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Why India outsourcing is doomed

122 points by bugsbunny123 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
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kamaal 12y ago
Some parts of this post are true, some are straight wrong. To let you know I worked for a Major Indian IT services firm for over 5 years. >>with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings. Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time. In fact if you are working with any moderately big outsourcing firm, they will likely have training programs for nearly all trending technologies out there. There are local in-company LUG groups, all kinds of technology interests groups, even labs who work on core CS research. You just don't hear about them, because unlike the product folks they don't blog every second minute about how great they are. You will be surprised by the sheer depth and diverse range of areas people are working in these companies. >>Remember all those schools that promised to turn anyone with or without ... This has been happening in India from probably 1980's or may be even since the independence. That doesn't change anything. India is a place where people will do anything, and I actually mean anything for opportunities. This might look strange to a lot of people. But there are many of us, for whom merely getting a foot in the door means bailing out of a few generations of misery. There fore people will do anything to first get some education, once done anything for a job. Once in a job anything to get a good life. Its not odd, for people to work crazy hours their all life just to get a decent life for themselves and their kids. People in the west may call lack of sleep as spoiling health or whatever, here its almost a virtue. >>With about 12 hours difference with Pacific Time there is simply no reasonable time for you to talk to your team in India. When they are finishing their work day you are not even ready to start, and when you are ready to leave office they are not anywhere to be found. In early part of my career, I've slept in the office dorm for days in stretch only because I had take status calls from UK/US. I know innumerable amount of people who still do. Any company with a reasonable brand, and a good vein of professionalism will do. It all depends on whom you are doing business with. >>Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate. You’ll notice that weeks and months go by with very little progress being made. Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little. If anything this is probably the most wrong statement in the entire blog post. In IT services companies you will run into projects which are basically 'mission impossible'. For almost negligible budgets, you will be pushing 18 hr work days to achieve almost the impossible. Most of the them succeed, a few fail. There are instances where people will be up all the night because some UAT needs to be done, or because a regression testing needs to be finished. Again continue to work the very next day to fix a few bugs and get stuff shipped only to be asked to be available that same night for a status check call, I've seen people do this kind of stuff for months. I've seen people burn out, get kidney stones, develop blood pressure related ailments, lose weight drastically- All kinds of crap because over the past year they just have been working like machines. Amidst all this some projects do fail, but its rarely because people are lazy.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  "Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time." I really, REALLY doubt that. Or you don't know what innovation is. It's not about India, it's about the companies and the mentality.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    >>Or you don't know what innovation is. May be I don't. >>It's not about India, it's about the companies and the mentality. It's not about companies either. Its largely about which project you are going to work for. I'm pretty sure even at Google there are a lot of 'keep the wheels running' kind of projects. And there might be a lot of politics too.
    - throwawaykf05 12y ago
      > May be I don't. Nonetheless, I am curious. Can you give examples of what (you consider are) innovations that you've seen? For what it's worth, I am aware that some of the bigger Indian outsourcing companies have initiatives for innovative and research-oriented work, but I have not seen what they actually produce.
- woah 12y ago
  I can't imagine the code is very good quality with the working conditions you describe
  - kamaal 12y ago
    Code quality is largely dictated by the client. And at times people who basically 'sign off' your code, Pretty much every project will have their own checklist, there won't be a common checklist because of legal copyrights and contractual things preventing things getting shared out of your project. So it depends on what the client demands. But there are very strict SLA's though(Based on what the client wants). I never recall a single instance when we shipped anything without unit test cases, UAT's and elaborate regression testing. Automation is a trendy and people get awarded prizes all the time for writing tools that save time and improve quality.
option_greek 12y ago
Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-490-Why%2BIndia%2Boutsourcing%2Bis%2BDoomed&nfpr=1&biw=1193&bih=665&noj=1&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
neebz 12y ago
The most important point is of blended rate. 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 12y ago
  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.
  - xrstf 12y ago
    You can just skip the login overlay by clicking the X in the bottom of it.
  - dagw 12y ago
    For what it's worth you can just click cancel on the log in popup and get straight to the article.
rikacomet 12y ago
Being an Indian, I agree with that. Sometimes, when asked "how do you justify the X salary you are demanding" I find very few who have any answers (except the occasional: 'How he/she belongs to IIT' as if being an IITian gives you the right to earn without work)
dksidana 12y ago
Outsourcing experience will depend on selection process and outsourcing rate. Can author confirm that they did good job on both of that ?
- hluska 12y ago
  The second paragraph contains the sentence: "This is simply an opinion I have formed based on 15+ years of experience with various providers." Your question smacks of 'show me the proof-ism'. Why does this article make you uncomfortable?
neindanke 12y ago
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.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  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.
  - MakeMake 12y ago
    Just for the training phase. You should expect to be axed in few months.
  - IndianAstronaut 12y ago
    >But we have a 1 on 1 relationship with each developer outside our company This is the main issue. Not whether the outsourcing is done to India, the Philippines, or even in the US. The model of shipping off your large projects to another company is going to be very problematic. One on one relations with a good developer are going to be the way to go. A lot of smaller startups that outsource do this.
- dominotw 12y ago
  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.
munimkazia 12y ago
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.
munimkazia 12y ago
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.
mahouse 12y ago
Why do "people" links lead to "people4people.ru"? I'm afraid to click it. Is it malware on my machine?
- perlgeek 12y ago
  I get the same; guess it's some link building SEO.
  - huntern 12y ago
    The whole things gives me a clickbait-y feel.
perlgeek 12y ago
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?
- joyrider 12y ago
  If so, trying to rank #1 for the word "people" is bad SEO.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  I think it's okay, but Google can easily catch on to stuff like that. Their Penguin algorithm is designed for that.
quarterwave 12y ago
"Finding talent in Hi Tech centers like Bangalore is almost as hard as finding qualified people in Silicon Valley." 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 12y ago
