo (an animated login screen and some generic dialogs... which in hindsight they probably copied from some other project and reused to impress all customers), but afterwards all requests took a lot of time to complete, and the things they delivered were often not the things we have actually requested. We assumed this was a honest misunderstanding and thought "we can clarify the misunderstandings and let them do it over, and it will still be much cheaper than hiring a local team for the same job", but one year later we realized we still had nothing useful, and if we had hired a local team instead, they could have the same thing done in a month or two, so it would even be cheaper that way. But this was not about India, but about using the middleman. In a different company we have hired a local team using a middleman, and it also turned out to be a disaster. Not as horrible as with the Indian middleman though; it is probably easier to be completely shameless if you never have to meet the people in person. I guess the lesson is that you can outsource programming, but you can't outsource hiring programmers.

eagsalazar2 4y ago

Just because it didn't work for you once doesn't mean it can't work. I know of many US companies using Eastern European and south American people very successfully and getting high quality contributions.

nootropicat 4y ago

From all anecdotal reports of 'not working' I noticed all think of outsourcing as something they contract a middleman foreign company for, rather than hire individual remote developers. That company then hires locally. Then they wonder why it doesn't work. That's because no good local dev wants to work for an outsourcing company like that.

Viliam1234 4y ago
Exactly this. I had a few Indian colleagues, contracted individually, and they were very smart and capable and a pleasure to work with. I also had an entire team contracted using a middleman Indian company, and they were barely competent. First they impressed us with an awesome demo (an animated login screen and some generic dialogs... which in hindsight they probably copied from some other project and reused to impress all customers), but afterwards all requests took a lot of time to complete, and the things they delivered were often not the things we have actually requested. We assumed this was a honest misunderstanding and thought "we can clarify the misunderstandings and let them do it over, and it will still be much cheaper than hiring a local team for the same job", but one year later we realized we still had nothing useful, and if we had hired a local team instead, they could have the same thing done in a month or two, so it would even be cheaper that way. But this was not about India, but about using the middleman. In a different company we have hired a local team using a middleman, and it also turned out to be a disaster. Not as horrible as with the Indian middleman though; it is probably easier to be completely shameless if you never have to meet the people in person. I guess the lesson is that you can outsource programming, but you can't outsource hiring programmers.