

The Myth Of Outsourcing - emontero1
http://blog.arc90.com/2009/07/the_myth_of_outsourcing.php

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mseebach
This is a thinly veiled marketing pitch, justifying the extra cost of buying
from the guy with a team in NYC, rather than the guy with a team in Russia.

 _To get it right, we need to not only have a tight feedback loop with you, we
want to become you. ... That's hard to do across two oceans._

No, that's hard to do - full stop. You're not bringing your full 15 (I'm
guessing) man development team to your client-site for more than a curtesy
visit - and certainly not "to become" your client. That's for your analysts.
And why would that be significantly more difficult over an ocean than over a
desk?

 _It's nearly impossible to do that if we're shipping chunks of an effort in
packages halfway across the world._

Then don't ship "packages". My offshore team work off the exact same Trac-
issue-list that the rest of my team does.

 _Software can always be built elsewhere, but the basic premise that the early
blueprints are 100% dead-on are a fantasy._

Strawman! "outsourcing=waterfall=bad" vs. "insourcing=agile=good"? No..

 _But connectedness alone doesn't lay the groundwork for building great
product._

But somehow you seem to argue that un-connectedness does? Bah.

~~~
jwhitlark
While I agree that this is a marketing pitch, and plays it a little fast and
lose, _all other things being equal_ local is better than remote. Of course,
all other things are never equal, and finding the combination that works for
you is the important part.

~~~
timwiseman
An excellent point. Of course, it seems that more and more that balance is
shifting to other countries, largely because of their lower cost of labor.

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tilly
We can quantify this.

Software Estimation by Steve McConnell on page 66 lists many factors from the
Cocomo II studies with their relative impact on software development. Multi-
site development on average causes things to take 1.56 times as long to
develop. How much does that extra time to market cost you? I submit that in a
competitive world, often a lot.

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barrkel
I find it oddly disturbing that someone would react with surprise to find out
that one has _not_ outsourced one's development team.

