Oh not this stupid argument again. Many problems he mentions aren't specific to India, you'll find them across all developing economies (We had most of the same issues contracting work to a Chinese and Brazilian company).
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. And some companies are clearly okay with said cheap work. There's a reason the IT industry in Hyderabad/B'lore is booming. Want solid contracting work without slackers? Sure, you can still find plenty of those too in India (thoughtworks?) but pay up (albeit less than what you may have to in the valley). The reason you're outsourcing core-work/parts of it to India should be that you can't find enough talent locally; not for getting it done cheaply or because your in-house developers think the work is 'beneath' them (I've seen this happen way often, dev with inflated ego doesn't want to test. Wants to do a cold hand-off and expects the cheap developers to be on his level and take dirty work off his hands. Starts cursing). So, there's probably room for both (cheap and expensive) industries in India. Unfortunately, you might have to expend more effort before you find the company that fits your needs.
Articles like these insinuate nothing but Xenophobia and racism. More often than not, Indians are always on the receiving end of it despite contributing so much to the software industry in general. The author from Ukraine of all places probably wants soviet like discipline and work-ethic for USSR salaries? Yeah, ain't gonna happen comrade. The employees on the other-end aren't stupid either. They have many friends in the US making bank working at Google/FB. Why would they work their balls off for peanuts?
I definitely agree the title of the argument is jumping to conclusions, but the problems are very real from what I have experienced.
paying more (to Indian (as in, in India) developers) doesn't alleviate those problems. people have really stretched what xenophobia and racism means anymore.
Why should they work for peanuts when their friends are working at google and FB making bank? because peanuts where they are is a very high standard of living, and lets face it, they do not have the skills or they would be working at fb and google making bank as well. One should never do a poor job just because they think they aren't compensated enough.
>>The reason you're outsourcing core-work/parts of it to India should be that you can't find enough talent locally
Sometimes, but not always. A lot of companies outsource because they feel software is just not a part of their core business. Very similar to the way why some companies outsource payroll.
this problem is specific to India because India is center of IT outsourcing and this problem is unique to IT. Contracting work to China is mainly manufacture sector which real product are being shipped. quality and standard are well defined in advance. customer can simply reject goods if they don't pass quality test. can you do that in software outsourcing?
when we talk about this problem we don't need to mention other contribution done by Indian developers. Let's just focus on one problem. I am sure there is thread for discussing Indian contribution in software industry. Actually author kindly mentioned he also met some very good developers both in US and India to be politically correct.
Not sure why the author seems to insinuate that the problems he/she has described are somehow specific to India. We had a disaster when we outsourced a large piece of design work to Denmark. We found out that the outsourcer in Denmark was themselves outsourcing chunks of work to Ukraine. Our bias assuming that an expensive Scandinavian outsourcer would be magically better than a cheaper Asian alternative led us astray. A mistake we won't make again. The real solution is doing proper due diligence and proper contract maintenance clauses that ensure the outsourcers goals are aligned with yours. That takes work, not just tossing a spec sheet across the wall.
We outsource successfully. But we have a 1 on 1 relationship with each developer outside our company. So no fooling us about whom it is doing the work.
It takes real work to manage any developer. Its an illusion to think outsourcing solve all the problems. We think of it as simply a recruitment tool really. Not that we hire all the developers we work with. But the outsourcing company is only there to bring in talent as needed. That talent still needs to be managed.
I don't think he says the problems are specific to India. He is just presenting India as a case study, perhaps because it the most popular outsourcing destination.
Outsourcing industry has a huge conflict of interest with the customer. Customer wants minimum number of high-quality engineers to complete work in the minimum possible time. Outsourcing companies want the opposite. They don't hire high-quality engineers because a) they eat in to their profit margins because of high salaries b) they get things done quickly which reduces their invoice.
They just want to deliver the "good enough" level of quality to ensure customer retention.
