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Has anyone had any success with off shoring development jobs? At a large software company that I worked at, we worked with an Indian team, and I found that they

by mdkess 15y ago

Has anyone had any success with off shoring development jobs? At a large software company that I worked at, we worked with an Indian team, and I found that they were nothing but trouble. They would miss deadlines (with nothing but reassurances that everything was on track up until the day that we were supposed to release), and the code that they produced was both incredibly buggy and had poor code quality. Now, I probably cost the company 10x what they did, but still, I feel like it was a bad expense to offshore. They ended up creating a lot of work and resulted in lower quality products. Alas, software development is one field where it's easy to have very negative productivity. That said, this is only a single experience, so this may have been bad luck.

plinkplonk 15y ago
this has come up here before. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067423 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067423
kls 15y ago
Yes this is the common theme of outsourcing to other cultures, it has to do with cultural norms and everyday knowledge that we take for granted, the same thing would happen if you took the best American developers and assembled a team and then outsourced them to an Indian company to build software for an Indian market. You in the end have to write the software twice to get it developed offshore, once in a sudocode of diagrams and detailed functional specs and the second time in code by the outsourced team. The end result is that it saves very little and increase the risk of failure. The take away is that it is a bad bet unless you know what you are doing and are doing at a very large scale, for the majority of US companies it is not a good idea. Many are starting to realize this and bringing projects home, which is why I find this article to be suspect.

by mdkess 15y ago

plinkplonk 15y ago

this has come up here before. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067423 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067423

kls 15y ago

Yes this is the common theme of outsourcing to other cultures, it has to do with cultural norms and everyday knowledge that we take for granted, the same thing would happen if you took the best American developers and assembled a team and then outsourced them to an Indian company to build software for an Indian market. You in the end have to write the software twice to get it developed offshore, once in a sudocode of diagrams and detailed functional specs and the second time in code by the outsourced team. The end result is that it saves very little and increase the risk of failure. The take away is that it is a bad bet unless you know what you are doing and are doing at a very large scale, for the majority of US companies it is not a good idea. Many are starting to realize this and bringing projects home, which is why I find this article to be suspect.