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In my experience when it comes to software development you get what you pay for. It's why I ask for US salaries even though I live in a country with an incredibly low cost of living.

It’s difficult to overcome the difficulties created because of the the India time zone difference. It’s literally the AM/PM opposite for Silicon Valley companies. Real-time communication is a struggle, even with Slack or Zoom. You’re forced into asynchronous communication which automatically imposes a 12-hour cost because you don’t get a response until their daytime which is the next day for you. It’s good for Indian outsourcing firms because their incentive is time billing. Bad for your company because that JIRA ticket you have now takes 2x to 10x as long to resolve.

Yeah I didn't want to get into that but it can even be a 24 hr cost if the people in india are acting bad or incompetent. A single simple change request can actually cost an entire week.

Mon: We need to add this X change to the project.

Tues:I Just got in and saw your email. I have a question about something in it.

Wed:Here is the clarification you asked for.

Thurs:Thanks for the clarification. I've updated the change request please sign.

Fri:Here is the sign off.

Mon:ok we are getting started on it.

The bulk of the 'bad' outsourcing projects that I've seen suffered from a local problem: bad management. Properly managed outsourcing can work but you have to ensure that you have very good control. Hint: if you can't deal with remote workers then you can forget about outsourcing.

Yes but competent developers are not stupid, why would they work for a cheap outsourcing agency. If you want cheap you won’t get competent developers anywhere.

The competent people in India usually end up working for foreign companies directly in a development center, or for a WITCH type company in dev centers.

I assume some work for Indian companies doing ordinary development work, banks, government, manufacturing.

Also competent people in Indian are not so cheap any more. The days of IIT Bangalore top 10% of class graduates working for $5K a year are long gone. The $8K average salary is going to lead to a world of hurt.

> prove he was a hotshot

First time I heard the term "offshore", the VP who used it sound like he was so clever. It should be noted the company was gone within two years. People who worked with this VP at another company didn't want to talk about when I ran into them later.

> Also competent people in Indian are not so cheap any more. The days of IIT Bangalore top 10% of class graduates working for $5K a year are long gone.

Yes, but IIUC, the going rate for FAANG quality mid-level engineers is still about the same as entry level startup engineers in The Bay, LA, NYC, Seattle, etc (most of the US SWE workforce).

Given the timezone, cultural, supervision, issues of offshoring, that makes it less of a bargain than it used to be.

Supervision - people in the USA have to oversee the offshore work, maybe even travel overseas, and video calls at 11 PM two or three times a week gets real old real fast, or else the people in India have to work difficult hours three times a week for conferences and they are exhausted and miserable.

> The code was also...interesting to look at. Talk about unmaintainable lol.

I've seen outsourced code where some logic was spread over 800 lines of copy/pasta horror for what should have been about three functions and two for loops.

When you look at the GNAFAM, for all that is wrong at these companies, they're ruling the software world and they must doing something right. Apparently outsourcing wasn't exactly the reason for these to become successful.

I cannot even imagine how much work GAFAM outsource. Don't know about Apple, only for Google and Facebook, and only for Eastern Europe, but dude, they often outsource both internal and external projects, even very visible parts of their business. Sometimes, the actual devs cannot talk about it nor put on resumes because of NDAs.

Also my experience with a Polish outsourcing firm that promised a lot to one of my client. Costed over 200k, one year late, full of bugs and security vulnerabilies. I was brought on the project later, fired the outsourcing firm and rewrote the whole codebase in 8 months and billed maybe 50k total. Outsourcing is rarely cheaper and certainly not on par with quality.

Sounds like you are underpaid

I don't think the client was in the USA. If it was, of course it would be a tremendous bargain.

Dude they would have paid 200k for those 8 months!

So? He feels he was fairly compensated and he demonstrated that American developers can still be the best value per dollar invested. That's damned important and I thank him.

You are way, way too cheap. Orders of magnitude too cheap.

Oh he tried Poland too. I found a different problem with them. They don't even recognize what a business agreement is. The culture is matter of factly dishonest.

Example. What the progress update this week?

Oh we stopped working on your project.

ummm..why?

