In the past decade or so, multi-national corporations have taken to diverting many of their customer service hotlines to Bangalore and other metropolitan centers in India, primarily as a ”cost-saving measure.“ Yet they’re perpetrating a greater injustice than simply annoying their customers to save a few cents. By giving their distant call center operators little training and even less authority to help customers — as most of them, with a few notable exceptions, seem to do — they’ve left many Westerners with an unfair impression of India as a pool of labor that, while presumably cheap, is apparently unskilled, apathetic, and awkward at communication.
Yet for the average Westerner to use this rather limited experience with “Indian outsourcing” to make inferences about the broader Indian labor market is as absurd as a Canadian making judgements about the entire American workforce based on the fast-food cashiers he might encounter at Interstate stops between Toronto and Pittsburgh. India is, after all, a country of one billion people, no more homogenous — and in many ways less so — than the United States.
My own experience working with web development teams in India has not only controverted every one of the popular stereotypes, it has greatly improved the productivity and quality of the work that all of my companies are able to produce.
At my Ruby on Rails consulting firm, for example, we have been operating an office in New Delhi since last October, supplementing our base in Boston. I decided to hire my New Delhi team after working with them on a one-off project and being very impressed by their work.
Anyone who cares about crafting good software should bear the vast pool of talent available in India in mind when assembling a team of developers. I’m not advocating favoring any one nation, but merely that we should decide to work with people without respect to the flag that flies over their heads. Moreover, I’ll grant that working with the Indian IT industry requires some care and a bit of cross-cultural sensitivity. But I can attest that the rewards are considerable for web entrepreneurs and project managers who are willing to learn to navigate this new trans-Pacific trade route.
Concerns and fears
First, just to get it out of the way, malcontents of various industries will inevitably surface the old poujadist complaints about “shipping jobs over seas” whenever the prospect of working with offshore companies comes up. The title of a recent book targeted at software developers says it all: My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book): 52 Ways to Save Your Job. There is nothing new in this. In the late 1600s, London silk weavers staged riots and were known to rampage through the streets, tearing the clothes off women who were wearing cheap printed textiles imported by the East India Company.
But people who oppose outsourcing never seem to learn what every empirically-minded first-year economics major knows: unrestricted trade across international boundaries makes life better for everybody in the end. The Western companies who employ either firms in India or US firms who employ Indian workers are often able to get more work done, more efficiently and cost-effectively than they might otherwise.
Other typical concerns are of a more practical, rather than political, nature: for example, that communication will be difficult, that it will be impossible to select a reliable team, and so on. But a little bit of attention to the peculiarities of the Indian software industry and its ways of doing business will help avert the (admittedly real) potential problems that lie behind such concerns.
Why go abroad?
As usual, one need look no further than Techcrunch for a distillation of Web 2.0 conventional wisdom on the subject:
Something that you don’t often see a lot written about in new media is the strong trend by startups to outsource a lot of their work. Digg for example was originally designed by Kevin Rose outsourcing the job on elance, and sites such as Slideshare [and] illumobile.com have gone down a similar path.
Naturally it’s a cost thing. I spoke to one startup CEO last year who hired five programmers in India who had PhD level qualifications for $45,000 a year each.
But while cost is an advantage that many Indian teams can offer — especially when it’s a question of lower-skilled services like data-entry and back-office work — I think that putting a focus on price in this way detracts from the true value of looking for a team without respect to international boundaries.
In fact, the reason I originally found myself looking to India was necessity rather than parsimony. I was exasperated trying to find a good Rails consulting team to help out with a start-up I was working on at the time. Over a period of several months, I hired quite a range of developers to help me out with various tasks: well-known “rock stars” in the Rails world, little-known but highly proficient and affordable indie guys, low-priced American firms who had only recently switched to Rails from other technologies, and finally the team in India.
The worst work came from the “famous” firm, who were charging us nearly $150 USD per hour yet would regularly take two weeks to reply to one-line emails. We were largely ignored, and whenever code was finally checked in, it was half-baked at best. The lower-priced firms in the US paid us more attention, but I didn’t get a sense of intellectual curiosity or expertise from most of them. One indie guy I hired in the US was amazingly talented and relatively affordable, but he simply didn’t have the hours I needed because he was also working a day job.
