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Nontechs like outsourcing because they think it's cheap. This makes them bad at playing the outsourcing game to win. If you go for the cheap, you lose. If you

Nontechs like outsourcing because they think it's cheap. This makes them bad at playing the outsourcing game to win. If you go for the cheap, you lose. If you optimize for cheapness, you get poor work, abroad just as here. It's not that the talent level is the problem. There's plenty of underemployed talent overseas. It's engagement. There are a zillion sleazy outsourcing shops that charge U.S. clients $30/hour and pay $6/hour on the other end. If you go cheap, you're getting people paid the same damn wage they'd get if they walked across the street to a different low-paying El Sleazo outsourcing shop, so they're not going to be engaged. This is especially true if it's obvious that you plan on replacing them with local developers once you raise an A round. If you paid $30/hour (to worker; the cost to US client would be higher) in India or the Philippines you could attract top talent, assuming you know how to recognize it. (As in the U.S., paying highly doesn't guarantee you get good people. Look at the crap that Corporate America gets for CEOs despite paying millions per year. You actually need to be able to assess the talent, and few can.) If you're a non-tech, not a chance. Non-techs can't tell the difference between people like me and the 99 who convincingly (to a non-tech) say they're like me within the same country, so how are they going to do it across cultural and language barriers? Outsourcing can be profitable and, done well, it's a good thing for the world. However, nontechnical founders looking to play this first-stage-abroad game are going to lose. To get good foreign talent, a first prerequisite is to treat it with the same respect as good local talent. That means investing in their skills and careers, flying them to conferences, and treating them as (and, in fact, making them) a permanent part of the team. If you're just using them for temporary cheap labor and planning to hire permanent engineers locally once you raise a Series A, they'll figure it out (they're not stupid) and it will show in the work produced.

fat0wl 12y ago
yea i think this is the point that shadeless's comment misses. it's not like there is no talent in the world at large, but businesses have a hard enough time deciphering talent when they have 2 in-house developers and can read their entire code portfolio... these rubes are doomed as soon as they descend into no-man's-land. Personally I'd much rather have 1 ace developer than 10 of questionable value. at the corp I work at they have the luxury of going both ways, just hiring a pool of expensive devs & seeing which ones turn out to be the aces. I understand thats not feasible for startups. & lack of a technical co-founder makes singling out an ace very difficult. I'd try to get a programmer friend to pick out a likely monster programmer & start from there. Having non-technical people hire/negotiate for tech talent is just not feasible IMO. So much money trickles down the drain like that. Corps can survive it, startups can't.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  Completely agree - I've been at startups with 20-40 people where I was the best developer in the company...with 1 1/2 years of experience. I left those places quickly, it reeks of not knowing what they are doing. These places all had in common heavy interest in outsourcing when timelines were tough. They just wanted stuff done quickly, and didn't put importance on the execution. What that does is frustrates the developers that have to fix the bugs and refactor the heavily coupled code, and ultimately makes good developers want to leave.
  - fat0wl 12y ago
    yep it is messy like that even at corps, but thankfully once you deliver on a few good projects & show you are reliable they will often let you rip up a codebase & re-format the project as you'd like (perhaps while phasing out the previous iteration) rather than inheriting a codebase that you feel is..... beneath you (for lack of a less pompous phrase) :D it's cool, it lets you keep to some level of personal standards once you have management's trust (took me about a year & a half i think? to be able to oppose a conservative architectural recommendation & win)
- adamc 12y ago
  1 ace developer will have no communication overhead (internally), whereas 10 will have a ton... no contest if they are of "questionable value". Big companies/organizations do otherwise because of politics (hiring a better developer might cost more than the business manager) and incompetence (if business people are picking, they usually can't tell the difference). But smaller, stronger teams are ALWAYS better, outsourcing or not.
deleted 12y ago
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fat0wl 12y ago

yea i think this is the point that shadeless's comment misses. it's not like there is no talent in the world at large, but businesses have a hard enough time deciphering talent when they have 2 in-house developers and can read their entire code portfolio... these rubes are doomed as soon as they descend into no-man's-land. Personally I'd much rather have 1 ace developer than 10 of questionable value. at the corp I work at they have the luxury of going both ways, just hiring a pool of expensive devs & seeing which ones turn out to be the aces. I understand thats not feasible for startups. & lack of a technical co-founder makes singling out an ace very difficult. I'd try to get a programmer friend to pick out a likely monster programmer & start from there. Having non-technical people hire/negotiate for tech talent is just not feasible IMO. So much money trickles down the drain like that. Corps can survive it, startups can't.

Bahamut 12y ago
Completely agree - I've been at startups with 20-40 people where I was the best developer in the company...with 1 1/2 years of experience. I left those places quickly, it reeks of not knowing what they are doing. These places all had in common heavy interest in outsourcing when timelines were tough. They just wanted stuff done quickly, and didn't put importance on the execution. What that does is frustrates the developers that have to fix the bugs and refactor the heavily coupled code, and ultimately makes good developers want to leave.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  yep it is messy like that even at corps, but thankfully once you deliver on a few good projects & show you are reliable they will often let you rip up a codebase & re-format the project as you'd like (perhaps while phasing out the previous iteration) rather than inheriting a codebase that you feel is..... beneath you (for lack of a less pompous phrase) :D it's cool, it lets you keep to some level of personal standards once you have management's trust (took me about a year & a half i think? to be able to oppose a conservative architectural recommendation & win)
adamc 12y ago
1 ace developer will have no communication overhead (internally), whereas 10 will have a ton... no contest if they are of "questionable value". Big companies/organizations do otherwise because of politics (hiring a better developer might cost more than the business manager) and incompetence (if business people are picking, they usually can't tell the difference). But smaller, stronger teams are ALWAYS better, outsourcing or not.

deleted 12y ago

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