  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.
  - fsloth 12y ago
    I agree except for "It just takes longer" Which depends a lot on everything. As an extreme example a bunch of junior people might develop a feature for a few sprints using TDD, XP and whatnot and not getting it done while a single expert might implement the feature simply and elegantly in a few days and a lot less code. My favorite example of this are two blog artifacts: The first of which describes an attempt to write a Sudoku solver using TDD, and as a counterpoint Peter Norvig's simple and elegant sudoku solver in python (as previously discussed in HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446
    - collyw 12y ago
      As someone who hasn't really managed to get into TDD (despite a few attempts), do you think this is generally the case? I do feel that TDD encourages a sort of shotgun approach to development, where you just try things until it works, rather than think the problem through thoroughly. Any opinions from people who have done both? I personally find fiddling with tests interrupts my flow of thought too much, so I would rather do it at the end.
      - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
        I call this the rewrite fallacy. I honestly cannot think of a decent piece of work that I did that did not involve two three or a dozen rewrites - either from scratch (rare) or just piecemeal replacements until I reached a design I was happy with, that fit my domain and was appropriate. Sometimes the rewrites were on the same project, sometimes the rewrites were on previous projects and I jus looked like a genius coming in to do something I had already done before , but I am always surprised if I can get things right first time (right enough is a professionals baseline, but actually right? Hardly ever). So, no, I honestly think that thinking through a design, working out and testing out ideas and architectures is a necessary part of development - call it discovery, call it the first iteration, call it perfectionism, it's needed. Tests should come as part of that. Slowly as you realise the approach you are choosin might actually be the right one and then increasingly as you fill out the space.
DevBattles 12y ago
It also explains that the best programmers are, American or Indian(http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-504- http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-504-)
- vixen99 12y ago
  So all you non-Americans and non-Indians - now you know!
raverbashing 12y ago
From my (not so big) experience: Best things to outsource are those with well defined requirements, with not many refinements to be done (or that can be done internally) The bandwidth is reduced, so it's not like the person is next to you. But with good requirements (and an agile development) this can work
curiousDog 12y ago
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?
- woah 12y ago
  Your post contains more xenophobia than the article, "comrade"
  - jfaucett 12y ago
    "Your post contains more xenophobia than the article" This statement seems completely unfounded to me. I feel the OP makes valid points, any professional developer that delivers high quality work is not going to be cheap. If you want high quality solid software you have to pay for it. Developers who have been around long enough know this and charge accordingly. If its cheap you're only getting one of two things, a good developer who doesn't know what they are worth (probably because they don't have the exp yet), or crap.
jrochkind1 12y ago
I get a login screen, not an article, from this link.
deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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lifeisstillgood 12y ago
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
SaiKumar 12y ago
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.
dschiptsov 12y ago
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.
lukasm 12y ago
There are also cultural problems. Person X won't talk to person Y because he/she is from different caste.
- okpatil 12y ago
  This statement is plain wrong. People you are referring to are highly educated professionals.
  - WalterSear 12y ago
    I've actually witnessed what the parent refers to, here in silicon valley.
- statictype 12y ago
  I have worked at a software company in India for over 10 years and have literally never seen this. Even once.
- known 12y ago
  Why Caste Won't Disappear From India http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disappear-india_b_6257354.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disa...
- known 12y ago
  Biggest caste survey: One in four Indians admit to practising untouchability http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/one-in-four-indians-admit-to-practising-untouchability-biggest-caste-survey/ http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/one-in-f...
r0h1n 12y ago
Take away the point about the 12-hour difference, and you can repurpose this article into: Why Silicon Valley startups are doomed. -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 12y ago
  Referring to people as resources is normally reserved for Outlook resources at financial institutions.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Most companies above a certain size have a human resources department.
    - nailer 12y ago
      Sure, but that's because most companies above a certain size are old, and department names are the last to change. Younger companies have 'people and culture' or similar.
deleted 12y ago
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known 12y ago
Cloud services will destroy/dilute their revenues.
- Sven7 12y ago
  plus automation
varchar 12y ago
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.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
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).
JamesBarney 12y ago
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)
- kyllo 12y ago
  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.
  - JamesBarney 12y ago
    At most of the companies I've been in the U.S. the difference in pay between senior coders and middle management was slight to non-existent but if you look at Accenture's Indian salaries associate manager makes 50% more then team lead, and makes almost triple what a senior software engineer makes. While this phenomenon exists in the U.S. it seems to me it is an order of magnitude smaller then it is in India.
ColinCera 12y ago
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.
akbar501 12y ago
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 - poor estimation - failure to align resources to task at hand - underbidding - inexperience in problem domain
bob917 12y ago
speaking as someone who eats copious amounts of Indian food, I agree with all this article says.
goombastic 12y ago
Look at the images on that article. Has this guy been to India? Snake charmers? Simpleton logic as well.
droithomme 12y ago
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.
ajinkyakale 12y ago
Not this again! The fact that the article shows only the under developed images (like the over crowded vehicle and the snake charmer) makes me sad. These articles and the tv shows have completely wrong images of india in their mind. You can argue why is it a big deal, but when you see the typecast running in all the articles these days it hurts mostly because it so far from the reality. I have not seen a snake charmer my entire life after staying in the country for 25 years! The problems he mentions might be true I dont have any experience but I bet its common and holds true for the entire outsourcing business.
ryanmarsh 12y ago
So far the comments seem to be saying: 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
webtopaz 12y ago
I have worked in outsourced projects for a big company in the past and our team got the work done. I have since then started my own company and have been working for US customers from India. My current customer is a startup from Philly for which I have been working for about 3.5 years. So, No. Indian outsourcing is not doomed. There are thousands of small companies like mine making customers happy at an affordable price. And what's with the pictures of a snake charmer and a crowded jeep?

