Trust me, I manage a project which is outsourced and currently employs 3 software engg offshore.
The pluses -
(1) Benefit in terms of costs. Well they bill us 30 bucks for a software developer where here I would assume it will be around 60.. Whoopee doo..
(2) The supposed 24 hour day where your team onsite would plug 12 straight hours and your offshore team would plug in another 12 hours, therefore giving the client the impression that his project was worked upon for 24 hours..
(3) Now that implementation is made seperate and outsourced, the client just needs to focus on the business aspect and the designm therefore having more time to themselves to focus on issues that need attention
Minuses
(1) Cost is not that much better. Quite soon, firms will try to up the prices and then you will lose the benefit in terms of cost
(2) The 24 hour Day - Its quite different from what you are led to believe. Mostly both teams would take a couple of hours everyday trying to understand what the other has done, interact and to a certain extent, also play the blame game.
(3) The client would find himself being pulled more often back in to the implementation and design, since his offshore partner cant understand the design or has a "better" design. Chaos ensues.
Mostly from my experiences, what makes all the difference is the people who are developing this offshore. If they are intelligent enough and has good communication abilities, then you have a success story. If what you have is a guy who did a 14 day java crash course and has one year experience in plugging java code in to Helloworld.java, then you have an absolute wreck waiting to happen. It happened to me, I had two stupid asses with whom I spent 3-4 hours every night trying to drill in, the architecture, the requirements, the implementation details. And then I would wake up in the morning and they would have probably coded 10 lines and sent two emails with questions which either are stupid or should have been asked the night before. So what you have is two asswipes who just billed you for 16 hours and turned out 10 lines of code, of which 9 you will probably rewrite and a bunch of questions which doesnt amount to nada.
I dont think that any firm who is currently doing outsourcing has thought about the actual implementation through and through. They are all given rosy pictures of intelligent professionals back home plugging away on their keyboards churning out code that works on the first try.
More so, in a few years, the real picture would come out where probably 10% outsourcing actually churned out something positive and the rest 90% lost money, less money in fact, on projects which had no direction, no able offshore partner and a bunch of developers who doesnt know the difference between a class and an object if it kicked them in the ass with it.
Sorry I just had to rant, since I spent a better part of my night trying to work with some idiots and two days ago I kicked them out of the project. And in a combined 300 hour period, they coded two classes, and the style of coding will make you puke.
I am as Indian as they get:). I have nothing against any race or any color. And yes, my ex-offshore partner was Indian as well, but that doesnt change the fact that they were incompetent.
I wasnt issuing a blanket statement about all Indian outsourcing firms. I am merely referring to the fact that most of the firms who indulge in outsourcing are plainly jumping on the bandwagon with nary a thought about its implications in the long run. And hence outsourcing isnt here to stay, it will blow over very soon when firms and managers realize that it makes more sense to have the team onsite rather than having someone do most of the work at night when you arent around to manage.
And if your offshore partner is a plain schmuck, like was mine, they will shaft you at every step possible, by overbilling you, by working on other projects in the hour they bill you. Believe me, I have been a witness to this and much more.
I'm reminded of the old Army caveat.. "Remember, your weapon was built by the lowest bidder."
Friend (who is savvy enough to know technical bullshit when he sees it) worked in an outsourcer's call center for a while, and this is an insider's perspective: The system was deliberately set up so it is *impossible* for a phone monkey to finish a support call in the max timeframe specified by the client company. So the outsourcer gets to bill the client for excess hours, yet can blame the overage on the phone mo
I can agree with some of your points here. An associate of mine (let's call him Joe) is nearing the end of a contract with an offshore development "team" that was supposed to have put together a complex system for retrieving large amounts of data over a network to local systems based on a user-defined set of criteria (sorry to be light on the details, but I don't want to compromise his project).
In 1 year, they cobbled together a system that meets some of the criteria and is subject to constant failures. Te
Actually our experiences are not that much different.
While I was getting shitty quality from my offshore partner, I talked to one of my buddies from CA, whom I know for over 7 years and who ironically initiated me to a community called slashdot 4-5 years ago. I asked him to help, he currently works for a Fortune 100 and he, thank God, said he would.
And he is the only person responsible for turning this around. I brought him on, explained the system to him in less than an hour and we went ahead and designe
Outsourcing works fine for manufacturing, and probably a bunch of other service oriented things. The common aspect of the things it works for, are that the problems are well defined. Wind it up and release it, and awaayyy you go.