The interests of outsourcing companies and customers are totally orthogonal. And we all know this always end bad.
I wish I could read the article, but it is asking me to log in, so I am skipping it.
But your comments remind me of what I hear for a lot of Americans (and Indian expatriates) who tend to be negative about Indian workers, when often the root cause of their complaints are cultural differences, and the ways that it impacts the work.
I have had great relationships with outsourced teams. But I did not get them just from hiring someone and expecting it to work. I spent a lot of time with my people, getting to know them, talking about how we wanted to work together, bringing them over here so the teams on both sides could know each other. I got to know a bit about their culture and how that impacted their work, and learned to work with where I could, and helped them make some changes to work better with us, where appropriate.
You would do that much for anyone on-site, so not doing it for remote workers is doing them a dis-service.
Personally, I got good results. And invitations to their weddings, which made me really feel like we were a team, and not just using them as a tool to get some work done.
Maybe I just had good luck. Maybe the rest of the industry is different. But I cannot support the comment that it "always ends bad". That does not have to be the case.
Who are these "experts"? Why they are so cocksure that the problem with outsourcing is related to any ethnicity? Oh, they are Slavic "managers" of a lowest rank..
Outsourcing could become a problem in situation when a "man in the middle" is incompetent and incapable to perform these tasks himself, so he obviously cannot estimate correctly any time-frames or evaluate sub-contractor's performance, and, most importantly, have no idea which tasks in a "project" could be outsourced and how to split them correctly into sub-tasks and between people to work in parallel.
What is the problem really? The answer is greed, mediocrity, incompetence and inflated self-esteem.
I would love for someone to step up up and directly address the core argument of this article, that is, Indian outsourcing is doomed.
Indian outsourcing, not outsourcing, not Indians, Indian outsourcing.
After a short 10 years observing, managing, or cleaning up after outsourced developers in Mexico, Costa Rica, Ukraine, India and CONUS (I'm in the U.S.) the data points I have are very consistent.
1. Outsourcing is hard
2. The greater the time zone difference the harder it is
3. The greater the culture difference the harder it is
4. The lower the average skill of available programmers the harder it is
You do the math.
From a U.S. perspective Indian outsourcing cannot possibly continue at its current level without innovation. That simple assertion the author made, IMHO, is both valid and correct.
I can't claim my experience is comprehensive enough to satisfy the apologists here but my God man find me a majority of CTOs, product managers, and senior developers who have an overall positive view of Indian outsourcing.
The last, and most controversial thing I'll say is this: The best Indian developers aren't in India. The great ones are getting visas to Europe, N. America and Australia. Hell there are 50 or so right now on my project that transplanted their families for only a 1 year project. They, and their families want to be in Europe, N. America, Australia.
I really should not be commenting on this - it feels like feedin the trolls. Ah well. So here is my "15 years of experience and no data points" commentary
Indian Outsourcing has a history that made it the way it is today - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality or skill level of (averaged) developers. The article smacks horribly of what I call "loud old white manager of forty Indians" syndrome.
India in the 60s and 70s tried to cut itself off from the outside world and political strategy effectively strangled any native IT industry in it's crib. So Indian hackers did what hackers all over do - got round the problem, either by emigrating or by flying out to find clients. Outsourcing was for a while quite literally the only game in town for IT.
It worked really well - and therein lies the rub. If you want to maintain a good client relationship with a Fortune 500 company mostly you do it at the middle manager level.
Fast forward to 2014 - Now it is clear that software is eating the world, senior managers are going to replace middle managers with some combination of simplified process, automated decision making and "empowering" frontline workers. And yet those middle managers are the ones outsourcers have spent decades learning to work with.
This has left a mark on the Indian university system - with a lack of professors (remember the good ones left) the schooling was left to commercial companies - and it is only slowly recovering from this bias - "don't challenge the loud old white guy" and "learn Java" are two axioms that (good) universities would not teach but outsourcers have built in.