122 points by bugsbunny123 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Some parts of this post are true, some are straight wrong. To let you know I worked for a Major Indian IT services firm for over 5 years. >>with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings. Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time. In fact if you are working with any moderately big outsourcing firm, they will likely have training programs for nearly all trending technologies out there. There are local in-company LUG groups, all kinds of technology interests groups, even labs who work on core CS research. You just don't hear about them, because unlike the product folks they don't blog every second minute about how great they are. You will be surprised by the sheer depth and diverse range of areas people are working in these companies. >>Remember all those schools that promised to turn anyone with or without ... This has been happening in India from probably 1980's or may be even since the independence. That doesn't change anything. India is a place where people will do anything, and I actually mean anything for opportunities. This might look strange to a lot of people. But there are many of us, for whom merely getting a foot in the door means bailing out of a few generations of misery. There fore people will do anything to first get some education, once done anything for a job. Once in a job anything to get a good life. Its not odd, for people to work crazy hours their all life just to get a decent life for themselves and their kids. People in the west may call lack of sleep as spoiling health or whatever, here its almost a virtue. >>With about 12 hours difference with Pacific Time there is simply no reasonable time for you to talk to your team in India. When they are finishing their work day you are not even ready to start, and when you are ready to leave office they are not anywhere to be found. In early part of my career, I've slept in the office dorm for days in stretch only because I had take status calls from UK/US. I know innumerable amount of people who still do. Any company with a reasonable brand, and a good vein of professionalism will do. It all depends on whom you are doing business with. >>Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate. You’ll notice that weeks and months go by with very little progress being made. Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little. If anything this is probably the most wrong statement in the entire blog post. In IT services companies you will run into projects which are basically 'mission impossible'. For almost negligible budgets, you will be pushing 18 hr work days to achieve almost the impossible. Most of the them succeed, a few fail. There are instances where people will be up all the night because some UAT needs to be done, or because a regression testing needs to be finished. Again continue to work the very next day to fix a few bugs and get stuff shipped only to be asked to be available that same night for a status check call, I've seen people do this kind of stuff for months. I've seen people burn out, get kidney stones, develop blood pressure related ailments, lose weight drastically- All kinds of crap because over the past year they just have been working like machines. Amidst all this some projects do fail, but its rarely because people are lazy.

