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I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff (plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we scutt
by oldgregg 17y ago
I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff (plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we scuttled the whole office and started everything from scratch. Everything they produced was garbage. Can you find talented people in India? YES. But it will cost you so much there is no point.
There is no sense of company loyalty. There is no sense of how to work independently without being told what to do. Status is defined as 1) how many people work under you, and 2) how many servants you have. If another company offers to give them 5 junior programmers ("freshers") to work under them instead of 4 you can kiss them goodbye. Oh, and never take their word about anything. You need to review the code on a daily basis to make sure something is actually getting done. Not to mention, while they will tell you otherwise, java and .net is the only thing they give a rip about, maybe a little php.
A startup is an inherently creative process. It would be like Bono outsourcing a new album-- then finding out they only play sitar. He would spend TONS of time documenting everything about how he wants it to sound and telling them in detail exactly how it should work. If he is lucky they will get 75% there. Creative processes just don't work like that.
Large bureaucratic organizations can squeeze the cost savings out of outsourcing, but for a startup it's just asinine. The only exception is VERY rote tasks. Basically just data mining. Send them a link to a website that you want mined and they will do it pretty cheap. Now, you could probably write a script to do it in about the same time, but in some cases it's easier just to give it to them.
Now that I think about it, the reason I left to do a startup was because I wanted to get away from people who get a big chubby over Thomas Friedman but don't have a damn clue about software development.
I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.
- joubert 17y agoa little servant boy?
- oldgregg 17y agotheir words, not mine. the caste system is alive and well, now it just has a capitalist tinge to it.
- solutionyogi 17y agoThat's incorrect. In India, a small company office will have full time 'peon' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon . This person will be responsible for various office chores, the main one being to get 'tea' from nearby teashop. [Imagine having an office boy here who gets a Starbucks coffee for you when asked.] This happens because in India, concept of 'vending machine' is not very popular and labor is cheap. A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. I am from a smaller city in India and I haven't seen any caste system discrimination in my 24 years of living there.
- anamax 17y ago> A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. Oh really? Let me suggest that you're using "caste" in a somewhat different way than we are.
- joubert 17y agoHow much does such a boy (or girl?) typically get paid? Do the workers tip him/her or is it fixed wages?
- shiranaihito 17y ago> I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing. Now that sounds fascinating. Maybe you could share some details on that?
- oldgregg 17y agoWe had been doing some pretty standard manufacturing stuff for the publishing industry so when we went to build out a new office we decided to do it ourselves. Visited factories for furniture, electronics, marble, fixtures... Everything custom made and dropped in a few containers. Definitely cheaper than if we had gotten everything locally, and although it did take some time, the process was a fun cross cultural adventure. I haven't done any projects like this, but I think the next big thing is going to be random iphone/bluetooth devices. Imagine any kind of small object and add low power internet access over bluetooth to it... whole new world of opportunities... Random stuff, like take this object and make all the data available on your iphone... http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/car/aa31/ http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/car/aa31/
- shiranaihito 17y agoI heard you have to keep a very close eye on your containers in China though. But yeah, sounds cool!