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Comment by gfody | Hacker News Reader

> Around this time, the core development team was reformed in India rather than Redmond and some of the key Softway developers moved on to other projects like Monad (PowerShell) or left Microsoft.

This is indeed very sad. It seems like every project shipped overseas suffers the same fate. When will we ever learn that you can't "leverage the salary disparity" - you don't outsource your engineers when your core competency is engineering.

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This is not outsourcing. I'm an Indian and I know for a fact that Microsoft India employs the very best talent. Yes, there are cost benefits for having engineering done in India, but for companies such as Microsoft there shouldnt be a quality difference. However where you'd see quality difference is if you try to build an app for $50 with a company you found on a job website. Those employ regular run-of-the-mill, copy-paste-from-stackoverflow developers.

Offshoring then. Talent probably isn't even the problem. It could have more to do with putting 8000 miles between the devs working on some project and the people who care about that project. If you try to get an app built for $50 you're gonna have a bad time regardless of where you do it - that's not an argument.

> the devs working on some project and the people who care about that project.

Those two aren't mutually exclusive. Toyota employees in the US probably still care about the cars they're working on. I can verify that the Finnish employees at Microsoft do great work (e: and care about it), despite being 4700 miles away from Redmond.

I'm not trying to imply that offshore workers don't care about their work. If you take an existing project and send it far away from everyone who was involved with that project, that project will probably suffer, especially with software.

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