The Myth Of Outsourcing | Hacker News Reader

The Myth Of Outsourcing

blog.arc90.com

17 pointsemontero16 comments

This is a thinly veiled marketing pitch, justifying the extra cost of buying from the guy with a team in NYC, rather than the guy with a team in Russia.

To get it right, we need to not only have a tight feedback loop with you, we want to become you. ... That's hard to do across two oceans.

No, that's hard to do - full stop. You're not bringing your full 15 (I'm guessing) man development team to your client-site for more than a curtesy visit - and certainly not "to become" your client. That's for your analysts. And why would that be significantly more difficult over an ocean than over a desk?

It's nearly impossible to do that if we're shipping chunks of an effort in packages halfway across the world.

Then don't ship "packages". My offshore team work off the exact same Trac-issue-list that the rest of my team does.

Software can always be built elsewhere, but the basic premise that the early blueprints are 100% dead-on are a fantasy.

Strawman! "outsourcing=waterfall=bad" vs. "insourcing=agile=good"? No..

But connectedness alone doesn't lay the groundwork for building great product.

But somehow you seem to argue that un-connectedness does? Bah.

While I agree that this is a marketing pitch, and plays it a little fast and lose, all other things being equal local is better than remote. Of course, all other things are never equal, and finding the combination that works for you is the important part.

An excellent point. Of course, it seems that more and more that balance is shifting to other countries, largely because of their lower cost of labor.

Try writing the software for a piece of hardware that is still being developed without everyone in the same place. it would be hell!

Language barriers, misunderstandings, the fact some things are just plain difficult to express, slow turn arounds, having incomplete specs and expressing which parts are subject to change, maintainability after delivery, accountability and international law, the need for regular contact between hardware and software guys, points of contact - if things go dark in russia, how can i get in contact? Config issues- the software doesn't work on my pc...licensing issues, source code availability and ownership, ability and cost of making mods to the code years later, unknown skill/professionalism of offshore programmers, etc etc. But hey, it could be cheaper...right?

We can quantify this.

Software Estimation by Steve McConnell on page 66 lists many factors from the Cocomo II studies with their relative impact on software development. Multi-site development on average causes things to take 1.56 times as long to develop. How much does that extra time to market cost you? I submit that in a competitive world, often a lot.

I find it oddly disturbing that someone would react with surprise to find out that one has not outsourced one's development team.

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