raverbashing 12y ago
"Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time." I really, REALLY doubt that. Or you don't know what innovation is. It's not about India, it's about the companies and the mentality.
- kamaal 12y ago
  >>Or you don't know what innovation is. May be I don't. >>It's not about India, it's about the companies and the mentality. It's not about companies either. Its largely about which project you are going to work for. I'm pretty sure even at Google there are a lot of 'keep the wheels running' kind of projects. And there might be a lot of politics too.
  - throwawaykf05 12y ago
    > May be I don't. Nonetheless, I am curious. Can you give examples of what (you consider are) innovations that you've seen? For what it's worth, I am aware that some of the bigger Indian outsourcing companies have initiatives for innovative and research-oriented work, but I have not seen what they actually produce.
woah 12y ago
I can't imagine the code is very good quality with the working conditions you describe
- kamaal 12y ago
  Code quality is largely dictated by the client. And at times people who basically 'sign off' your code, Pretty much every project will have their own checklist, there won't be a common checklist because of legal copyrights and contractual things preventing things getting shared out of your project. So it depends on what the client demands. But there are very strict SLA's though(Based on what the client wants). I never recall a single instance when we shipped anything without unit test cases, UAT's and elaborate regression testing. Automation is a trendy and people get awarded prizes all the time for writing tools that save time and improve quality.

option_greek 12y ago

Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-490-Why%2BIndia%2Boutsourcing%2Bis%2BDoomed&nfpr=1&biw=1193&bih=665&noj=1&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

neebz 12y ago

The most important point is of blended rate. 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 12y ago
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.
- xrstf 12y ago
  You can just skip the login overlay by clicking the X in the bottom of it.
- dagw 12y ago
  For what it's worth you can just click cancel on the log in popup and get straight to the article.

