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Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

The story is old but I have to say that anyone who manages to outsource his job to China for a quarter of his paycheck and get top-notch quality (he was considered a rockstar programmer until they found out), has my respect.

You don't fire such a person, you appoint him CEO.

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This smacks of urban legend more than anything else, though I have worked with people who ran tech staffing businesses on company time while fully employed.

Lol. We do not live in a meritocracy, you do not become a CEO with mere talent.

(I realize you were being sarcastic, but misinterpreting you enabled me to make my point elegantly)

It does rather depend on how you define "meritocracy":

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Well, I am sure that he is a CEO in the hearts of the Chinese programmers he hired. :)

> he was considered a rockstar programmer until they found out

I assume his work was being done by a whole team of engineers, though; is it really all that difficult to get a team of five people to contribute more than you're expected to do by yourself? A recent graduate from a top Chinese university can be happy to make less than USD 2K / month. I know a few making 5000 yuan / month (USD $800) plus housing in a company-provided communal apartment.

If you're looking to outsource something to some young but highly intelligent chinese programmers, do let me know ;)

Getting stuff built to spec and with intelligible comments from outsourced overseas developers is impressive.

Outsourcing is "hard" (and usually fails) because usually, the process is performed by a middle manager who (a) is trying to optimize for cost, which hurts quality and is expensive in the long run, and (b) doesn't have the technical talent and therefore can't recognize it. In any country, the bottom of the barrel is going to be bad. But if you don't have the ability to pick talented people and others in the market do, you end up getting hurt by adverse selection. Then, outsourcing becomes really expensive.

Painting Bob as a slacker doesn't tell the whole story. He had to set up his own business. At least while he was ramping up, he had to hire, fire, train, and check the work. At the same time, he had to deal with inconveniences caused by time zones, and cover his tracks. Maybe he slacked once it was established and he could coast, but it's not easy to set up a business like that.

To win at the outsourcing game, you need to (a) pay well, so that people care, and (b) pick great people, because paying incompetent people well doesn't do anything. Going overseas might make (a) easier, but it doesn't make (b) less hard.

I don't intend to paint him as a slacker at all. I respect that what he did took a lot of effort to establish, but I doubt he did a lot of hiring and firing himself -- the article I read on this guy said he employed an existing chinese consulting company. What I'm assuming is that he paid that company enough to engage several engineers at once, which means I'm not surprised that "his" output was considered especially impressive.

I think the greatest obstacle to retaining chinese engineers is actually (c) communication across the language barrier.

I suspect at the start he would have done code reviews because otherwise he couldn't know if the other party [the consulting firm] was a competent entity.

I'm sure once he figured out their level of competence and how far he could trust their agency [e.g. How much direction they needed to succeed], I suspect that is really when the slacking started.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the second or third consulting company he had tried.

Honestly, I doubt that process took more than 3-6 months.

Do you find most Chinese programmers don't know written English?

All (recent) chinese people are supposed to know English (it's a mandatory subject at all levels of schooling), but fluency levels vary widely. It's generally not a big focus for engineers. At the startup I worked at last year, the founders had decent english and the employees knew almost nothing. The college students I know can communicate at an acceptable level, but (a) they are still highly prone to misunderstandings unless I make the effort to use simple phrasing and (b) there's a huge selection bias in which people I'm on speaking terms with.

I do find that for almost all the chinese people I know, it's more effective for me to communicate with them in written chinese (but, sadly, spoken english, as my spoken chinese is appalling).

So summing up... there might be a decent population of chinese programmers who can communicate in written english, but there's a much, much larger population that can't.

Fair enough. :)

I guess the much, much larger population is going to make less money if they do outsourced/consulting time work since they have to deal with a middleman because of it [who will take a cut and do project management/sales].

Also, this may sound weird, but jobs speaking english can pay better than programming jobs, which will cut down on the number of english-speaking programmers.

That sounds very weird but different job markets I suppose.

Why do you think that is?

Jobs speaking english involve serving english-speaking foreigners, who have money.

As others said, outsourcing in countries with cheap workforce is challenging quality wised. If I recall correctly from the original article, not only he delivered his work in time, but his code was considered to set the standard for both quality and documentation. When his colleagues had trouble, whatever language they were using, they send him their code and he returned it fixed with proper explanation for their mistakes.

Thanks for the offer. :)

Or at least head of outsourcing

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