To my surprise, my best experience by far was with the team I hired in New Delhi. Not only did they fully grasp the principles of how to write good Ruby code, but they were lightening-fast responsive, good communicators, highly available, and enthusiastic. Given my past experiences, to find a team like that I wouldn’t have cared what they charged me. It was, therefore, all the more fascinating that the Indian team charged less per hour than most (but not all) of the developers I had hired in the US.
I uncovered in the process a number of other formidable advantages to an offshore arrangement.
Undeniable advantages
The first, and most significant, is actually related to the lower cost of living (and therefore labor) in India, but only as an ancillary point. Consider that when you’re a consulting firm with an expensive office in a large US city, along with having a payroll composed entirely of US full-time developers, you simply can’t afford to spend much time expanding your team’s skill set unless that work goes right into hours billable directly to a client. But when labor is more affordable, you can more easily make choices that favor increasing the skill and expertise of your team — things like being choosy about the client projects you accept in order to make sure every new project is an educational, as well as a profitable, experience.
Equally, you can allow your developers to spend spare non-billable time on interesting side projects that enhance their skills with new techniques and technologies, which also allows them to contribute to open-source. Although there are plenty of “software sweatshops” to be found in India (as well as the West), the more enlightened boutique firms often strongly encourage their employees to improve their skills rather than spending every second on client work, leveraging lower labor costs into greater expertise rather than raw dollars-to-lines-of-code output.
In practical terms, this meant that when I first hired the New Delhi team as contractors for my start-up, I immediately had someone who was an expert in Amazon Web Services, another who was a CSS guru, another who knew deployments in and out, someone else who knew all about building APIs in Ruby, and so on. I had access to a team with varied experiences and a vast repository of resulting expertise, which would have been very hard for most smaller American consulting firms to put together and retain on staff. They were also all available to work on my project part-time when I needed them, because they didn’t have the cost imperatives that push many Western firms to take on more work than they can handle, severely overworking and limiting the availability of their developers. With a well-run firm in India, you’re likely to get far more available time and attention than you would with a comparable firm that only has a local team.
Additionally, I found the team members were simply better educated in the full breadth of computer science and engineering than their counterparts in most web dev shops in the US. Most Indian software firms require at least a bachelor’s (and often post-graduate) degree. I don’t generally abide by the notion that formal education makes better programmers (sometimes the opposite is the case), but it’s hard denying the value of having folks around who can code a custom utility for you in C or .Net when necessary, based on having worked with those technologies at university. This has proved essential to us on more than one occasion.
I also found that my application immediately adopted a 24-hour development cycle when I began working with an Indian team. This workflow, sometimes referred to as “chasing the sun,” means that while you sleep in the West your dev team will work through the night on tasks you assign during the preceding day. This type of iterative daily (or at least weekly) cycle of work-and-critique fosters an agility in the development process that makes for a manifestly better application. In addition to the cycle of work and review, there is also an overlap in the morning (if you’re in the US) when both you and your team will likely be in the office at the same time, making real-time Campfire and Skype discussions possible. So you get the best of all possible worlds, especially if you’re into Getting Real: automatic alone time for your developers, iterative development, and the impetus to keep your meetings brief and action-oriented.
You’ll notice that none of these advantages is about hiring a developer at $20 an hour to churn out code mindlessly. It’s about looking for the best people without respect to international borders, finding a good workflow, and having a team that both cares about quality and has the logistics to support keeping that quality high.
I thus like to make a critical distinction between “outsourcing” and “offshoring.” Outsourcing is when one company hires another to perform some task because it doesn’t make sense (for whatever reason) to hire an employee to do internally. When I hire an accountant here in Massachusetts to do my taxes, I’m outsourcing. Offshoring, however, is a subset of outsourcing, and it involves selecting an outsourced provider specifically on the basis of cost of labor differentials between countries (see “labor arbitrage”).
