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Comment by js4ever | Hacker News Reader

I had terrible experience with projects outsourced to india... But on the other side I got amazing experience with indian talents... hired at European salary level like rest of the team.

I'm now hiring more and more dev from India and they are in the top performers tier from my team. Just don't try to pay them peanuts... And respect them as any other good dev from western countries.

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You probably already know this: This has less to do with India or Indians and more to do with the fact that outsourcing a whole project tends to go to low bidders and hiring is held at a high bar. This is just self selection. Pay top dollar and you’ll get really good results with outsourcing as well.

tl;dr - Large IT consultancies profit on arbitrage between their salary costs and your billing rates. And give zero damns about your project's success.

In my personal experience theres always a honey moon period with these devs until they start taking on other clients as yourself. Then the technical debt starts to creep in and you end up as a hostage, unable to switch them out and unable to run your business without them without incurring huge downtime that will impact your revenues.

Glad you had success, we did too, that is until we realized sprints were taking longer and longer, and we were fixing the same bugs over and over.

I don't know why this happens, they are top notch, everything is great and then they play mind games. Reading a bit about Indian culture, this type of trickery is actually not frowned upon but rather celebrated as "shrewdness".

So take any success with Indian teams with a grain of salt.

Same here, complete project outsourced, outcome was a security and code quality nightmare. While incorporating individuals in the team and follow the same workflow had good results.

I see this happening all the time, majority of the people working in service based companies are bad at all the steps of development of any kind of software project. But there is an other side to it. Form a long time I am trying to get into consulting, companies don't want to see the background of us(devs). Majority of the times there is no response or they want to see some "white papers".

Would recommend you look at more focused consultancies that do one thing, very well.

Avoid shops that have diner-style "We can do anything, and we're great at all of it!" marketing. And also ones which require a heavy PM footprint: that's a good sign they don't trust their own devs.

The former cares about capability; the latter just cares about minimizing labor costs and getting clients to sign.

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