

Have any Y Combinator startups outsourced coding to China to get up and running faster? - qwerty2


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cperciva
The merits of out-sourcing are debatable in general, but where startups are
concerned out-sourcing coding is just plain crazy. Startups, more than any
other sort of company, need to be fast, need to do things well, and need to
have very efficient internal communication; the likelyhood of any of these
happening decreases the further away the founders are from the people who are
doing the coding.

If all the coding is being done by founders, things have a decent chance of
working; if all the coding is being done by people hired by the founders, the
odds are pretty slight; but if all of the coding is being done by people hired
by a company hired by the founders -- i.e., by people two steps away --
there's almost no chance whatsoever that the coders will have either (a)
sufficient motivation, or (b) understand the founders' vision. (Of course, the
same thing works in the opposite direction -- if the founders are two steps
away from the people writing the code, there's almost no chance that the
founders are going to understand what's going on.)

And that's not even getting into the difficulties of working with people who
have a different culture, a different language, and are working in a different
timezone.

Out-sourcing development might save you money; but it's distinctly _not_ going
to get a startup up and running faster.

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plinkplonk
Do NOT outsource unless you know the outsourcee _in person_ , know he is an
excellent developer but can't come to the USA because of visa reasons or
whatever

(Due disclosure :-> I am Indian and work out of Bangalore these days ( I
worked in the USA for a couple of years) and have been on both sides of the
outsourcing contact. It can work for certain big enterprise projects, but
probably never for a startup. )

My 2 cents

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SwellJoe
We've (Virtualmin) outsourced two tasks so far:

Translations. We met a great guy in China via Elance for the Mandarin work.
We've also worked with people in France.

Artwork. The new Webmin logo was done by a guy in Romania, I think. Met him on
SitePoint via a logo contest.

I considered outsourcing some of the JavaScript work, since it's not our core
competency (we build system administration tools in Perl/C/Java), but given
that UI is so important I opted to learn JavaScript myself. Our first hire
will probably be someone very strong on UI and web technology, though I'm
getting pretty comfortable with it lately.

My previous company frequently outsourced, but never to China. I regularly
hired my current co-founder (an Australian), and I worked with folks in
Germany, Romania, Pakistan, Ukraine, Tunisia, and the US. Some experiences
were positive, others were very negative. I wouldn't suggest outsourcing
without some solid in-house expertise to judge the resulting code. I had a lot
of trouble with really bad security practices in many outsourced projects. If
I weren't a developer myself, I would have merely have had to trust that since
it looked like it was working it actually was--when in the case of a couple of
projects all of the "login" work was being done client-side. I even had a
Firefox toolbar project come back with SQL being generated on the untrusted,
unauthenticated, client-side in JavaScript (inserts, deletes, the whole
shebang).

In short, if you aren't a developer, or don't have one on board, outsourcing
is potentially rife with pain. That said, Digg and MySpace were developed by
outsourced labor, and Mark Fletcher is a big fan of Elance. I dunno that any
Chinese developers were involved, though.

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hassy
Presumably, a YCombinator start-up is one where writing good code is the core
competency, and a major competitive advantage.

You don't outsource your core competency.

~~~
cmars232
Unless you're the semiconductor industry.

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socmoth
what do you mean?

making semiconductors is a ton of math, theory, and layout work. are you
talking about actually using masks to do the doping?

~~~
majimojo
he probably means outsourcing your design/foundry work to taiwan, then
manufacturing the chips in china. management you keep over here. typical of a
company like Marvell (not the comic company you nerds! :D)

also because semiconductor "startups" have higher capital costs than your
typical software company.

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pg
Not that I know of. Outsourcing is for banks, not startups.

~~~
majimojo
I just got back from a business development trip to China. China programmers
are cheap. Their monthly salary is $1,000 for the top of their graduating
class programmer. Their work ethic is impeccable. Unfortunately, their english
is not. This is where Indian outsourcing shines, their english language skills
and eventual ability to meet spec is 10-15 years ahead of the Chinese as a
society.

Although there are some other incentives to outsourcing in China. I was told
that in some major cities like Xian, the Chinese government is offering free
office space and subsidizes the salary of each of your employees if an
american startup or company decides to hire employees there. Xian has
particularly good tech schools (they would be like the UW of China), but they
have 50% white collar unemployment.

engineering school ranks:
[http://www.asu.edu/chinainitiatives/documents/unv_rank_eng.p...](http://www.asu.edu/chinainitiatives/documents/unv_rank_eng.pdf)

(sorry can't find the link for the government program right now... that tip
was given to me by a senior partner at a private equity firm... I'll try to
find it guys. although, I would much rather recruit top grads from #1
universities than save a few thousand dollars a month by setting up operations
in some average place with subsidies)

So I am definitely looking into China or India for my startup. But, I would
not recommend going to China unless you or one of your co-founders speaks
chinese. The major problems as other people have noted, are quality control
and communication. Otherwise, your outsourcing has just about as much success
as saying that you plan to move to Hawaii and live off the ocean by asking
dolphins to fish and pick up sunken treasure for you.

I think a great startup idea would be to help American companies utilize
idling chinese programmers by providing middle management, oversight, and
translators (and job training + good pay for your Chinese employees).

I've met a couple guys our age in China (25-26) who have already sold their
company for $20-30 million (US dollars) and walked away with $6-10 million.
All they did was copy a popular idea in the US like Pandora or Last.FM, hire
some cheapass programmers for $1k a month a pop, clone the idea completely,
sell it to a larger company. These guys probably sat next to you in class at
Berkeley or UCLA. I also know of a few US startups that already finished a
Series A ($7 mil) and have a majority of employees outsourced to China. Solo
founder.

more info if you guys want it