When it comes to skilled work like software engineering, savvy entrepreneurs ought to be interested in the efficiencies afforded by outsourcing, but in offshoring only insofar as not caring where a provider is based means one can get better outsourced work.
Selecting a provider
The first criterion when selecting a firm is to figure out what type of client you are. Over time I’ve learned that there are three discrete types of web dev clients, and each one requires a different type of consulting arrangement if things are to go as smoothly as possible.
The first type are those who are planning on being very technically involved. These clients know their programming platform well enough to ask for very specific tasks, are able to assess the quality of the work at the code level when it comes back and are the ideal candidates for working directly with an Indian team — in direct communication with the developers working on the project, with only minimal (or in some cases no) management by a US consultant. This type of arrangement saves money, and the fact that the team and client will be able to speak the common language of code will allow them circumvent most potential cross-cultural and management issues.
The second type of clients are those who are comfortable working with a partly offshore team but who care more about the product and its functionality than the underlying technical details. We’ve found that these projects really need at least a part-time on-shore project manager, in addition to the one or more full-time developers in India. In arrangements like this, the project manager acts as a communications liaison and is the primary point of contact for the client. From the client perspective, this is basically like hiring an entirely domestic firm, but with the added benefit that they’ll likely get a lower overall hourly rate, along with a team that has the ability to give far more attention (and expertise) to the project. Trans-national project management is an emerging business skill — and a fairly particular one at that — and clients will benefit greatly if they hire a company that has already learned the ropes. This type of arrangement also gives client a local throat to choke, as it were, in case anything goes wrong.
The third type are those clients to whom outsourcing truly isn’t well suited. Clients in this situation actually turn out to be quite rare, but I have definitely encountered them. These clients usually have a very formative product idea and are counting on the developers/consultants to help them finalize their ideas in real-world brainstorming sessions and what are effectively on-site “hackfests.” I’ve spoken with start-ups like this in the past, and I’ve never hesitated in telling them that an off-site (to say nothing of off-shore) team is probably not the best for them.
Fighting harmony and avoiding “too good to be true”
The next two bits of advice for selecting a firm to work with are slightly counter-intuitive. They both stem from the fact that the Indian culture of business places tremendous emphasis on preserving the appearance of harmony. Indians are constitutionally loath to tell a client “no,” for fear of offending or causing embarrassment. There are a number of painfully subtle ways in which Indians may communicate “bad news” and “no” to each other within their professional culture, but they are unlikely to be detected by a Westerner. This means, especially if you’re talking directly to a provider in India, that you’ll get a lot of knee-jerk yes-saying, which you have to work hard to cut through and figure out what’s just harmony preservation and what’s really an enthusiastic affirmation. To that end, be wary of shops that claim expertise in everything; it’s best to find a firm that has built a reputation in one particular community or with one specific technology. It’s nice to have people who can do work here or there in related technologies, but when it comes to the core of your project, find folks who know your specific platform inside out.
This relates to my second bit of advice, which is to try to find the most expensive and accomplished provider possible. When you’re already saving money working with an offshore (or at least partly offshore) team, it’s very easy to get greedy and go for whoever bids the lowest rate. But if a team promises they’re going to give you great work for what sounds like an insanely cheap price (and, believe me, these folks aren’t hard to find), red flags should go up immediately; they probably have no idea what they’re doing. It took me a few bad experiences early on to learn this lesson, but it’s one I’ll never forget.
Two last canaries in the proverbial coal mine are firms that are run with a sweatshop mentality and firms that don’t contribute back to open-source. You don’t want a team that is driven too hard, working through nights and weekends for example, because this inevitably leads to a compromise in quality. A significant indicator of this is whether the firm allows its employees to blog. 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. And if an employer doesn’t permit his or her employees to contribute back to the platforms they work with on a daily basis, it means they’re probably more obsessed with billing every hour possible than in building up their team and technology.
