I can put it another way - of the 9 offshored projects I've encountered this year it would seem one was a moderate success for the client (think the company was Indonesian). The others range from average through to unmitigated disaster.
My experience on Telstra projects here mirrors the previous sentence whenever certain large Indian service providers were involved.
You could almost have a strategy of coming along after these guys and cleaning up their slop if you could be bothered.
Yea I understand what you mean. I'm working with a very large non-Indian firm that's opened up a 5000+ person outsourcing office.
The quality of software is absolutely terrible. I'm flabbergasted at what they're doing here. For instance, 50% of the commits in their VCS cannot be compiled. People are actually checking in code that doesn't compile, constantly.
Another thing is, I think the project is truly over-staffed -- the mythical man-moth problem can be seen in all its horrifying glory. To make what's already worse, even worse -- the version control situation is a total mess. No one really understands how to use it. There's no concept of personal branches (as in git) -- instead if you were working on commit X, and an hour later, you want to merge it; and there 5 new commits, this is what (the smart) people do: Create a backup of all the files you changes. Pull the latest code. Merge it using Beyond Compare of some similar tool.
I think the right to do would be that each engineer has a personal branch that they work on, and there should be a person called the maintainer whose sole responsibility is to merge these personal branches to the main branch. A git-style rebase could be done at the end of the day, instead of every time you want to commit, as is the norm here.
I should say the non-Indian parent company, is a extremely successful company (ie. billions of dollars in revenue), despite the terribly-produced software. It is primarily a hardware company though -- owned and operated by a conglomerate.
On top of everything, the people here seem really unhappy. No one seems to be doing programming out of passion -- it's just a job for them, that helps them feed themselves & support their family. I know there's nothing wrong in that. This particular company (hiring) them, also makes sure that their life is hell -- with absurd deadlines, policies, etc. People complain frequently about how terrible things are (people who've been working there for 5 or more years), yet no one seems to do anything about it. Remember, the average wage of an engineer here is around $900/month -- which, I honestly find unbelievable. And I've met a few people working at this wage rate, who are actually skilled.
$900/month is awesome. I am from Pakistan and am very talented and work on amazing things, our people are much more professional. The story you mentioned about version control, it cannot happen here.
Not sure what you mean here. Could you elaborate?