Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would highly discourage a non-technical person from trying to manage a foreign outsourced software project. For what it's worth, I've managed a few such projects over the years with developers in India and China. My experience has been that you absolutely must have a technical person in house who should expect to spend a significant amount of time very thoroughly documenting and verifying their work. For a smaller project, it really doesn't make sense because you'd be able to finish the project yourself in the amount of time it takes you to manage an outsourced team. For larger projects, expect them to spend and bill at least 2-3x the hours (and 2-3x the number of developers) that you'd find with a local dev team. Also, don't expect any creativity or initiative to fill in gaps in your requirements... you will have to be very specific and explain every minor detail of functionality and behavior in order to get the project done right.

Also, don't expect any creativity or initiative to fill in gaps in your requirements... you will have to be very specific and explain every minor detail of functionality and behavior in order to get the project done right.

Completely agree with this.

But here's another way to look at it: why would the outsourced team show any creativity or initiative? They're basically being treated as a commodity, because typically the projects that go to such places do so because these projects are 'cost centres' - some business guy decided to get the 'i have an idea, the rest is implementation' part done as cheap (or "cost-efficient") as possible.

When the programming team has no engagement with the idea or the organisation or even the product they're contracted to build, why would they expend any creativity or initiative for it? Not everyone is personally driven by a sense of excellence, sometimes people just want to get the job done. And my experience in such places is that a lot of the programmers there aren't in it for the love of software/IT/tech, and more focussed on just getting a job done.

Agree on all points!

In general, I've found European talent(Romania, Poland etc.) to be more technically sound than Indian devs even if a little more expensive. This goes for both programming and design. The vast majority of Indian designers roaming on freelancing sites are absolutely crappy.

And yet, all freelance sites have their share of Indian devs and designers in the top workers list. They are the exceptions to the rule and little of what I say above applies to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com