Working with your provider
Although there are cross-cultural issues to consider when working with an Indian team — just as there would be for a British firm working with a French one — it’s worth observing that many of the issues that are likely to come up when working with an Indian team are common to all remote work. Don’t be too quick to blame miscommunications or collaboration glitches on trans-national issues. When people have a bad experience with a domestic firm, they rightly blame the firm, but if they have a had experience with an offshore firm, people are always quick to blame the country first. This is both irrational and unfair.
Most of the issues for Westerners working with Indians revolve around this issue of yes-saying and the need to preserve the appearance of harmonious relations. Most American entrepreneurs are (quite rightly) accustomed to saying what they think, being challenged by contractors and subordinates, and doing the same in reverse. Indians tend to be somewhat more reticent to express reservations openly about a plan that seems like a bad idea. So make sure you encourage push-back. Encourage your Indian partners to be what they would call “extremely blunt.” Lest you should fear this is encouraging rudeness, rest assured that “blunt” on the Indian scale often equates to what most American start-up entrepreneurs would regard as fairly deferent and polite.
When you start to assign tasks to a provider that you’re not used to working with, you should ask him or her to re-state the task back to you. It is not uncommon for Indian workers to say they’ve understood something even though they haven’t because they don’t want to suggest that the speaker hasn’t explained himself properly. The provider will then go confer among colleagues and try to figure out the request, rather than putting the questions they have to the person who actually assigned the task. You should always verify that your requests have been understood clearly and let your provider know very clearly that you won’t be offended if clarification is requested.
Another useful piece of advice is try to have individual conversations with your providers. Because of the need to preserve harmony, multi-person meetings (or conference calls) become rife with peril for the Indian employee. Not only do they have to worry about offending the client, but also saying something that might offend their bosses. To encourage frankness, it’s best to limit the number of people involved in the conversation and either go directly to the supervisor or directly to the person doing the work, not both at the same time.
I have cribbed much of this advice Craig Storti’s excellent Speaking of India, which details these cross-cultural differences very astutely, while simultaneously managing not to resort to single-minded stereotypes. I highly recommend that book for those considering working regularly with Indian providers. Becoming aware of these cultural differences makes one realize that some behaviors which can at first come off as incompotence — or even malevolence — are often due to insidious cross-cultural differences. What’s worse is that these differences often go ignored by both parties because of the illusion of shared culture created by a common language.
To be sure, finding and working with a good Indian team takes a bit of work and some cultural flexibility, but if my experience is at all indicative, it can be more than worth the effort — and not nearly as frustrating or scary as one might think.
Resources
Elance, oDesk, and Guru are good starting points for finding providers in India.
Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap When Working with Indians, Doing Business in India, and The Black Book of Outsourcing are all wonderful books on doing business with Indian partners. For guidance on outsourcing in contexts beyond web and software development, see my article series at 43folders.
For a bit of comic relief, see Sandeep Sood’s Doubtsourcing, an excerpt of which I included in the article, with Mr. Sood’s permission.
Excellent article. Over the years I have found out sourcing to India to be both a pleasant lifesaver and scary. On the one hand, you can get pretty much anything done, at a low cost, very quickly which is great. On the other hand… they do the same work that I do and I fear missing out on jobs in the future due to a global economy I can’t compete with, but hey… I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now I enjoy outsourcing when it is waranted. I am a user of both guru and elance. I have only actually used guru for actual projects and had excellent results. Elance looks just as good, but I have yet to make a transaction so I can’t really comment on their quality. I guess technically it all depends on the freelancer you choose and not the method of finding he or she.
- Furleydelphia
My inner idealist radical says “here! here!” to a global meritocracy.
I’ve tried to outsource a .NET related job I didn’t want to do…I didn’t get any good bids (not in terms of $ but in terms of my confidence in their skills), perhaps the offer/scope was too small. I am still eager to try it.
As a current jack-of-all-trades, I also see outsourcing influencing the web industry in a potentially positive way. If I could focus on product architecture and design and have a reliable army of skilled programmers an email away…well, shucks, that’d be awesome!
