Comment by sekasi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sekasi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't mean this quite in the 'derogatory' way it's going to sound like, but offshoring is a serious sign of trouble when it comes to commoditization.

If what you're doing as a business can be done for a fifth of the cost in the Philippines, India, etc, then you have a serious clock on your business model before the 'quality, quality, quality!!' argument runs out.

Seen it with a few things now. The biggest flaw that businesses do in this situation is believe in that the quality of the product will continue to outweigh the cost difference. It won't. ;/

By the way, I'm not saying there's inherently something wrong with the quality of work from those nations, I'm speaking strictly about offshore 'hubs' that are set up to purely be a cost-saving. Those type of hubs have a hugely different mentality when it comes to production in my experience.

"The biggest flaw that businesses do in this situation is believe in that the quality of the product will continue to outweigh the cost difference. It won't. ;/"

Do you count the loss in sales as cost? Or time to rework something? Sometimes it's hard to figure out if there's going to be a correlation before you do it.

About 10 years ago, we tried to do most of our work offshore. Company said they could hire 5 engineers for the price of one here in the states. We started looking overpaid and I'm sure the managers thought we were. It didn't last long. We still offshore, but it's much more strategic.

Sounds like a very familiar story to ours.

Point being, commoditization is not a binary. It's not on or off, there's varying degrees of just how bad it is. At some point during that scale, the quality argument tends to fall down a little bit and I've seen it happen a few times.

Interesting to hear you still offshore though, despite obvious troubles.

We had offshoring before. But the push 10 years ago was to do the bulk of work offshore. Like to have the lead here working with 5 developers there.

I can still see it working though. 5 to 1 is hard to ignore (although I think it's like 3 to 1 now). It comes down to implementation. Like everything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com