

Your Man in India - Outsourcing Your Errands - mhb
http://www.smartmoney.com/esquire/index.cfm?Story=20050909-outsource

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rwebb
Your Man in India (YMII) is actually a service designed for Indians in the US
to use. Brickworks is their task outsourcing business. They are not taking on
new customers right now because of all the interest caused by 4 Hour Work
Week. Get Friday is Brickworks' main competitor. They currently take about 2
weeks to respond to an inquiry (in broken English) and you then have to give
them you CC# and commit to a monthly minimum and wait another 3 weeks before
you can try the service. All reports I have seen have been very positive once
the service starts, but I'm not holding my breath. Ask Sunday is a start up
that was offering a month of free tasks (or 30 tasks total) for free with
promotional code "beta". I use them for some business outsourcing stuff and
have been quite good. I bet they are going to start getting overloaded with
demand as well.

At the end of the day, for non-code business outsourcing (research, online
tasks, etc.) the services don't save you that much money (US temp agencies are
~$18/hr - these Indian services are around ~$15). And obviously the best type
of tasks to outsource are repetitive homogeneous ones that don't require
subjective decisions.

I blogged a bit about some of these services here:

<http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2007/07/29/ask-sunday/>

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jsackmann
An awful lot of the stuff he describes outsourcing seems like it would be just
as fast if he did it himself. Ordering food? Placing Amazon orders?

I realize he's going for humor with some of the examples, but in each of these
cases, once he's decided to outsource, written the e-mail requesting action
(and making sure it's understandable to someone for whom english is not a
first language), and checked to make sure it was done right, it's probably not
a net gain. And he's paying for it.

I'm sure there are instances where outsourcing is wonderful--coding (in some
cases), research, waiting on hold--but using a service like this in place of a
secretary sitting right outside your office seems misguided.

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richard81
BE CAREFUL.

Speaking from personal experience, hiring a bunch of coders in India can
either be a fantastic investment and cheap way of getting a prototype done...

...or a minefield of poor communication, miscommunication, a LACK of
communication, total misinterpretation of spec, and dog-ugly code.... don't
even ask about database structure (or lack thereof).

The startup I've been working for over the past 12 months had one such
development team do a prototype, and the next 3 months was a nightmare of bug
fixes and code rewrites.

So if there's one thing I can emphasise if you're thinking of engaging an
offshore development team.... get references. LOTS of references, and make
sure they check out!

~~~
gommm
One should never ever hire programmers in india (or anywhere) without the help
of a good programmer to test them and check on their progress....

The problem is that almost anybody can call himself a programmer and find a
job since a lot of companies don't bother to check and do not take into
account the huge difference of quality and productivity between
programmers....

So what I did when we used programmers from philipines (same situation as
india) in my company is first request them to do a small application that took
two weeks to develop and we checked the code extensively. The first group of
programmers didn't work out but the second one produced quality code. We then
hired them and did weekly review checking out their code and testing it.

But it's true asking coders in other countries is not the cheap way out of
getting a co-founder, who knows how to program, some people want it to be

~~~
richard81
The two week test is a great idea..... I wish the founder of THIS company had
thought of that, as I'm sure he'd rather pay for a two-week project and find
out that the resource was a poor one, rather than find that out when there's a
few months of dev work to be paid for!

I totally agree on the co-founder front..... having just one good coder in-
house is better than having a half-dozen off-shore who have no clue what
they're doing (IMO).

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subbu
Some comments from an Indian working in Bangalore: there is definitely a lot
of weed in the services offered from India. If you expect everybody that you
come across in cheaper countries to be 100% efficient and as intelligent as
everybody else in the world then rest of the world is really cooked. That's
hardly the case. I have been on both sides of the interviews and have seen
really crappy resources. On the other hand I have recruited bright guys for as
little as $1000/month. The key here is to spend some time in choosing your
resources. This could be a difficult task especially for foreigners because
they have no or little idea about the country/people they are outsourcing to.
Some ideas for getting the right resource: 1) Use any Indian connections you
may have. I am sure a lot of them will have connections back home. This is
your best option. 2) Use your LinkedIn connections. 3) Hang out in
newsgroups/mailing lists and watch out for people who answer questions. They
are generally good. 4) Use communities like news.yc and slashdot. Some
communities attract bright people and some of them could be Indians.

I know it's not as easy as I say but you need to take that extra mile if you
want good resources. It will pay off in the longer run.

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darius
this reminds me of the call center movie (<http://callcentermovie.com>)

~~~
gommm
Thanks this was a really nice short movie...

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jimbokun
"Us high-end types will be as vulnerable as assembly-line workers."

I think this is the most insightful statement in the article. I keep hearing
"yes, but the high end tasks will remain here" from every proponent of
overseas outsourcing.

Why? Indian people and Chinese people and I'm sure people from lots of other
countries are just as smart as us and often highly educated. There is
absolutely no reason they can't do so called "high end tasks" as well as we
can.

~~~
richard81
True, but having high-end developers in-house is both handy, and good for the
economy!

And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from
India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications.... can you imagine
how frustrating it is to work with someone who apparently has a Masters in IT
yet doesn't understand that "var1 = textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something
I want to see in proper VB.Net code? Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter
"wow, that's genius" when I cobbled together a session-based auth script....
ugh.

Like I said above, outsourcing basic, labour-intensive stuff is OK as long as
you can verify qualifications and get plenty of references. Personally, I
would never, ever outsource anything mission-critical or "high-end" as I'd be
more than a little afraid of having IP compromised (not to mention security).

All that aside, one golden rule I swear by is:

Real-world experience is more important than qualifications.

Always.

I do not care if you have a Masters degree in Information Superhighway
Architecture Specialization and Awesomeness. If you have 3+ years of
experience and can exhibit resourcefulness, experience and intelligence, I
will hire you over Mr PhD/Masters/B.IT/B.EComm/Fresh-out-of-college.

Maybe slightly off-topic but pursuant to the whole "verify your resource
first" mantra.

~~~
jimbokun
"And as biased and prejudiced as this may sound, I've found that workers from
India and China often have "shake-and-bake" qualifications...."

I suspect that's due to the rapid growth of the software development industry
there. Allegedly similar things happened during the dot boom here in the 90s,
when there was so much demand for software that many unqualified and under-
qualified people were hired.

On the other hand, there was a Wall Street Journal article recently (much
discussed here, I think) about how the best developers in India can command
salaries closer to their Silicon Valley counterparts than the typical Indian
IT salary.

Perhaps "you get what you pay for" applies?

"someone who apparently has a Masters in IT yet doesn't understand that "var1
= textfiedl1 + textfield2" is NOT something I want to see in proper VB.Net
code?"

I suspect you can find similar code from American developers. The only
difference is that over here a lot of the less dedicated programmers have left
the field and so now we have their Indian counterparts doing the same low
quality work for less money.

"Nevermind that I swear I heard him utter "wow, that's genius" when I cobbled
together a session-based auth script.... ugh."

If the article's portrayal of "Honey" is indicative, he may have been just
trying to stroke your ego. :)

"Real-world experience is more important than qualifications."

No argument there.

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icey
For those of you who have read "Four Hour Workweek" this is the company that
Tim Fenriss pimps throughout the book.

~~~
plusbryan
and it was the only really interesting takeaway from the book

