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Comment by debarshri | Hacker News Reader

$1.5M goes a long way if the work is outsourced. Generally bigger orgs will have internal contracts. For instance IBM Canada outsources to IBM India at internal discounted rates. When I used to work for TCS, a budget of $80k was good enough for team of 4 for 6 months. I can only imagine that at $1.5M, it is definitely going to get them a few teams.

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What’s the quality of that Indian team like, though? You’re adding multiple layers of overhead before anything gets to the actual workers and in my experience once you got under, say, 70% of U.S. rates the quality plummeted because people capable of doing solid technical work are also capable of researching rates and jumping to a better job.

It can be very high if there is excellent continuity of communication (for asynchronous work matters), the right tools are being used (for asynchronous work), and the workers have the right qualifications and experience.

Oh, definitely: I just haven’t found it to be anywhere near as cheap as the money guys tell people – you can certainly save some money, possibly even enough to make up for the communication delays, but I’ve never heard of it being anywhere near the wild claims, and sometimes it’s even a net loss.

I agree.

This issue really annoys me because some people start claiming that Indian developers aren’t good when it’s basically as simple as getting what you pay for.

I cannot reply to your lower post, as the post tree has been expanded too far.

I just want to say that Americans, and certain other westerners have no right to talk badly about teams from places like India.

These teams often have some of the hardest working people in the world. They often have amazing academic credentials too, along with work credentials.

People who shortchange and underpay these extremely hardworking, gracious, and devoted people are scum. The same goes with talking negatively about people from diverse places. They are not all that different from you!

With the "globalization" that is occurring via the internet, which is being accelerated unbelievably fast by the pandemic, Americans are likely going to be in for an unbelievably ugly surprise in the next 10-20 years.

I am American and I do not want my fellow Americans to suffer, but lifestyle, even in STEM fields is going to decline hardcore. If I am correct on my bets, it will no longer be as remotely comfortable as it was in STEM for Americans.

I completely agree - and it’s not like there aren’t plenty of Americans who coasted in a boom market or relying on things like nepotism, too.

The main thing I see impacting offshoring is communications: it’s hard to build custom software for a business you don’t understand and most companies haven’t been willing to invest in effective mitigation strategies. I’m expecting one outcome of this to be Indian companies pivoting towards SaaS, realizing that many businesses increasingly see in-house software development as a riskier choice.

To be honest it really depends. It is a mixed bag when it comes to quality. I have seen some of the smartest people in those organizations. It is truly about how well you can manage the people working on your project.

This only works if the internal client doesn't take the savings as margin, _and_ the communication and project management is good enough to overcome the issues that come with outsourcing.

In this case you've now got 3 levels of project management (Canadian govt, IBM CA, IBM India), 2 countries, 2+ languages, and 2 layers of a company who are banned from government contracts in parts of the world for over spending and under delivering.

IBM Formula For Pricing:

Initial Price = Estimated_Cost / 1000

"Oops, we need more money" = (Estimated_Exec_Bonus + Estimated_Corp_Greed) + Worker_Cost + Extra_Corp_Greed

It might not be organized that way. For instance, it could be that IBM canada basically sold the project and IBM India are the people who would be implementing it. I don't enough about IBM's organization structure to comment on this topic.

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