So there is innovation and hacker culture in India. But it is not as celebrated as "going to work, having a proper job and working for a named Fortune 500 company". Every hackers mother prefers the second one, and India has an unusual situation that the majority of IT education prefers it too.
Apart from this quirk of history Indian outsourcing and project management is down the line the same as every where else - gosh! Training at the expense of the client ! Rapid turnover on internal projects! Badly spec'd out projects with minimal business justification turn out badly!
This is not an Indian problem. This is our industry's problem - and treating it as anything else is ... Wrong
As an Indian software developer who has some exposure to the outsourcing industry, I have to say that I can't disagree with anything the article has to say.
I agree with other commenters that OP has conflict of interest since he is an outsourcer as well. He hopes to establish that this other outsourcing destination is not as high quality as his own.
That's an easy argument to attack on both "conflict of interest" and "racism" grounds, and many in this and other threads have made that rebuttal.
It dismisses though the reality that most of what he says in his post is true, as anyone who has actually dealt with this scenario honestly knows.
If outsourcing, there are advantages to having compliant workers who never contradict you. It's very comforting and you can feel good about yourself until the deadline arrives and you receive non-functional junk. But that's OK, you're saving money, just send it back for another round, or ten or twenty, of rework.
Dealing with guys like the OP is much harder. He's Ukrainian. He's much more likely to tell me if what I propose is a stupid idea or I am an idiot. If I was insecure or incompetent, that could really damage my self esteem. On the other hand, he's much more likely to deliver a working product in accordance with what I had in mind on the agreed upon date.
Depending on whether I am some middle manager at a big corporation for which product quality and success is not very important, or if I am the owner of a company that is trying to rework industry, I may find it rational to choose one rather than the other.
Every problem he mentions, except the timezone difference, is exactly the same when you're outsourcing to large IT consulting companies in the US. The only difference is the US companies charge 5x-20x more for their crappy deliverables.
How many people here have worked with a major IT consultancy in the US? How many were satisfied with the process and result? I would be astonished if even 5 out of 100 projects outsourced within the US turn out so well that customers say, "That was great, we can't wait to work with those consultants again."
As a veteran of half a dozen such projects using half a dozen different IT consulting firms, my experience was they were all terrible experiences, with rampant price-gouging (novice programmers billed at $300/hour, "senior" people at $600-1,000/hour), conflicts of interest, poor communication, etc., and the work products in every case were massive total failures (and no, they do not give refunds).
I don't put much stock in this article as a specific critique of India, but as an article about outsourcing in general it's dead-on accurate.
As some people here have already commented, the trick to effective outsourcing is building solid personal relationships. I have worked with people in India, Vietnam, Russia, China, Ukraine, and Hungary. In most cases I keep track of people and share life events long after work is over (or between projects).
Did anybody else find it odd that every occurrence of the world "people" is a link? Is that some SEO link-building stuff? And if yes, do you consider that OK?
There are known causes of failure in software projects many of which overlap with project failure in general. As there are two companies involved, a post-mortem of failed projects must include problems on both sides.
On the purchaser side:
- poor specification is a major project for both internal and external projects
- abdication of responsibility for resource appropriateness. Yes, you are responsible for ensuring the vendor's engineers are a good fit for your project.
- failure to manage the project. PM of external resources is a specialized PM skill.
- changing objectives: this flows from poor specs, and results in changing targets
- communication failures: nuff said
- no QA: Yes, you must quality check work of external vendors. It's amazing how often this basic step is skipped.
On the vendor side:
- everything above, plus
- failure to include specification as a line item in budget
Most of these arguments can be made about any country and any type of contractors, from car mechanics to house builders. Bad cost estimates, Cost overruns, work not completed to satisfaction of the buyer, work completed but with poor quality are all in general aspects of any kind of outsourcing. There's a saying if you want something done and done well do it yourself. Whoever you hire may not be able to satisfy all your expectations. Adding to the confusion sometimes people who charge a lot do a lousy job and people who charge less end up doing better work. Such is life.