[…] My latest article is up at Vitamin Magazine. It’s about working with web developers in India, and why we should look to hire people without respect to the flag that happens to fly over their heads. Comments / Leave a response […]
[…] Working with developers in India Why whom and how Added on 07/02/2008 at 01:37PM […]
Nicely articulated. Being an Indian I agree to all of it. I have gone through most of these feelings myself early on my career…especially saying “I didn’t get you” or “say that again” for the fear offending the client. Now I am accustomed to Western clients and can understand their needs better.
[…] Great post on working with teams in India. […]
Can you share who the firm you selected is? This article is a great testimonial for them and I might be interested in working with the firm.
Excellent Article . With the vast talent pool in India …Outsourcing not only brings lower cost but also great value to Software development .
I disagree with your conclusion. In my experience, offshore teams don’t save money in the long run and incur too many logistical issues. As a simple example, it’s SO much easier for a front-end guy to walk over to a back-end guy, and be able to resolve a matter in minutes rather than days.
Good advice… Outsourcing is about high value, not low cost.
As with anything, easy money attracts impostors and phonies who will jump at an opportunity to make money. There are tons outsourcing companies like that. You want to look for a firm that knows its strengths and weaknesses and isn’t afraid to admit it. They may be more expensive, but they’ll be worth their weight in gold.
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com
[…] Vitamin Features » Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how (tags: outsourcing business development india entrepreneurship webdesign toread isv **) […]
Hi, Ryan! Good article! But why don’t you look at Russian web developers as well? We have thousands of really good ones. Moreover, Russian programmers are one of the best in the world. By the way, Sergey Brin is Russian too. :)
I’ve found that outsourcing to India simply is not worth it. That’s not to say that outsourcing doesn’t work, just outsourcing to India isn’t worth it.
I’ve experienced managing the lowest paid developers where you had to write such in detail technical specification documents that it became insanely time consuming; having software given back to us where US and UK currency fields that have 8 decimal places is one example where they turned around and said we didn’t specify 2 decimal places.
I’ve also managed the relationship (in theory) best developers in India (Thoughtworks Bangalore) who were supposed to be agile, but I found them to be anything but (a few XP practices does not make you agile), and turnover of staff was insane.
Quite simply if the Indian developer is any good then he/she will look to move out of India to the US, or will look to move up/to the side and up towards management as quickly as possible, so any domain knowledge that you transfer to an Indian developer only has a very very short period of capitalization time.
Also there are so many sharks its insane… I’ve found that its often the case that the developers you think are working on your projects are not those that are actually working on your projects. Again and again, the lead developers take the phone calls, sit in the VC calls and answer the emails, but most of the time the work is passed off to a more junior developer. Its all about profit. After doing code reviews with a highly qualified ex games developer friend he thought he could spot 5 different developers working on code that only the single lead developer claimed to work on, and the code quality ranged from good to appalling, and it needed extensive refactoring.
Indian developers I’ve worked with directly in the UK have been amongst the best with great technical knowledge, friendly attitudes, and they have a very good work ethic.
So I’d say if you want to do outsourcing, and your heart is set on India, then set up your own team if you can afford it. You may end up paying more than you would like to keep your staff, but at least the domain knowledge that has been transferred will stay in the team.
… OR …
… call us (www.dreamcc.com). Outsource if you want, but I work for a small, but quite talented design and development firm in Charleston, WV. I didn’t come to this article looking to insert a free plug for my company, but there are plenty of us smaller firms around that can produce the same or better work than anyone in India at or around the same cost with faster turn-around.
Living in WV, our cost of living is generally lower than a lot of states (although our gas tax is stupid) so we can offer rates that are very reasonable and competitive without going half-way around the globe, dealing with language/culture barriers, etc…
All I’m saying is look around you a little closer to home before sending jobs to India - you might be surprised how many of us there are who can do the work you want within your budget. To some extent I agree with the whole idea of the global economy except that it seems at this point to be a predominantly one-way street.
Awesome article, everything about this article was just right.
Just to correct delfor, its not two way at all. I know enough Americans running call centers and working as manegers and business analysts in India.
Its just that some people choose to sit and crib, others make a adverse situation work for them.
