Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianl | Hacker News Reader

If outsourced software in India is well known for being awful, I can't imagine what the quality must be like in the new frontier of cost savings.

View on HN

Actually, ex-Soviet nations have a huge emphasis on mathematics and similar scientific disciplines. You may get quite a few "Your requirement is stupid", but the code quality will probably be not that bad (assuming the code you need is heavy on algorithms).

Actually that would be quite a breath of fresh air, because one of the biggest problems I remember in my experience with outsourcing to an Indian agency in '04/'05 was the complete lack of feedback or collaboration. They basically expected us to give exact details specs, and provided no evaluation of the product as they went. The code was alright, but it was as if they were doing a school programming assignment, seemingly without consciousness of the fact they were building a product that required people to interact with it. I can understand this as a strategy to maximize billable hours, but it doesn't do shit for building repeat business.

Hmm, having handled some of these assignments, I would say it's not done to increase billing hours. People keep their traps shut for two reasons: deeply hierarchical Indian org structures that don't tolerate opinion, and wanting to reduce friction as much as possible. The times we have pushed back we have been faced with "well, what do you know?" When that happens, the first guy to get slammed is the guy who asked questions. Rinse and repeat over a couple of projects and you get teams that will unquestioningly build you a handcart with a rocket engine.

Wanted to add, for every dollar an Indian firm makes, the average developer gets probably around 8-10 cents or less. When you are at a subsistence level like that, it's difficult to ask questions. You focus on the insecurity instead.

Hm yes, I recall an article about how there's a distinct cultural dichotomy where different countries tend to fall on one side or the other and the implications for management. How an Indian boss, for instance, knows that clues of things going awry are more subtle, and he must draw them out through questioning, whereas for an American boss that might be considered micro-management that would rub the employees the wrong way.

For every dollar a good Indian firm makes, the average developer gets anywhere between 50 and 80 cents. Good devs are equally expensive anywhere, but oddly enough in India the salaries don't grow linearly when compared with first world salaries. A dev with a year of experience will cost 1/5 what he/she would cost in the first world. A (good) dev with 15 years of experience would cost 1/2 what he/she would cost in the US.

This was something we covered in some detail in our talk at Rubyconf last year. Here's the link FWIW: http://speakerrate.com/talks/5120-india-ruby

This is my ignorance showing, but are there actually Indian devs with 15 years experience? I was under the impression that the culture forced devs into management roles before they reached that point.

I'm an example. But the reason in my case is lack of an engineering degree which has luckily helped stay away from management.

Eastern bloc is awful communication wise - I don't know about India but I know about eastern Europe.

When people are told for a couple of generations that they should shut their mouths and look down if they don't want their families hurt. They tend to obey.

As someone who worked in an outsourcing company of former USSR, I don't think that's the case really, most developers are pretty young. If anything, they are unnecessarily opinionated.

How about their managers? To me its the other side of the coin - like depressive people have manic phases.

My experience was that I was development lead of a project that had development outsourced to a former Yugoslav republic. We had clear agreement (on all levels) that we shall use direct communication on appropriate levels. But what happened in reality was that every memo or inquiry I did - the local development lead would not respond to me directly in a timely fashion. Instead the information would be passed up to the CEO of the company who would then proceed to send this information to my Executive Director who would then send it to me (in an understandably untimely fashion). Needles to say we had to break the effort and search for local developers.

And further east you go more of this effect you see - people refuse to convey information that is clearly in their jurisdiction, because their boss might not agree with everything.

A fucking nightmare.

Oh yes, the management :)

I actually began writing about it, but then decided I shouldn't generalize about all of Eastern Europe from just my experience.

Management tends to be poor to atrocious, effective management is seriously lacking through all industries there. Add to that resource constraints and competitive pressure you have in outsourcing shops, and it multiplies many-fold.

Good devs are expensive everywhere (especially when GazProm used to pay 300 euros an hour for SAP support person) and some jobs are outsourced to neighbours.

That sounds very much like my experience with outsourcing to Romania. The core library and algorithms where very solid, the actual UI and whole application experience was somewhat less so.

I've had some decent code written by people in the Bloc countries for a pittance. Was for pretty simple stuff, though, no idea how they would have fared on more challenging things.

The trick is to find the right people in India to outsource it too.

The right people in India to outsource to have all already moved to Silicon Valley.

Not true. There are good software companies in India to whom you can outsource your work and be somewhat confident that it's done in a reasonable manner.

Many people won't go to them because they are not cheap.

Part of the problem is also the relationship between the managers and the outsourced programming team.

If you spend time in terms of vetting the team for people you are comfortable with, take the time to be as clear and detailed as possible with the requirements, have a good continuous build system so that you can see the software being developed daily, and have direct, continuous communication channels to the coders, one would have a far better experience.

Untrue. They represent only a part of the talented people. I know, we constantly hear about the quirkiness of people at the freelance sites and forums. Perhaps, that's not the best place to look.

If you're not looking for an overtly complicated project, try hiring undergraduate students. Not from any university though. Try the students IIT's and BITS Pilani. These are the foremost technical institute in the country. So, how do get in contact with them? Visit their Computer Science Association websites, contact their student president to help you out. More often than not, you will find brilliant programming talent this way. Some of them will value a letter of recommendation (that may help in their MS or PhD) very highly.

If not that way, always insist on seeing the portfolio/previous work of the guy you'll be outsourcing too. Else chances are you might end up outsourcing, say a e-commerce implementation, to someone just learnt how to echo in php.

I do know why this was downvoted, but it was a sincere advcie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com