I worked with one of the top 5's and the biggest issue was the hierarchical culture that seemed to give managers more status and money than coders.
I think this meant there wasn't a lot of incentive to become a great coder so people worked very hard to take on management responsibilities and not as hard at becoming great coders.
I'd really like to hear from people with more experience if this was just true of this one consulting company(one of he top 5) or was this true of many companies.
(first posted from cell phone, edited for readability)
This phenomenon (career advancement = promotion to middle management) is also the case at the client companies, which is part of the reason why outsourcing is tempting to them in the first place. The never ending desire to commoditize their inputs.
Yes, more and better work can be done by less people - it's axiomatic in software. It just takes longer - and often looks like people sitting around thinking and experimenting.
I have no doubt that the author has experienced these issues and also agree with him on some points. However here's where the error lies - drawing conclusion from your personal experience and extrapolating it to the entire sector worth perhaps 100 billion dollars and predicting it's impending doom. That's just not how reality works. There will be dozens if not hundreds of examples contrary to your experience.
There may be declines, there will changes, restructuring, recalibration, pains, growth etc. Life and business will go on albeit with changes. A broad vision always helps keeping things in perspective in drawing such conclusions.
[+] [-] curiousDog|11 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. And some companies are clearly okay with said cheap work. There's a reason the IT industry in Hyderabad/B'lore is booming. Want solid contracting work without slackers? Sure, you can still find plenty of those too in India (thoughtworks?) but pay up (albeit less than what you may have to in the valley). The reason you're outsourcing core-work/parts of it to India should be that you can't find enough talent locally; not for getting it done cheaply or because your in-house developers think the work is 'beneath' them (I've seen this happen way often, dev with inflated ego doesn't want to test. Wants to do a cold hand-off and expects the cheap developers to be on his level and take dirty work off his hands. Starts cursing). So, there's probably room for both (cheap and expensive) industries in India. Unfortunately, you might have to expend more effort before you find the company that fits your needs.
Articles like these insinuate nothing but Xenophobia and racism. More often than not, Indians are always on the receiving end of it despite contributing so much to the software industry in general. The author from Ukraine of all places probably wants soviet like discipline and work-ethic for USSR salaries? Yeah, ain't gonna happen comrade. The employees on the other-end aren't stupid either. They have many friends in the US making bank working at Google/FB. Why would they work their balls off for peanuts?
[+] [-] autokad|11 years ago|reply
paying more (to Indian (as in, in India) developers) doesn't alleviate those problems. people have really stretched what xenophobia and racism means anymore.
Why should they work for peanuts when their friends are working at google and FB making bank? because peanuts where they are is a very high standard of living, and lets face it, they do not have the skills or they would be working at fb and google making bank as well. One should never do a poor job just because they think they aren't compensated enough.
[+] [-] kamaal|11 years ago|reply
Sometimes, but not always. A lot of companies outsource because they feel software is just not a part of their core business. Very similar to the way why some companies outsource payroll.
[+] [-] archlight|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neindanke|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|11 years ago|reply
It takes real work to manage any developer. Its an illusion to think outsourcing solve all the problems. We think of it as simply a recruitment tool really. Not that we hire all the developers we work with. But the outsourcing company is only there to bring in talent as needed. That talent still needs to be managed.
[+] [-] dominotw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neebz|11 years ago|reply
Outsourcing industry has a huge conflict of interest with the customer. Customer wants minimum number of high-quality engineers to complete work in the minimum possible time. Outsourcing companies want the opposite. They don't hire high-quality engineers because a) they eat in to their profit margins because of high salaries b) they get things done quickly which reduces their invoice.
They just want to deliver the "good enough" level of quality to ensure customer retention.