Another offer for more money came in.

Yeah thats when you tell them you have a project you are on and you can do theirs until next week.

hahahaha very fun citizen, you know how it is though.

ummm no I don't. So when are you going to start again.

Probably a couple of weeks, I'll let you know.

So are you going to refund me the money for the SLA violation in your contract?

hahahaa you know nobody does that. You really are funny citizen.

Umm...yeah...

Spot on in your observations. Staff churn and significantly decreased product quality were two notable outcomes I've seen as well. Income growth is easier in markets that are industrializing, so it's even easier to jump ship than it is here. You can trip into a new role that might pay 20% more. So, the staff don't last long.

Was that an issue with them being Indian, or that your CEO did a terrible job of vetting the firm he hired?

From what I hear this is a pretty common experience. It would be interesting to hear the other side - when outsourcing works. I think it tends to be when the task is extremely well-defined, like "follow this standard workflow to deal with this stream of requests to grant/remove access".

Right. The impact of different cultures and worldviews cannot be overstated. Mental interpretation of general directives varies wildly enough between Americans of different backgrounds, different ages, different neurodivergences to create problems even with them all sharing the same language and culture. The further you go the less you can rely on everybody being on the same page.

You get what you pay for. our devops guy is in India. He does a great job and communicates well. I wouldn't say he's cheap though. We went with him because he was the best applicant and he's paid accordingly.

Not cheaper than his US equivalent?

we pay him in line with someone in the midwest would be making. its significantly more than someone in southeast Asia. Its worth it to make sure he doesn't jump ship.

When it comes to working with outsourced devs, nationality doesn’t really matter when it comes to dev competence.

The problem is not that there are no good devs in India, the problem is that there are no good devs in India working for $10k a year. At least not for long.

It is a hugely complex socioeconomic issue, nothing to do with race. Many of the people were quite nice to work with but were trapped in a race to the bottom that their entire tech industry is based on. I know from some of the people that I talked to that they literally quit to change companies over a less than $100 pay raise. Its that bad.

India is a very poor country overall. There is a huge amount of dog eat dog derived from the fact that they are only being hired for the low cost and no other consideration.

To directly answer your question, the CEO had them do one other project before for another company and it went ok. I guess I wasn't there for that.

The problem is outsourcing firms. The job market is so hot that developers jump ship all the time. You’ll also interface with a “project manager” whose job will be to forward what you say to the developers. And finally, outsourcing is an entry-level job—more experienced developers move to better positions.

Companies that have had success “outsourcing” to India open up their own office and hire permanent employees.

Just like we love to say “cheap Chinese” for physical goods, we say “subpar Indian outsourcing…” for digital goods/tech support.

Even though most of what we use, cheap or not, comes from China. And many devs, talented or not, are from India.

I recall a tenured professor at a well known university who liked to bring the Indian accent along (he’s a white dude) when explaining “how bad India is at writing software”….

I think it's a different phenomenon. There are plenty of extremely good devs in India, it's just that they won't work for peanuts. They will be paid similarly to devs in some western countries.

> Was that an issue with them being Indian

There are a gazillion very talented Indian developers, but they're (usually) not the ones working at budget outsourcing shops...

Managing contractors is a skill. India, being a major destination for offshore outsourcing has a business culture in this space that has to be managed both actively by people and by contract.

It’s no different than anything else. A home builder needs contractors to scale and needs to learn how to manage contracts and vendors as well. If you’re selling services as a contractor, how you work for a auto company is different than a bank or a government agency.

The answer to your question is always “yes”. The contractor oversold its ability and failed to retain talent. The CEO believed what he wanted to hear and didn’t didn’t due appropriate due diligence as he either didn’t trust or has already fired his own people.

I’ve never seen a successful “lets outsource this to X to save money” initiative that was a success from a best value perspective. (Many succeed in saving short-term money though) I have seen “let’s outsource this function outside of our wheelhouse” projects awarded to offshore companies that have worked out well.

He was probably getting paid on the down low. That's what precipitates a lot of these outsourcing deals. 4% off the top. I'm on the. consulting end of things now and thats SOP