rikacomet 12y ago

Being an Indian, I agree with that. Sometimes, when asked "how do you justify the X salary you are demanding" I find very few who have any answers (except the occasional: 'How he/she belongs to IIT' as if being an IITian gives you the right to earn without work)

dksidana 12y ago

Outsourcing experience will depend on selection process and outsourcing rate. Can author confirm that they did good job on both of that ?

hluska 12y ago
The second paragraph contains the sentence: "This is simply an opinion I have formed based on 15+ years of experience with various providers." Your question smacks of 'show me the proof-ism'. Why does this article make you uncomfortable?

neindanke 12y ago

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.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
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.
- MakeMake 12y ago
  Just for the training phase. You should expect to be axed in few months.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  >But we have a 1 on 1 relationship with each developer outside our company This is the main issue. Not whether the outsourcing is done to India, the Philippines, or even in the US. The model of shipping off your large projects to another company is going to be very problematic. One on one relations with a good developer are going to be the way to go. A lot of smaller startups that outsource do this.
dominotw 12y ago
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.

munimkazia 12y ago

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.

munimkazia 12y ago

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.

mahouse 12y ago

Why do "people" links lead to "people4people.ru"? I'm afraid to click it. Is it malware on my machine?

perlgeek 12y ago
I get the same; guess it's some link building SEO.
- huntern 12y ago
  The whole things gives me a clickbait-y feel.

perlgeek 12y ago

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?

joyrider 12y ago
If so, trying to rank #1 for the word "people" is bad SEO.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
I think it's okay, but Google can easily catch on to stuff like that. Their Penguin algorithm is designed for that.

quarterwave 12y ago

"Finding talent in Hi Tech centers like Bangalore is almost as hard as finding qualified people in Silicon Valley." 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 12y ago
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.
- fsloth 12y ago
  I agree except for "It just takes longer" Which depends a lot on everything. As an extreme example a bunch of junior people might develop a feature for a few sprints using TDD, XP and whatnot and not getting it done while a single expert might implement the feature simply and elegantly in a few days and a lot less code. My favorite example of this are two blog artifacts: The first of which describes an attempt to write a Sudoku solver using TDD, and as a counterpoint Peter Norvig's simple and elegant sudoku solver in python (as previously discussed in HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033446
  - collyw 12y ago
    As someone who hasn't really managed to get into TDD (despite a few attempts), do you think this is generally the case? I do feel that TDD encourages a sort of shotgun approach to development, where you just try things until it works, rather than think the problem through thoroughly. Any opinions from people who have done both? I personally find fiddling with tests interrupts my flow of thought too much, so I would rather do it at the end.
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      I call this the rewrite fallacy. I honestly cannot think of a decent piece of work that I did that did not involve two three or a dozen rewrites - either from scratch (rare) or just piecemeal replacements until I reached a design I was happy with, that fit my domain and was appropriate. Sometimes the rewrites were on the same project, sometimes the rewrites were on previous projects and I jus looked like a genius coming in to do something I had already done before , but I am always surprised if I can get things right first time (right enough is a professionals baseline, but actually right? Hardly ever). So, no, I honestly think that thinking through a design, working out and testing out ideas and architectures is a necessary part of development - call it discovery, call it the first iteration, call it perfectionism, it's needed. Tests should come as part of that. Slowly as you realise the approach you are choosin might actually be the right one and then increasingly as you fill out the space.

