Comment by rootsudo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rootsudo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, they listed hourly rates for China and Argentina but abruptly drop it for India, lol!

The article speaks against my experience and working alongside some talented people in Argentina, China, India and surprised they didn't list it - The Philippines.

The hourly rates also don't seem likely for what "they're" paying them, but more what the end client is. I don't see $35/hr common in China for a BPO/offshore provider, see that as what is being billed to the end customer.

And at that point, $35, 45, 60/hr dev rates for Dynamics CRM and Salesforce, might as well employ locally. You're not saving much, if at all. Geez.

But the cherry on top:

"A funny fact about offshoring to Ukraine is that we, as Americans, wake up when the sun is up. But when I came to the office, no one was there. They are not getting there until 11 AM – 11:30 AM.

(Editor comment: it is not always the case, in fact, the majority of Ukrainian developers prefer starting their day at 9 AM – 11 AM)"

Lol, what is this. What. It's simply hilarious this is even there at all.

They have other hilarious comments like this about Mexico:

"You would think that since we are so close to them, there would be less of a language barrier"

Because we all know if you get close enough to a person, they'll start speaking english.

Some real insights on China as well:

"One of the main challenges that we had with China is that we are on the other side of the globe. You could hardly be more opposite on the clock."

Shocker that a guy who had apparently never even looked at a map wasn't great at running an outsourcing operation.

As someone who used to freelance for US companies from Slovenia ... damn right I started working at 11am or lter. You expect me to stay available for meetings until your 4pm (my midnight), I sure as heck won’t start coding at 9am lol

12pm to 10pm is a perfectly fine workday with lots of overlap for communication

The hourly rates are quite meaningless anyway. If you look for the cheapest price, the offshore providers will give you fresh grads who muddle through the work with little guidance and supervision. This is especially true for clients who aren't perceived to be particularly important in the long term.

It's easy enough to see what the money gets you in Ukraine, since developers there are paid in USD or EUR anyway. And the outsourcing company takes a big cut of what you pay.

> A funny fact about offshoring to Ukraine is that we, as Americans, wake up when the sun is up.

As an American I definitely do not get up when the sun is up. And, in fact, most of the people I know in America do not.

Yeah this succinctly typifies the extreme degree of self-blindness in the whole article.

This is completely false in my experience. Ukraine is among the top countries for IT talent, end of story. USSR education (until recently) coupled with very low COL make it a top destination. That's going to decline as most Ukr devs move out of the country though.

The author idiotically projected one office's habits in Kiev to all Ukrainian technologists. Absurd.

I've worked with some phenomenal talent in Kiev. I've also had people who would over-engineer the simplest solution in comical ways, that had to be let go. Not unlike engineers everywhere.

What was one example where a simple solution was over-engineered? (I ask this in order to help me better avoid my own over-engineering habits.)

I gave a talented engineer, who was also a relatively fresh graduate, a task to build a framework that would convert pieces of xml state that rendered in a non-web GUI into a React representation.

His solution ended up using as many new features as possible, seemingly for the sake of using the new features, but beyond that, it was incomprehensibly complex. Most importantly, it didn't work. It felt like he used the project as an excuse to try new tech and pad his resume.

Wow... this brought back memories. A decade ago I was on a (small) team that took over a project from another company. Our client had paid the other company to build it but wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. The product worked but it was a resource hog, very difficult to use, very expensive for what it did, and the other company wanted increasingly larger amounts of money to maintain it and add new features.

The entire project was a giant mess of technologies, to the point it looked like every dev who was on it used it to try out some random technology for personal curiosity. I mean... it used multiple RDBMSs, multiple programming languages, multiple formats for transporting information over the network. The set-up/build process was so complicated and fragile. It was insane, this project could have been done for probably 1/4th of the cost of less.

Project management - it's extraordinarily necessary when you have devs who think they are at work to personally entertain themselves rather than build the best product.

Most websites nowadays.

We shared only our own experience. We never outsourced to the Philippines that is why it is not there. We mentioned these rates because we were the end customer of IT outsourcing services. Only in Ukraine we set up our office and started hiring people directly

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