The interests of outsourcing companies and customers are totally orthogonal. And we all know this always end bad.
[+] [-] codingdave|11 years ago|reply
But your comments remind me of what I hear for a lot of Americans (and Indian expatriates) who tend to be negative about Indian workers, when often the root cause of their complaints are cultural differences, and the ways that it impacts the work.
I have had great relationships with outsourced teams. But I did not get them just from hiring someone and expecting it to work. I spent a lot of time with my people, getting to know them, talking about how we wanted to work together, bringing them over here so the teams on both sides could know each other. I got to know a bit about their culture and how that impacted their work, and learned to work with where I could, and helped them make some changes to work better with us, where appropriate.
You would do that much for anyone on-site, so not doing it for remote workers is doing them a dis-service.
Personally, I got good results. And invitations to their weddings, which made me really feel like we were a team, and not just using them as a tool to get some work done.
Maybe I just had good luck. Maybe the rest of the industry is different. But I cannot support the comment that it "always ends bad". That does not have to be the case.
[+] [-] vdaniuk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschiptsov|11 years ago|reply
Outsourcing could become a problem in situation when a "man in the middle" is incompetent and incapable to perform these tasks himself, so he obviously cannot estimate correctly any time-frames or evaluate sub-contractor's performance, and, most importantly, have no idea which tasks in a "project" could be outsourced and how to split them correctly into sub-tasks and between people to work in parallel.
What is the problem really? The answer is greed, mediocrity, incompetence and inflated self-esteem.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|11 years ago|reply
Not all Indians
Not all outsourced projects
I would love for someone to step up up and directly address the core argument of this article, that is, Indian outsourcing is doomed.
Indian outsourcing, not outsourcing, not Indians, Indian outsourcing.
After a short 10 years observing, managing, or cleaning up after outsourced developers in Mexico, Costa Rica, Ukraine, India and CONUS (I'm in the U.S.) the data points I have are very consistent.
1. Outsourcing is hard
2. The greater the time zone difference the harder it is
3. The greater the culture difference the harder it is
4. The lower the average skill of available programmers the harder it is
You do the math.
From a U.S. perspective Indian outsourcing cannot possibly continue at its current level without innovation. That simple assertion the author made, IMHO, is both valid and correct.
I can't claim my experience is comprehensive enough to satisfy the apologists here but my God man find me a majority of CTOs, product managers, and senior developers who have an overall positive view of Indian outsourcing.
The last, and most controversial thing I'll say is this: The best Indian developers aren't in India. The great ones are getting visas to Europe, N. America and Australia. Hell there are 50 or so right now on my project that transplanted their families for only a 1 year project. They, and their families want to be in Europe, N. America, Australia.
edit: sigh formatting
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|11 years ago|reply
Indian Outsourcing has a history that made it the way it is today - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality or skill level of (averaged) developers. The article smacks horribly of what I call "loud old white manager of forty Indians" syndrome.
India in the 60s and 70s tried to cut itself off from the outside world and political strategy effectively strangled any native IT industry in it's crib. So Indian hackers did what hackers all over do - got round the problem, either by emigrating or by flying out to find clients. Outsourcing was for a while quite literally the only game in town for IT.
It worked really well - and therein lies the rub. If you want to maintain a good client relationship with a Fortune 500 company mostly you do it at the middle manager level.
Fast forward to 2014 - Now it is clear that software is eating the world, senior managers are going to replace middle managers with some combination of simplified process, automated decision making and "empowering" frontline workers. And yet those middle managers are the ones outsourcers have spent decades learning to work with.
This has left a mark on the Indian university system - with a lack of professors (remember the good ones left) the schooling was left to commercial companies - and it is only slowly recovering from this bias - "don't challenge the loud old white guy" and "learn Java" are two axioms that (good) universities would not teach but outsourcers have built in.
