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Comment by t1o5 | Hacker News Reader

The author forgot to mention how much he paid for the offshore team. There was no mention of money in the things that went wrong. I think the cost is a very important factor if you expect a high quality project.

I have seen many people who bash India and Indian engineers for low quality work, but lets get to the crux of the problem. Its not that Indian engineers are all bad. They come in all shapes and sizes. You will get the best ones if you pay enough. You pay cheap, you get cheap.

Where can you get cheap ones ? From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources. The employees in turn will also treat their jobs along those lines.

So if you need high quality work, please don't go to these giant corporations. If you look hard enough, you will find small high quality places, but they are not cheap and not 'scalable' like your manager wants them to be.

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The last time I managed outsourced developers I made this joke.

"There are some truly amazing Indian developers, it's just a shame none of them are in India".

My observation was that the outsourced developers I managed, the good ones usually got visa's and buggered off abroad even though they where getting near UK wages in India they could earn more by moving.

Agree. What I see is, skilled ones are flocking to Canada and Australia because of their merit based immigration system.

H1B has lost its luster because its now a lottery visa, no place for skills. The Indian IT biggies flood H1B market with petitions claiming high skills for a meager developer.

There are also a lot booming startups in many cities spread across India. You can find the best ones there too.

Not really, I don't know a single top student who is studying in Canada or Australia. Maybe you are referring specifically moving for work.

Australian wages are significantly lower than those in the US and for the most part, it isn't on anyone's mind to apply there. In my experience, students apply to Australia when they can't compete for good universities in the US. Canada is very sensitive to GPA values. I know of cases, where literally the absolute cream of the cream, with a strong profile to show for it, have been rejected from Canadian institutes, for reasons that no one seems to have figured out yet.

In the past few years, I know a lot more people who are gravitating towards the EU over the US, but I don't don't hear much about moving to either Canada or Australia for work or education.

That being said, the lottery system for giving the h1b is universally loathed.Some of smartest people I know are struggling to get one, while Infosys keeps sending utterly mediocre people in droves to the US. I hope it does become a merit based system (assuming the number of spots stay constant), I however have no idea as to how merit should be decided.

Alternatively, the good ones that stay in India may not be interested in working as contractors for Westerners. India has a population of 1.3 billion - there are certainly some top of the line engineers and computer scientists there.

True - with that many people there simply has to be talent, the question is how to find it.

That’s why it was a joke and not an assertion of fact ;).

There is also the culture of "making it to management". For some people being general staff is not prestigious enough, so some people pursue a managerial path and leave their programming skills behind.

>the good ones that stay in India may not be interested in working as contractors for Westerners.

I had plenty of brilliant IT colleagues in a nondescript small town in rural south India. Almost none of them wanted to do any contract work or even get in the rat race.

They were working on porting BioShock to Mac OS and I was amazed at what they could achieve in a limited timespan

Very interesting story ! Did they worked for a local firm contracting with the Bioshock publisher or a indian subsidiary of this publiesher ? How did the publisher find them out ? How did they meet and acquire their competencies ?

I think Feral Interactive worked with my colleagues for the port. I was in a different team working on Android for HP Printers

This statement screams failure - "We would have one week to recruit developers from our company's off-shoring pool and then two weeks to coach the team."

Basically, they were forced by their corporate entity to hire people that did not have the right experience and then train them in two weeks? <sarcasm> Sounds like a recipe for success! </sarcasm>

I've been in the position before where I had to work with a staffing firm and the majority of the resumes they provided were not a fit in any shape or form. Management did the smart thing and we found somebody else who could give us a better pool of candidates.

Yeah, the way they did it wouldn't have worked any better if it were the Berlin office trying to work with the Munich office.

Who here would take a skills test to transfer internal projects?

The whole article is one red flag after another. Judge developers individually, judge harshly, and fire quickly. Bad developers require endless management while great developers require minimal oversight.

In my experience with off shore development I found the people I worked with to be extremely hard working and eager to learn. The programming was never the problem, the problem was the lack of understanding the business use cases of what we were building. Because they had no proximity to the business problem we were attempting to solve, they had a hard time making the right decision on their own. Specs had to be very, very detailed.

Or as the analogy was written in 1946: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

I work with incredibly talented Indian engineers. The secret is that they're being paid like talented engineers.

I agree, you get what you pay for.

This is too simplistic and doesn't match my experience.

It is true that if you pay rubbish you are likely to get low quality personnel. If you pay well, then you may or may not get quality.

