Hacker News Reader

Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

To me this looks like the old outsourcing myth in a new(?) disguise.

The question remains: How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like these?

Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever. How am I supposed to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests? Database Development?

I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid. Over here in the real world it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to speed, even on small tasks. In my expirience outsourcing makes more sense for slightly bigger chunks, to justify the overhead, instead of the teeny weeny bits.

View on HN

I opened an office for a company in India (in protest). Eight people on staff (plus a little servant boy to serve them tea twice a day). One year later we scuttled the whole office and started everything from scratch. Everything they produced was garbage. Can you find talented people in India? YES. But it will cost you so much there is no point.

There is no sense of company loyalty. There is no sense of how to work independently without being told what to do. Status is defined as 1) how many people work under you, and 2) how many servants you have. If another company offers to give them 5 junior programmers ("freshers") to work under them instead of 4 you can kiss them goodbye. Oh, and never take their word about anything. You need to review the code on a daily basis to make sure something is actually getting done. Not to mention, while they will tell you otherwise, java and .net is the only thing they give a rip about, maybe a little php.

A startup is an inherently creative process. It would be like Bono outsourcing a new album-- then finding out they only play sitar. He would spend TONS of time documenting everything about how he wants it to sound and telling them in detail exactly how it should work. If he is lucky they will get 75% there. Creative processes just don't work like that.

Large bureaucratic organizations can squeeze the cost savings out of outsourcing, but for a startup it's just asinine. The only exception is VERY rote tasks. Basically just data mining. Send them a link to a website that you want mined and they will do it pretty cheap. Now, you could probably write a script to do it in about the same time, but in some cases it's easier just to give it to them.

Now that I think about it, the reason I left to do a startup was because I wanted to get away from people who get a big chubby over Thomas Friedman but don't have a damn clue about software development.

I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.

> I've had much more luck and a hell of a lot more fun traipsing around Guangdong and dabbling in manufacturing.

Now that sounds fascinating. Maybe you could share some details on that?

We had been doing some pretty standard manufacturing stuff for the publishing industry so when we went to build out a new office we decided to do it ourselves. Visited factories for furniture, electronics, marble, fixtures... Everything custom made and dropped in a few containers. Definitely cheaper than if we had gotten everything locally, and although it did take some time, the process was a fun cross cultural adventure.

I haven't done any projects like this, but I think the next big thing is going to be random iphone/bluetooth devices. Imagine any kind of small object and add low power internet access over bluetooth to it... whole new world of opportunities... Random stuff, like take this object and make all the data available on your iphone...

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/car/aa31/

I heard you have to keep a very close eye on your containers in China though.

But yeah, sounds cool!

a little servant boy?

their words, not mine. the caste system is alive and well, now it just has a capitalist tinge to it.

That's incorrect. In India, a small company office will have full time 'peon' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon . This person will be responsible for various office chores, the main one being to get 'tea' from nearby teashop. [Imagine having an office boy here who gets a Starbucks coffee for you when asked.] This happens because in India, concept of 'vending machine' is not very popular and labor is cheap. A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste. I am from a smaller city in India and I haven't seen any caste system discrimination in my 24 years of living there.

> A lot of times, young kid from a poor family seem to take up this job. This has nothing whatsoever to do with caste.

Oh really?

Let me suggest that you're using "caste" in a somewhat different way than we are.

How much does such a boy (or girl?) typically get paid? Do the workers tip him/her or is it fixed wages?

>How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like these?

You spend time up front to find them. With a few hours of up-front work it's not very difficult.

>Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever. How am I supposed to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests? Database Development?

We've outsourced post-launch bugs to a very talented developer who works for us 2-8 hours per week depending on the bugs we find.

Creating unit tests is one of the easiest development tasks to outsource, and you'll find out pretty quickly whether your object model makes sense when you assign this to someone who didn't build the objects themselves.

>I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid.

But that doesn't mean outsourcing is bogus, or that it doesn't work.

>it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to speed, even on small tasks.

If you're working on a credit card processing system you are correct due to the complexity. But most apps are not this complex, and you'd be surprised how quickly a solid developer can start fixing bugs on a system they've never seen before if they are talented and the architecture is sound.

You spend time up front to find them. With a few hours of up-front work it's not very difficult.

Well, but upfront I don't even know the tasks that may crop up in the future. And once I encounter them I can often not be sure whether they're one-off or recurring. I just don't see how this is any quicker (or different, tbh) to just finding people when you need them - and hiring them or contracting to them.

The author apparently wants me to avoid hiring people and contract out everything instead. I have never seen that work on such a fine-grained level. I'd need a PA just to spend the time of finding and managing all those micro-contractors.

But that doesn't mean outsourcing is bogus, or that it doesn't work.

Well, I didn't say it wouldn't. I'm just saying it was quite overhyped for a while ("just outsource everything to India") and this article seems to beat that dead horse again, from a slightly different angle.

We've outsourced post-launch bugs to a very talented developer who works for us 2-8 hours per week depending on the bugs we find.

Sorry, but that sounds absurd to me, unless your app is of the truly trivial kind. Bugfixing normally requires a deep understanding of the codebase and is exactly the kind of work that makes not much sense to outsource.

And how is a "post-launch bug" different from a "pre-launch bug", btw?

If it's honestly cheaper to have an external contractor learn your codebase and fix your bugs, than to have your in-house staff take care of that, then I think you have much bigger problems in first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com