~~~
rms
Moving to China is on my list of backup plans if I utterly fail in America. I
met with one American working as a manager at a mid-sized software firm in
Beijing and he said that he learned spoken Mandarin with one year of dedicated
study at a language school and $10,000 paid his tuition and living expenses.
Written Chinese, of course, will take longer. Do you think this is realistic?

~~~
majimojo
I've done four years Japanese. 1-2 years Chinese + 3-4 months immersive
Chinese at Beijing University. My chinese is way better than my japanese, so
immersive study definitely works. Chinese is very hard because it works on
tones. In English and Japanese, you can put the emphasis on the wrong
syllables or speak in a monotone and still make sense. In chinese, not using
proper inflections makes you say something else.

1 year will get you through every day life, but trying to communicate on a
business level or even listen to the news on TV will be very difficult. It's
possible to be fluent enough to do business in 2 years but you'll need to get
a Chinese girlfriend. After 3-4 years you'll start to lose the "accent."

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davidw
The most recent place I did some work outsourced work to India, and got code
like this:

    
    
        val = create_cat_res(create_res_val,ty,nm,pa,ow,tg,de,ic,f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,cty,oc,ors,rc,rr,c,r,u,d)

~~~
davidw
Oddly, I can't edit my own post... BUG?! In any case, note the final
"c,r,u,d"... it wasn't intended but it made me laugh when I found it.

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trevelyan
We're in China and hiring locally. Most of the people I see on the market know
ASP or .NET or Java. Experienced LAMP developers are harder to get.

We hire smart people with the understanding that they won't necessarily have
been trained to do what we need. We give them challenging work and train them
in the skills we want over time. Then get them to teach and train each other.
This makes it difficult to grow rapidly (work outstripping staff) and requires
tech-savvy management. If you can't communicate with your staff it is harder.

China is also a lot of fun. If anyone is considering coming here and wondering
about the language, I'd recommend ChinesePod.com.

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nostrademons
It's a terrible idea. I was in a startup that opened a China office, for about
what it cost to hire 2 quality engineers in the U.S. However, the China office
produced _nothing_. Moreover, it sucked up a lot of management time, so
managers weren't actually around to, well, manage.

~~~
chrisconley
you will spend more time managing them than if you do it yourself

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kirubakaran
It would be great if you can learn and do it on your own, with the close knit
team you put together. But if that is out of question and your choices are
either to do nothing and stay with your boring job or outsource, I would say
you outsource at least to see if it flies. You would at least have first hand
experience of outsourcing by the the end of it.

You may want to get a "virtual assistant" first to see how it goes. If you get
burnt by that, you can cut your losses early. But chances are you will find a
creative use for them that might give you a competitive edge.

Have you read "The 4-Hour Workweek"?

~~~
qaexl
You're talking about outsourcing non-programmers. The guy who was asking was
asking about outsourcing programmers.

I am wary of outsourcing. I've done some work on RentACoder ... most of the
people there want cheap work done for crap. I've picked up some projects where
I ended up fixing mistakes from other people's code. They were candidates for
a DailyWTF submission. Some of these people were from overseas, and some were
from right here in the US.

However, outsourcing non-intellectual-property stuff like the virtual
assistant or a bookkeeper -- _that_ sounds like a great idea. You don't really
want to be messing with non-code-related details while coding.

~~~
kirubakaran
I was suggesting outsourcing non-critical functions first, to get a feel of
it.

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tkiley
What about outsourcing graphic design?

I can code everything my startup needs, but we don't have a good graphic
designer. I suspect that we could go a long way with a few mockups from a
great designer.

Of course, good designers tend to be expensive, and I suspect hiring a really
good one would blow through a good chunk of my savings :[

~~~
maurycy
Do not forget that, especially in the startup's case, graphic is a continous
process; the design is constantly improved, new usability problems are found
every day etc.

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qwerty2
I would like to know if any of the ycombinator startups have outsourced code
to China? I have an idea and would like to apply for the next round of funding
but have limited coding experience. Is outsourcing some coding to China or
similar an option or are there major issues with this approach?

~~~
rms
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024>

It could work if your idea is good enough and simple enough, but it's rather
unlikely. You need to create very, very specific documentation to get good
results from outsourced Asian/Eastern European programmers. You also have
almost no chance of getting funding from Y Combinator if you are not a hacker
and have no hackers on your team.

The site consensus answer to your dilemna is to learn how to hack. Ruby or
Python are the languages of choice here. Ruby has this nice learning IDE
available, if you feel like playng around right now. <http://hacketyhack.net/>

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rapind
I think it's doable if you're a smart coder and can find an equally really
smart coder in China, India, etc. that's on the same page. Easier said than
done of course. But if you can communicate well with the individual, make use
of various tools, and can develop a long-term one-on-one relationship you
should be able to save some time and money. Win-win for both of you.

There's some significant upfront investment though, just like hiring any key
employee, and you can't hire someone the day after you realize you need the
extra hands. Really doesn't work like that. Think long-term. Think
partnership.

It's whole new challenge apart from your typical day job. Interesting one
though.

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qwerty2
Thanks for the comments, I am busy with Agile Web Development with Rails. I
was just wondering if it had been done as I have experience writing use cases
and functional specs. Thought it could be a way of expediting things if there
are only two coders but I understand the issues presented here.

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anamax
What kind of startup can succeed by that strategy?

If you prefer, what must be true about coding for that strategy to work? How
do you know that programming for your startup qualifies? (If you don't know
anything about programming ....)

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pistoriusp
I wish I could outsource this thread...

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yawl
Outsourcing has its merit, but the risk is high too.

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pageman
try the Philppines. Most BPOs are going there and they speak American English
(since it used to be a former American colony).