For programming, outsourcing is a spectacularly bad idea, because it is almost never well defined. In fact, in my experience, the quality of a programming product is driven by constant communication between the lead programmers and those that want the software developed.
I just
Promptness is its own reward, if one lives by the clock instead of the sword.
Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:5, Informative)
The pluses -
(1) Benefit in terms of costs. Well they bill us 30 bucks for a software developer where here I would assume it will be around 60.. Whoopee doo..
(2) The supposed 24 hour day where your team onsite would plug 12 straight hours and your offshore team would plug in another 12 hours, therefore giving the client the impression that his project was worked upon for 24 hours..
(3) Now that implementation is made seperate and outsourced, the client just needs to focus on the business aspect and the designm therefore having more time to themselves to focus on issues that need attention
Minuses
(1) Cost is not that much better. Quite soon, firms will try to up the prices and then you will lose the benefit in terms of cost
(2) The 24 hour Day - Its quite different from what you are led to believe. Mostly both teams would take a couple of hours everyday trying to understand what the other has done, interact and to a certain extent, also play the blame game.
(3) The client would find himself being pulled more often back in to the implementation and design, since his offshore partner cant understand the design or has a "better" design. Chaos ensues.
Mostly from my experiences, what makes all the difference is the people who are developing this offshore. If they are intelligent enough and has good communication abilities, then you have a success story. If what you have is a guy who did a 14 day java crash course and has one year experience in plugging java code in to Helloworld.java, then you have an absolute wreck waiting to happen. It happened to me, I had two stupid asses with whom I spent 3-4 hours every night trying to drill in, the architecture, the requirements, the implementation details. And then I would wake up in the morning and they would have probably coded 10 lines and sent two emails with questions which either are stupid or should have been asked the night before. So what you have is two asswipes who just billed you for 16 hours and turned out 10 lines of code, of which 9 you will probably rewrite and a bunch of questions which doesnt amount to nada.
I dont think that any firm who is currently doing outsourcing has thought about the actual implementation through and through. They are all given rosy pictures of intelligent professionals back home plugging away on their keyboards churning out code that works on the first try.
More so, in a few years, the real picture would come out where probably 10% outsourcing actually churned out something positive and the rest 90% lost money, less money in fact, on projects which had no direction, no able offshore partner and a bunch of developers who doesnt know the difference between a class and an object if it kicked them in the ass with it.
Sorry I just had to rant, since I spent a better part of my night trying to work with some idiots and two days ago I kicked them out of the project. And in a combined 300 hour period, they coded two classes, and the style of coding will make you puke.
Re:Bigot (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bigot (Score:4, Informative)
I am as Indian as they get
I wasnt issuing a blanket statement about all Indian outsourcing firms. I am merely referring to the fact that most of the firms who indulge in outsourcing are plainly jumping on the bandwagon with nary a thought about its implications in the long run. And hence outsourcing isnt here to stay, it will blow over very soon when firms and managers realize that it makes more sense to have the team onsite rather than having someone do most of the work at night when you arent around to manage.
And if your offshore partner is a plain schmuck, like was mine, they will shaft you at every step possible, by overbilling you, by working on other projects in the hour they bill you. Believe me, I have been a witness to this and much more.
Re:Bigot (Score:2)
Friend (who is savvy enough to know technical bullshit when he sees it) worked in an outsourcer's call center for a while, and this is an insider's perspective: The system was deliberately set up so it is *impossible* for a phone monkey to finish a support call in the max timeframe specified by the client company. So the outsourcer gets to bill the client for excess hours, yet can blame the overage on the phone mo
Re:Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:2)
In 1 year, they cobbled together a system that meets some of the criteria and is subject to constant failures. Te
Re:Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:2)
While I was getting shitty quality from my offshore partner, I talked to one of my buddies from CA, whom I know for over 7 years and who ironically initiated me to a community called slashdot 4-5 years ago. I asked him to help, he currently works for a Fortune 100 and he, thank God, said he would.
And he is the only person responsible for turning this around. I brought him on, explained the system to him in less than an hour and we went ahead and designe
Re:Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:2)
I take it thats per hour right. Now, if your project is going to take 10 man years to complete...
Re:Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:2)
Wait! Let me guess, all the variables are named i1 through i99?
Re:Outsourcing wont be here for long.. (Score:2)
For programming, outsourcing is a spectacularly bad idea, because it is almost never well defined. In fact, in my experience, the quality of a programming product is driven by constant communication between the lead programmers and those that want the software developed.
I just