So there is innovation and hacker culture in India. But it is not as celebrated as "going to work, having a proper job and working for a named Fortune 500 company". Every hackers mother prefers the second one, and India has an unusual situation that the majority of IT education prefers it too.
Apart from this quirk of history Indian outsourcing and project management is down the line the same as every where else - gosh! Training at the expense of the client ! Rapid turnover on internal projects! Badly spec'd out projects with minimal business justification turn out badly!
This is not an Indian problem. This is our industry's problem - and treating it as anything else is ... Wrong
[+] [-] munimkazia|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|11 years ago|reply
That's an easy argument to attack on both "conflict of interest" and "racism" grounds, and many in this and other threads have made that rebuttal.
It dismisses though the reality that most of what he says in his post is true, as anyone who has actually dealt with this scenario honestly knows.
If outsourcing, there are advantages to having compliant workers who never contradict you. It's very comforting and you can feel good about yourself until the deadline arrives and you receive non-functional junk. But that's OK, you're saving money, just send it back for another round, or ten or twenty, of rework.
Dealing with guys like the OP is much harder. He's Ukrainian. He's much more likely to tell me if what I propose is a stupid idea or I am an idiot. If I was insecure or incompetent, that could really damage my self esteem. On the other hand, he's much more likely to deliver a working product in accordance with what I had in mind on the agreed upon date.
Depending on whether I am some middle manager at a big corporation for which product quality and success is not very important, or if I am the owner of a company that is trying to rework industry, I may find it rational to choose one rather than the other.
[+] [-] r0h1n|11 years ago|reply
-Resource Availability
-Resource Quality
- Employee turnover
- Mindset and work ethics
- Cost
A truly lazy piece of writing about generic/cylical demand-supply challenges that most booming industries end up facing.
[+] [-] nailer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ColinCera|11 years ago|reply
How many people here have worked with a major IT consultancy in the US? How many were satisfied with the process and result? I would be astonished if even 5 out of 100 projects outsourced within the US turn out so well that customers say, "That was great, we can't wait to work with those consultants again."
As a veteran of half a dozen such projects using half a dozen different IT consulting firms, my experience was they were all terrible experiences, with rampant price-gouging (novice programmers billed at $300/hour, "senior" people at $600-1,000/hour), conflicts of interest, poor communication, etc., and the work products in every case were massive total failures (and no, they do not give refunds).
I don't put much stock in this article as a specific critique of India, but as an article about outsourcing in general it's dead-on accurate.
[+] [-] mahouse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joyrider|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akbar501|11 years ago|reply
On the purchaser side:
- poor specification is a major project for both internal and external projects
- abdication of responsibility for resource appropriateness. Yes, you are responsible for ensuring the vendor's engineers are a good fit for your project.
- failure to manage the project. PM of external resources is a specialized PM skill.
- changing objectives: this flows from poor specs, and results in changing targets
- communication failures: nuff said
- no QA: Yes, you must quality check work of external vendors. It's amazing how often this basic step is skipped.
On the vendor side:
- everything above, plus
- failure to include specification as a line item in budget
- poor estimation
- failure to align resources to task at hand
- underbidding
- inexperience in problem domain
[+] [-] SaiKumar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesBarney|11 years ago|reply
I think this meant there wasn't a lot of incentive to become a great coder so people worked very hard to take on management responsibilities and not as hard at becoming great coders.
I'd really like to hear from people with more experience if this was just true of this one consulting company(one of he top 5) or was this true of many companies.
(first posted from cell phone, edited for readability)
[+] [-] kyllo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] option_greek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quarterwave|11 years ago|reply
This is a good point. A related question: Can more and better work be done by less people?
If so, are 'two-dozen dev-ops' (a rhetorical number) adequate for all scenarios?
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varchar|11 years ago|reply
There may be declines, there will changes, restructuring, recalibration, pains, growth etc. Life and business will go on albeit with changes. A broad vision always helps keeping things in perspective in drawing such conclusions.