

 Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how - adamhowell
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/working-with-web-developers-in-india-why-whom-and-how

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visitor4rmindia
Disclaimer: I'm an Indian and I've worked on offshore developments years ago.
I work in product development now and there's no way in hell I'm going back to
outsourced projects but I'll admit to some bias.

Outsourcing works. Most reputable outsourcing companies are looking for long-
term relationships and they are usually _very_ serious about feedback and
customer satisfaction. However, like anything else, it takes work and
research. You wouldn't hire a single developer without rigorous interviews and
even so it would take a while before he/she was up to speed. How then can you
expect there to be no overhead with the 5-10 outsourced developers?

I've personally worked on projects for Yahoo (US and UK) and Merck and my
experience was that the biggest problems were always at the beginning - and
they usually were communication problems.

What I'm saying is successful outsourced projects tend to work things out as
the teams adjust to each other. In _no_ case will it work if you just throw
some documents at each other - there needs to be face-to-face and key people
need to know each other in any team. The payoff is, of course, the work then
continues at a much lower cost.

Outsourcing may not be for everyone, but it does work well in a lot of cases.
Just my two cents.

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blurry
I've heard nothing but negative experiences from those who outsourced to
India, or anywhere remote for that matter. Could it be that the author is so
gun-ho about it because he has a consulting outfit in New Delhi?

~~~
maw
I think it mostly boils down to bad hiring decisions. People -- mostly
nonprogramming managers -- said "hey, these guys are just as good and only
cost a third as much" and hired more or less indiscriminately. (As with any
other group of people, some Indians are smart, some less so. Some are
passionate about what they do; others view it as just a job.) So they ended up
with some guys who were indeed as good at one third of the price, and many
more who weren't. They got the same result, of course, as what they'd get
hiring indiscriminately in wealthier countries. I don't think companies with
good hiring cultures have these problems, in India or anywhere else.

There are other problems with outsourcing to somewhere far away (which India
is for many people): people will have stay up late or start very early to
attend meetings, language can be an issue, and matters that are simple but
take a few rounds of communication can end up taking days to resolve.

Those problems can all be managed with smart leadership, but when that's
lacking, it's easier to point fingers at people with little chance of fairly
defending themselves.

~~~
gaius
Here's how it works: Joe Manager goes to Silicon Valley and sees all these
incredibly talented Indian engineers and thinks _wow, I gots to hire me some
of them_.

What he fails to understand is that an Indian entrepreneur in Silicon Valley
is not really representative of Indians as a whole, any more than a pro
athlete is representative of the fitness of the average American, or a
Hollywood A-lister is representative of how the average person looks.

In fact the quality of engineer you will get outsourcing to India is _lower_
than the average, because the most talented engineers (in any country) aren't
really interested in working for huge companies on other people's dull
corporate applications. They're busy working on their own startups or at least
for small companies doing interesting work, whether in India or in the US.

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kleevr
I worked for a company that was given a free 1 month trial of 1 dev guy out of
india. We had a custom PHP framework (<http://www.sinapse.org/>), and he
jumped in and started pumping out code pretty quick. When you looked at his
pages, he was "accomplishing" his tasks, but his code was so inconsistent and
completely outside the framework (it was all one-off-spaghetti-code-hell), so
at the end of the month we had to throw everything out. We didn't outsource
again.

~~~
lkozma
talk of anecdotal evidence

~~~
ajross
Indeed. There are bad coders everywhere. The problem with outsourcing is
generic: you're hiring consultants, not hackers. There are "good" consultants
out there, but even the best of them are basically bean counters.

And no doubt there are plenty of great Indian hackers out there, but they're
not on the consulting market.

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babul
In many respects the developer masses in India go through more rigour than the
developer masses in many countries like UK/US, essentially due to the
increased competition and overall standards in general in technical education
there.

However, even in India developers/firms have been gearing towards work in
markets other than enterprise Java and .NET for a long time now, as the
competition becomes stronger all around in those fields and first mover
advantage has generally been lost/taken by the early players.

Many realise the niches (such as bespoke RoR/Python/other work for smaller
clients and individuals) remains largely untapped and profitable. We will soon
see more impact by smaller independant Indian firms in these areas and as tech
startups in general.

~~~
geebee
It's hard to get good data, but I've read the opposite - that educational
standards for engineers may be much higher in the US than in India and China.

Here's a link to a business week article by Vivek Wadhwa, a prof at Duke:

[http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2005/sb20051...](http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2005/sb20051212_623922.htm)

and another by Pete Engardio on a related topic...

[http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf200512...](http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf20051223_7594_db039.htm)

Btw, none of this is meant to knock the top tier, such as the IIT schools,
which are excellent But we're talking about the "masses" here...

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tx
We've had... I'd call it a moderate success with Ukraine and now things are
getting better and better.

The reason why it works for us is because we've pretty much trained those guys
from the beginning to work a certain way: they didn't do outsourcing before
(servicing local market) and they haven't worked with anyone else but us.

So yes, it can be done and it does help enormously, especially if founder(s)
cannot afford to code full time.

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luckystrike
This article has some good advice on the 'how' part of working with Indian
software developers. Regarding the 'whom' part, really it is the same as
everywhere, find good developers.

I happen to know the Indian folks whom the author got on board his firm. They
actually are 'very' good, and i guess that is the primary reason why the
author is so happy at having it all figured out.

The point that is a bit off the mark in the article is:

    
    
      Because of the fairly fluid and competitive labor market in the IT world in India right now, 
      many Indian employers don’t allow their developers to blog or make contributions to open-source, 
      for fear of losing them to competitors who might contact them directly
    

I am yet to hear of any employers here not allowing open source contributions
per se. I guess one of the reasons for not having as many open source
contributions/technical blogs from India (sadly) is that most of the business
is still 'services' and people are jammed up with unrealistic schedules
(committed by their firms). Also majority of the work is Java/.NET enterprisey
stuff that is not too encouraging for the people to put more efforts back in
to 'that' ecosystem.

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ideamonk
how much should i pay to a web designer based in india? how much to a php
developer?

~~~
thomasswift
they should pay you

~~~
kashif
I would like to see if you can publish this statement in context on
<http://iden.tify.us> :)

~~~
thomasswift
I wouldn't, becuase i was joking, and after the massive downmod i figured i'd
rather not muddy up the conversation more by trying to explain myself.

this was a joke... about how people outsource their work to other countries
because they are too cheap to pay for developers in their own countries. sorry
i forgot that the internet was serious business all the time.

i apologize to anyone if you took offense to it

