My experience with off-shoring teams and what went wrong

The author forgot to mention how much he paid for the offshore team. There was no mention of money in the things that went wrong. I think the cost is a very important factor if you expect a high quality project.<p>I have seen many people who bash India and Indian engineers for low quality work, but lets get to the crux of the problem. Its not that Indian engineers are all bad. They come in all shapes and sizes. You will get the best ones if you pay enough. You pay cheap, you get cheap.<p>Where can you get cheap ones ? From those big IT companies who treats employees as resources. The employees in turn will also treat their jobs along those lines.<p>So if you need high quality work, please don&#x27;t go to these giant corporations. If you look hard enough, you will find small high quality places, but they are not cheap and not &#x27;scalable&#x27; like your manager wants them to be.

BitKeeper guy here (predecessor to Git and Hg). If you think about the capabilities of a distributed source management system you can quickly see it&#x27;s an enabler for out-sourcing.<p>As a commercial DSCM provider, we got to watch a lot of out-sourcing attempts.<p>In 18 years of doing that, I&#x27;ve only seen one really successful one. Which was a Portland based dev team and a Singapore based test team. Every day, the dev team would check in their stuff (or make it available in a test tree) and the Singapore team would wake up, pull it, test it, document the failures, the Portland team would wake up fix and dev some more, lather, rinse, repeat.<p>As I recall, the Singapore team was out-sourced, different company, but they had a stable group of people dedicated to working with the Portland guys. It was more like two teams working on the same project.<p>I&#x27;ve seen countless efforts based on &quot;I can get 3 guys in India for what I have to pay one junior guy here&quot; fail. The time difference makes communication hard, you have to send someone to manage the India guys and communicate what you want, there is zero loyalty, if a better gig comes along all the time you put into onboarding those guys is lost, the quality of the code is pretty crappy, etc.<p>Pretty quickly it becomes not worth it.

&gt; we needed to reject some candidates because we simply could not understand their English pronunciation.<p>That could be a mistake - If you find someone who has good skills, and would otherwise make the team, there are language bootcamps you can send them to, which will help with their English. I have sent people to them, and they ended up being wonderful members of my team, once we got past the communication barriers. If you are willing to coach on other topics, refusing to coach on communications is an odd choice.<p>For my part, when building an offshore team, I did a few things:<p>1) Brought them here for a couple weeks. Seeing how we work, and getting to know each other in person made a huge difference, including being able to get used to accents and mannerisms. Like any other team, it built trust, which goes a long way towards working well together.<p>2) I took lessons in Hindi. Never spoke it to them, never got fluent, and many Indians don&#x27;t speak it anyway... but just trying to learn it helped meet in the middle on accents, and helped communications to the point that I often ended up translating between 2 English speaking people who just couldn&#x27;t understand each other. And they appreciated having an American who would just laugh with them when we couldn&#x27;t understand each other vs. getting frustrated and making them fear for their job.

&gt; Most of them came pretty late (around 9 or 10am), mostly due to heavy traffic in the city.<p>How is that late? It&#x27;s not rare for some developers to get in between 11am-12pm in the large tech companies I know about&#x2F;have worked at.

This was a real insightful look at how &quot;clients&quot; feel when coming down to India. There are some great points made on how things don&#x27;t gel well together.<p>I have been on both side of the fence - both as a &quot;resource&quot; for an offshore client and contracting a team for work. If I reading this correctly the issue might have started from candidate selection itself.<p>You have to be strict when it comes to hiring. Startup scene has ensured a good developers are paid well. But most offshoring firms tend to keep the salaries low even for in-demand stuff like mobile app development.<p>So, offshoring pools can be dry. In which case, companies tend to fudge resumes or provide some low quality devs.<p>So, look out for people being unable to answer basic stuff, that is red flag 1. And if they are unable to explain their past projects, that is red flag 2.<p>Apart from that, there is another thing you have to answer - What is more important? Good candidate or quickly selecting one?<p>We had to spend 8-9 months looking for a candidate. We found one who fit nearly 80% of our criteria, even with the best pay possible.<p>But when we tried building a team quickly - the overall pay rose exponentially.<p>IMO, a better idea is to open an offshore center and fester a culture that you want. It is difficult to ask people to follow one company&#x27;s culture while they are working in another.

I owned a company that provided off-shore services to companies in the US, it worked perfectly.<p>If you are doing off-shoring, you really need to insist on the independence and the ability to speak up of the team, it doesn&#x27;t work if you get yes-men, sadly that&#x27;s the general case for India-based offshore companies

It&#x27;s an old, old story; middle management&#x27;s never ending quest to commoditize and automate software development. They&#x27;ll never accept software development has almost no commonality with assembly line work. But they keep trying.<p>Fast, good, cheap; pick any two.