Aditya
www.appliedeye.com
Sorry for the typo..correct my earlier comment to “its not ONE WAY” at all….
Coworkers give me crap about paying people in other countries to do my work for me…but lets take a look at this: in the past two years I have started four semi-successful online businesses from ideas I had back in college. I have outsourced about half of my work from my “real job” and now enjoy about a 20 hour work week. BTW I would have never started those businesses if someone didn’t do the work for me. So eat it coworkers, I’m out of my crib!
Mike
personalsidekick.com
Alirght, I liked this article. There is definitely vast talent pool in India and outsourcing works best when you hit the right spot with group of teams you work with. The article is right about the Cultural differences and how understanding the culture is important when it comes to dealing with teams.
Also the comments about the distress is true too.
First of all culture in India is not solely about the communication and presentation of work. It is is much more than that. The I.T culture strives on quantity than quality. If you look at any Indian outsourced company you can easily find how appreciation of your work is directly proportional to the time you put in. Infact more preference is given to hours you work. Developers working all night and producing is code which you know isnt acceptable by any standards.
Also when people mention there is vast talent pool, they are right but also there is lot of garbage out there. This is because of the Society and educational culture which drives India. In India getting in to technology is more of a status symbol than just being successful. other forms of education are generally ignored You have kids who flock to I.T ignoring their own personal likes and dislikes and end result you have huge pool of people who are disgruntled at their job and career, dont take pride in their Job and are waiting for the next promotion where they become Manager.
So finding talent is like finding needle in a haystack. You need to have right resources to find people or need to know people who have dealt with them before.
The comment above which mentions about consulting firms in WV being cheaper is true. Wripo an Indian consulting firm is already opening offices in US. Why because outsourcing was never about cost. Cost was the hype which let is build up now it is just dependency and because US lacks 60% people going in to I.T as careers.
I just want to say think about it before you outsource.
I read many of the posts and the article and coming from someone who has been a professionally paid software developer for 23 years I would say that the enthusiasm is short-sighted for the long term effects of handing over American jobs to India or any other country just to get a 20 hour work week or to get your projects done quickly and cheaply.
I work for an organization that outsources all IBM development. So now, when we need to transition back in-house we discover that the cheap priced talent pool is cheap for a reason.
As an American I am all for global economy just not to the point of watching my grandchildren on welfare because all the good paying jobs have been sent to india or given to Hx visa’s.
What exactly is gained in the long term investment of our country by giving away jobs in America to those who are not Americans?
Reading many of the comments and the article gives me a sense that many if not most are only concerned with the here and now and not the future of our country and that is pathetic.
So now all you immature flamers bring it on..
Excellent article.
Welcome to globalization! Today its India, tomorrow its someplace else. I moved back to Mumbai, India 3 years back to join the ‘outsourcing bandwagon’ but found out early that costs were going up, attrition was high and the quality of the developers was not as great as what is published/talked about and that we were not creating any intellectual property. Merely working on projects which paid in $ was not very satisfying at the end of the day. An entrepreneurs quest is to create something bigger than himself/herself that will scale and last for a long time. Hence, we took a product route with a small team and came out with a software as a service called DeskAway (in 2007). Moving up the value chain has been very very rewarding and satisfying.
I see more and more Indian companies move out of the cost/labor game and come up with global products and services…
@Mike : Well your personalsidekick website certainly looks like it was a result of outsourcing. You get what you pay for I guess!
[…] Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how […]
Got this link from Johnathan Snooks website - just wanted to say “THANK YOU” for writing this :)
It’s unfortunate that I have to even point this out, but any racist or otherwise offensive comments will be promptly deleted. Try not to suck, people.
When it comes down to it, strong Indian development shops will charge almost as much as US shops because they can. There are absolutely shops in Russia, India, Ukraine, and everywhere else in the world where you can get labor at bargain-basement rates. But there’s just no way to get around the old adage, “you get what you pay for”.
The technologists that graduate from IIT and the myriad other technology schools in India are absolutely top-notch. But so many things go into producing a strong partnership. Technical strength is one term in the equation. But service, commitment to quality, genuine interest in your clients’ success and experience are all equally important.