  It is true that if you pay rubbish you are likely to get low quality personnel. If you pay well, then you may or may not get quality.

That sounds about right for software developers everywhere.

The thing is that you don't really buy developers or even developer's time but a service which is a more complex package where your interests and those of the people who sell you the package are not alligned.

> From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources.

I've worked in those companies, they do treat employees as resources. I was amazed how executives, RH and even Project Managers refered to developers literally as "resources", example: "We are happy to announce we have five new resources in project X".

No one seemed to care, that mentality was just sad.

The best response to people calling individual contributors "resources" is to politely correct them. If the abusive terminology continues, then the "resources" have the right to "return the favor" by setting the standard in the culture of referring to managers as "overhead" (e.g. "I should ask my 'overhead' if I really need to attend that stupid meeting. I might be able to dodge it so we can get this new feature checked in.")

Problem is large orgs are political by nature. If you acted that way chances are you'd be sidelined into some dead end thing, given all the crap work, or even laid off as "not a good fit" or something. If you were the kind of person who didn't care about those possibilities then you might as well be working for a small company where you'd have a lot more fun... which is a backward way of saying that the people who work at large corps often do value security and stability and do care about keeping their jobs.

Personally I'm just trying to figure out where I can get the quote "Make game of that which makes as much of thee" tattooed on my body.

I once had a lead engineer refer to me as a "resource" during a meeting while I was in the room. As in, my boss was having a discussion with a senior manager and pointed at me, referring to me as "that resource."

That lead engineer was later promoted to VP...

Well, at least they're honest about it. It's a shame the people under can't be as open.

When you deal with enough people, this just becomes a fact no matter where you are. In big companies, this happens.

My boss has often used the term ressources when talking about me and my collegue, usually saying that she has only two ressources to work on the current project. But since it's usually when pushing back against more demands of the sales people, I don't mind.

Although I would be offended (and weirded out) too, is it possible it's a quirk of geographical variation in language? Resources are by definition valuable, after all.

Any outsourcing firm, though, has a basic dilemma. Even firms that outsource to other expensive US locations.

It's the bait and switch. They give you the top talent at first, to make the sale. Then they slowly swap them out, because they are trying to use the top talent to close a sale with a different client.

There's no real way to remove that incentive. You can try, but the time and energy needed usually invalidates the initial business case.

The author didn’t mention exact pay, but he claimed they waste a million Euros on this team of about 10 in less than year.

That should provide ballpark figures, and that doesn’t seem underpaid. Unless pay was split unfairly by the “hierarchy”.

How much of those million Euros went to the actual employees ? I agree with you that the pay was split unfairly by the “hierarchy”.

Big Indian IT firms makes a killing when it comes to billing clients. Not much of that money trickles down to the employees who actually do the job. The employees are plagued with "performance appraisals", "yearly evaluations" to fight for meager raises.

A modestly sutainible consulting business probably bills at about 2.5x salary. Without considering any materials cost (which is a dubious assumption) that puts average compensation of the ten member team at 40k/year. Note that the senior person or people on the team responsible for attending meetings and communications almost certainly make a multiple of that. And the juniors who are most profitable for a "body count" type contract often make a fraction of that and perform most of the work.

On the other hand, organizations that allow themselves to be in the business of saving money are not really results focused anyway. They're often buying based on the difference between a team of ten and a team of eight because the team of ten is easier to defend to the next layer of management. Team count is the same sort of metric as lines of code.

I read it as costing a million euros to clean up the mess afterwards and get the software that should have been done into a state where it could actually be released.

I think the million Euros was the cost to clean it up afterwards,

It is possible to read that sentence as "million Euros spent to deliver working solution, which includes a full rewrite of everything employing well-paid senior-level engineers in Europe".

The author says they spent a million euro for a year. Even assuming that includes the one FTE in Germany, for 10 devs in India, they definitely weren't paying bottom dollar.

Running my own startup I have one absolute rule: If you are not an expert in it, then don't outsource.

I outsourced my business and marketing to team in US/UK and it was an absolute disaster. Took me long to realize that you can only outsource tasks which you have expertise in and which can be measured.

> You will get the best ones if you pay enough.

No you won’t, all the best Indian developers are somewhere else, getting paid more than they could ever hope to in India.

Most of us are not the ones making the decision to offshore, or the ones choosing the firm to outsource to. Most of us are likely the ones that have to deal with the output.

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