DevBattles 12y ago

It also explains that the best programmers are, American or Indian(http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-504- http://www.devbattles.com/en/sand/post-504-)

vixen99 12y ago
So all you non-Americans and non-Indians - now you know!

raverbashing 12y ago

From my (not so big) experience: Best things to outsource are those with well defined requirements, with not many refinements to be done (or that can be done internally) The bandwidth is reduced, so it's not like the person is next to you. But with good requirements (and an agile development) this can work

curiousDog 12y ago

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?

woah 12y ago
Your post contains more xenophobia than the article, "comrade"
- jfaucett 12y ago
  "Your post contains more xenophobia than the article" This statement seems completely unfounded to me. I feel the OP makes valid points, any professional developer that delivers high quality work is not going to be cheap. If you want high quality solid software you have to pay for it. Developers who have been around long enough know this and charge accordingly. If its cheap you're only getting one of two things, a good developer who doesn't know what they are worth (probably because they don't have the exp yet), or crap.

jrochkind1 12y ago

I get a login screen, not an article, from this link.

deleted 12y ago

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lifeisstillgood 12y ago

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

SaiKumar 12y ago

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.

dschiptsov 12y ago

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.

lukasm 12y ago

There are also cultural problems. Person X won't talk to person Y because he/she is from different caste.

okpatil 12y ago
This statement is plain wrong. People you are referring to are highly educated professionals.
- WalterSear 12y ago
  I've actually witnessed what the parent refers to, here in silicon valley.
statictype 12y ago
I have worked at a software company in India for over 10 years and have literally never seen this. Even once.
known 12y ago
Why Caste Won't Disappear From India http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disappear-india_b_6257354.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shashi-tharoor/caste-wont-disa...
known 12y ago
Biggest caste survey: One in four Indians admit to practising untouchability http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/one-in-four-indians-admit-to-practising-untouchability-biggest-caste-survey/ http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/one-in-f...

r0h1n 12y ago

Take away the point about the 12-hour difference, and you can repurpose this article into: Why Silicon Valley startups are doomed. -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 12y ago
Referring to people as resources is normally reserved for Outlook resources at financial institutions.
- collyw 12y ago
  Most companies above a certain size have a human resources department.
  - nailer 12y ago
    Sure, but that's because most companies above a certain size are old, and department names are the last to change. Younger companies have 'people and culture' or similar.

deleted 12y ago

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known 12y ago

Cloud services will destroy/dilute their revenues.

Sven7 12y ago
plus automation

varchar 12y ago

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.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

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).

JamesBarney 12y ago

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)

kyllo 12y ago
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.
- JamesBarney 12y ago
  At most of the companies I've been in the U.S. the difference in pay between senior coders and middle management was slight to non-existent but if you look at Accenture's Indian salaries associate manager makes 50% more then team lead, and makes almost triple what a senior software engineer makes. While this phenomenon exists in the U.S. it seems to me it is an order of magnitude smaller then it is in India.

ColinCera 12y ago

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.

akbar501 12y ago

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 - poor estimation - failure to align resources to task at hand - underbidding - inexperience in problem domain

bob917 12y ago

speaking as someone who eats copious amounts of Indian food, I agree with all this article says.

goombastic 12y ago

Look at the images on that article. Has this guy been to India? Snake charmers? Simpleton logic as well.

droithomme 12y ago

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.

ajinkyakale 12y ago

Not this again! The fact that the article shows only the under developed images (like the over crowded vehicle and the snake charmer) makes me sad. These articles and the tv shows have completely wrong images of india in their mind. You can argue why is it a big deal, but when you see the typecast running in all the articles these days it hurts mostly because it so far from the reality. I have not seen a snake charmer my entire life after staying in the country for 25 years! The problems he mentions might be true I dont have any experience but I bet its common and holds true for the entire outsourcing business.

ryanmarsh 12y ago

So far the comments seem to be saying: 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

webtopaz 12y ago

I have worked in outsourced projects for a big company in the past and our team got the work done. I have since then started my own company and have been working for US customers from India. My current customer is a startup from Philly for which I have been working for about 3.5 years. So, No. Indian outsourcing is not doomed. There are thousands of small companies like mine making customers happy at an affordable price. And what's with the pictures of a snake charmer and a crowded jeep?