Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

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The company where I work tried to outsource part of our app to India and Ukraine. The result was a mess and they paid a nice amount. Now we do everything in house.

I guess outsourcing companies pay their employees very little and they aren't able to hire top talent. And even if the pay was good, best programmers don't like working for outsourcing companies. The ones they do work for outsourcing companies don't care about the quality of their work as long as their company is paid so they get paid, too.

We assigned a task to one guy in Ukraine and two months latter he didn't complete it. One of our colleagues did it in three days.

My take is if you want to get good results from developers from another country, you have to hire them directly.

My experience working in such kind of projects is that bringing back in-house seldom happens, most key devs eventually leave, managers of both companies discuss some new deals during lunch time in how the offhsore company will make up for the loss of quality, and then is business as usual.

We assigned a task to one guy in Ukraine and two months latter he didn't complete it. One of our colleagues did it in three days.

Given the vast discrepancy in turnaround times -- I would seriously start to wonder about the person on your own team who was responsible for cutting out and assigning work to people outside the company.

Who apparently had not even a ballpark idea of how long the task should take. And who perhaps didn't do such hot job of communicating the requirements, now did they. And on top of that, apparently went to sleep on the task of, you know, tracking the status of the project, checking whether the intermediate deliverables (were there any)? actually worked and where up to team standards in terms of quality, etc. And yet they're still on the job, for some reason.

People love to blame freelancers, and they especially love water-cooler tales about how some project (whether by a person/team inside the company, or outside), and then was done by another person/team in a small fraction of the time. But usually there's more to the story.

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