<i>Although I never got an explanation, their managers were probably selling their employees to multiple projects. I&#x27;ve heard that this happens from people working there.</i><p>Offshore developers from a body-shopping company who are <i>shopped</i> to multiple customers is common. I&#x27;ve seen it happen multiple times in different countries.<p>I have over a decade of experience trying to make off-shore development work with several off-shoring companies, one of which was a wholly owned subsidiary (to avoid the various overbilling strategies). I&#x27;ve never been convinced it is worth it overall. The semi-irrational insistence on off-shoring was actually one of the primary reasons I quit my last job.

&gt; But that was very exhaustive and couldn&#x27;t obviously go on like that forever. Then we switched to weekly meetings, reviews were mostly done by their team lead.<p>That&#x27;s where you went wrong first. You let go of the responsibility and handed it over to people who did not necessary have your best interests in mind. Quality, schedule, outcomes etc need to be managed, and managed so problems can be picked up early.<p>Secondly &quot;It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code. Although I never got an explanation ...&quot;, point to another management issue.<p>I am sitting in a country with a reputation for being an outsourcing hub, I am from the western world and I can tell you that there are many talented developers. The problems are the same as I have had with managing western teams, personal issues, skill levels etc though some of higher or lower impact. But the basic fact remains, the further you distance yourself from responsibility the greater the risk of failure.

For me, the secret was to stop looking at teams, and start looking at individuals.<p>We found extremelly talented people that were underpaid, dislocated and suffocated by a toxic and outdated culture.

There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this.<p>More than a decade ago I started out as a developer on an offshore team for a US based product startup. We grew from 2 people to 19 people and the US based company did well in its market and got acquired in a successful exit a few years later.<p>There are numerous success stories like this for every engagement gone wrong.<p>Now days I run an India based offshore team from Europe. The cost model has changed dramatically over time, but the premise that you can ship quality code with an India team is very much viable. Every large tech company does it. I’m happy to chat offline if you want.

About 15 years ago my company made a long term investment in hiring software developers from India.<p>Early on were some of them terrible developers? Yes, but so are many United States based Developers.<p>Now 15 years later I can tell you that my India based coworkers are some of the best developers that I&#x27;ve ever worked with.

I’ve heard and read so many “here is how my offshoring went wrong” (or even just outsourcing locally), that I am really looking for successful examples and what one can learn from them.

I don&#x27;t think it matters where people are as long as there isn&#x27;t some hindrance to their work ethic or shady work schemes going on. You simply have to be due diligent AND be a tech lead at the same time. You cannot offshore that part. No way. Instead, you directly know each person working on the project and directly work with them, while providing guidance to the entire team. (Directly meaning on Slack since its offshore) For example, a coder puts out something sub optimal. You then correct that code, then go through this with your coder in a constructive way why this way is better and more efficient, while also noting to the group here is an example of X where you do Y. I make repos specifically for projects to refer to as example code scenarios that commonly crop up. For example, here&#x27;s how you do a background image on a flexbox that auto sizes itself or here&#x27;s how you destructure a promise.all easily, or here&#x27;s a baseline project to start from with basic bones and structure to work from. You have to really guide and lead and there is no easy button where more time spent is the trade off of the cost savings.

In India hiring decisions, on any level, are mostly based on which college one comes from, how many random buzzwords one can speak, and not based on the actual skills one has learned during college or picked up at work. People &#x27;learn&#x27; things by reading nuggets from interview prep sites, they memorize things and repeat like a tape-recorder during interviews. No wonder their &#x27;understanding&#x27; is non existent.<p>At one end of the spectrum are people who come from &#x27;premier&#x27; colleges (term invented by HR folks, I guess), like the IITs and NITs. Although these institutes produce some brilliant minds, the majority of graduates have no skills whatsoever. Most of the skilled ones go abroad while the&#x27;unskilled&#x27; ones get hired in India. So it&#x27;s not uncommon to come across people, who have fancy titles, get paid insane salaries (by Indian standards) and who have been selected through &#x27;rigorous&#x27; technical interviews to fumble when writing a simple application program.<p>At the other end of the spectrum is a huge number of people graduating from private colleges. The quality of teaching and learning at these colleges is abysmal. Most of them end up at one or other &#x27;IT giants&#x27; doing menial maintenance work and earning a pittance.<p>The salary varies a lot across the spectrum but the quality of work is equally bad. Their approach to programming, and problem solving in general, is trial-and-error combined with some Googling. As the author points out the code that is produced by these &#x27;engineers&#x27; and &#x27;programmers&#x27; is compiler-ready not production-ready.<p>Of course there are exceptions too. A small minority of people who stay back in India working for startups or as freelancers are amazing at what they do irrespective of which college they went to or how they learned to program.<p>When you&#x27;re sampling from this pool, your hiring process has to be ingenious or you end up with insurmountable technical and financial debt.

Another approach would be to start with one developer living in europe&#x2F;US already but wants to live in India. Example: I have an Indian friend who was working in Seattle but ultimately wanted to go back to India. He found a job where he started at the headquarters on the east coast for a few months then moved to India to build a team there.<p>The key thing is patience on these projects and paying people well. FWIW I&#x27;m impatient and when I had a similar discussion with management as in the blogpost I openly said it was a bad idea and found myself laid off months later. The company eventually had changes in upper management and closed it&#x27;s India design center.

Agree with most points.<p>A plug and play never works when it comes to scaling engineering function through not just india but anywhere.<p>One must invest from a long term standpoint. Offshoring isn&#x27;t a shortcut to scaling, its better from cost perspective.<p>Its best to first get someone on the team who knows local ecosystem(offshore) and is good fit from your culture standpoint. Its a harder process but once you get this right you are most likely to succeed.

I&#x27;m from SF. Living in Saigon now for almost 2 years. Lots of people reach out to me to &#x27;offshore&#x27; here because they hear that VN devs are pretty good and salaries are a fraction of the Bay Area.<p>What I&#x27;ve learned is that Vietnamese developers are generally smart and hard working. There is a lot of young hipster attitude. They don&#x27;t suffer from some of the same cultural issues I&#x27;ve seen in other countries. They have their whole own baggage here. ;-) They really love the latest technologies and strive to keep up to date on things. At the end of the day, it is quite hit or miss, but that could really be said anywhere.<p>In the past, I&#x27;ve never really been a huge fan of offshoring, but with the right company, I&#x27;ve seen it work here on several occasions now. If you&#x27;re willing to pay a bit more (but still way less than the bay area) for the better dev houses here, you can really get some quality work done.

Off-shoring is hard. But it can be done right. It requires honest intentions and a commitment of enough financial resources. If a firm is off-shoring simply to get the cheapest devs, its not going to work.<p>One of the first companies I worked at had an India office even though the company was pretty small (~50 engineers in total). The Director of the India office was good at recruiting good engineers and they were paid much above market rates for the city they were based in (still less than what US based developers were making). This situation worked out best for everyone. The only problem was when scheduling long face to face meetings, which had to be done either super early or later in the night. But I felt it was a small price to pay to get to recruit a lot of good talent.

Do the Indian developers get &quot;cross-cultural training&quot; in how to deal with Americans, Germans, or other people from &#x27;hiring&#x27; countries, or is it assumed that only the Europeans and Americans have the aptitude to accommodate unfamiliar cultural expectations?

The punchline: &quot;It cost us nearly a million Euros to get both applications to a state that was acceptable to our customer. That did not include the actual personnel, coaching and travel costs.&quot;<p>&quot;It seems that costs scale better than people.&quot;

The company management doesn&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing and are looking to grow while magically cutting costs by outsourcing.<p>It takes years and&#x2F;or a very solid network to build competent teams.<p>What went wrong? Your company is managed by amateurs.

I&#x27;ve had success using Filipinos for outsourced labors.<p>Also fun to live in the Philippines.<p>Realistically, if you need to coordinate people to only talk to person A because he&#x27;s in department X then you&#x27;re going to have a rough time...

Well... <i>&quot; It turned out that from those 8-9 developers we hired, at the end of the project only 3 of them were actually committing code.&quot;</i><p>I guess that&#x27;s what went wrong :( . I wonder why they do this, because they can?

Argumentative &amp; too emotional - are Indians tough to work with?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;corporate-dossier&#x2F;argumentative-too-emotional-are-indians-tough-to-work-with&#x2F;articleshow&#x2F;45638709.cms" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;corporate-doss...</a>

&gt; In Germany, you would not call yourself a senior but apply for a position as senior.<p>Interesting. Anybody know why that is? Seems to happen in the US.

I find it important to have a off shore managerial team fully responsible for the project in the same manner as the home office. You can&#x27;t just hire the off shore team and tell the home office engineers to make use of them. Also the project should be divided so that there is minimal need for daily communications between the teams.

Yes, you need someone onshore to inspect every bit of work. Offshoring can be done if you expect it. You don&#x27;t just give them a project to work on an check in when it is done, or once a week.<p>We would have standups every day, and tech leads in our country. They would explain the work needed, make sure they were on task, and check there work.

Sometimes its about ... everything. Time difference * culture difference * tool availability * hierarchy * quality expectations. If they are all 90%, you still end up at under 50% of the expected result.

Interesting read. I would like to read something written from the perspective of the team in India that maybe explains some of their impression of the companies they are working for.

Well good developers can get $100k in India. So money is very bad reason to hire in India.<p>But equity you get is peanuts.

You pay peanuts you get monkeys !!! If you want to outsource for cost then good luck with that, but if you want to do it for skill then you have options. There are really good shops who provide amazing service.These companies hire from the right schools and provide great training . Too much generalisation and lack of information in the article.

«if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys»

Indian engineers in India are like animals in a zoo. Indian engineers outside India are like animals in a forest. They thrive and shine because they are free. It&#x27;s all in the environment. The only way to add &quot;offshore&quot; teams safely is to find people who refuse to accept a code review comment because that&#x27;s not the right thing to do, no matter which part of the world they are in.