One factor that I find to be particularly important is the motivation. The biggest motivator I’ve ever come across is feeling like I’ve got some skin in the game; having something to lose if a project doesn’t go well. A small US-based shop made up of a few people, all of whom are invested in their company, and therefore the happiness and success of every client is far more motivated than the average Indian or Russian (or Chinese for that matter) programmer who’s cheap because they’re still working their way up the ladder. Projects come and go, they’re primary interest is in working their way up the corporate ladder. A small US-based development company however is often interested in building long-term collaborative and supportive relationships with their clients.
I wish everyone luck in finding quality offshore outsourcing vendors. If you find yourself unsatisfied with what you can find, US-based Evans Codeworks, Inc. is a solid, committed, experienced and capable group of developers that will absolutely leave you feeling satisfied.
@Laran: Please don’t use your reply as a shill for your own company.
interesting how very few of the above posts talk about the cold hard facts of interchangeable programming:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3757311/The+Myth+of+the+Interchangeable+Programmer:+Can%E2%80%99t+We+Just+Offshore+Him?.htm
Ryan, what a good article! I can tell it is coming from someone who has experience the good working with Indian IT companies. The second thing that I really liked about this article was that it is aimed at the Fortune 500000 and not just the Fortune 500. Most analysis tend to ignore the ‘long tail’.
I run an IT company in India and have been catering to clients in the US for the last 6 years. I would like to add how clients in the US can decide on the right provider:
A few right questions can easily help identify the right company to work with:
- ask the provider for references with whom you can speak
- ask for live URL’s and working sites
- ask for real code so you can assess code standards
- talk to the provider on the phone. Check if they have an IP phone or are comfortable using Skype or something similar
- talk to the developer who will be assigned to the project
- ask for photos of infrastructure
- check on the Internet connectivity
- ask for the option to do regular web conferences
There are a lot of companies in India. Unfortunately there are some bad ones - they are bad simply because they do not have the right people or experience. The checklist provided above will clearly show you who the experienced ones are.
When I pitch to a client we always offer them a ‘trial run’. We ask them to make a small investment and then buy in for the long run. A group of two or three companies can be made to compete. Trust me this really gets us working to ‘win’ the project.
One of the big benefits of medium sized Indian company is the availability of varied skills. For example, we offer a team service to companies who come looking for .Net developers. We offer them a Developer and along with that we give them the option to use a Project Lead, Graphic designer, CSS designer, Tester, etc. Everything that a client will need to get a project complete. I believe this is difficult to match in small companies in the US.
The benefits of round the clock delivery is something that cannot be overlooked. We have clients who start their day talking to the project lead, then spending the day reviewing stuff - emailing it before the day starts here in India, talking to the Project lead when it’s morning here and going to sleep while the team starts their work here.
What kind of clients this is best suited for? I agree with Ryan, that it works very well when the client has a Project lead who kind of manages the team here. Works less effectively for clients who just have a business idea and rely on the offshore company to bring the business plan to reality.
The World is Flat and I believe it is for everyones benefit. Right now we are looking at hiring a project lead in the US who can interface with our clients in the US and also manage teams here.
Ryan,
This is certainly the best outsourcing article I have come across. I am a Canadian Citizen and just like you, I started a Drupal development shop 2 years ago from Canada and hired 2 developers 1 in Delhi and 1 in Ahmedabad. Since I lived most part of my life in India, I had no issues with cultural differences.
As the business continued to scale, my confidence increased. We kept building deep expertise in Drupal and bagged few Fortune 500 client contracts. And we did not have to sell!
Key here is to build deep expertise. Why would a client come looking for you? They obviously would have seen your work or someone would have referred them to you. Everyone is so busy nowadays. Trying to get the lowest cost developer sometimes does not work because you may as well spend 3 times the amount of time to communicate with someone miles away and the result may be totally different then what you envision.
We do charge North American rates as well as offshore rates but we do tell the client what level of experience they are going to get. For this we have 2 separate divisions in the company. The training division - OpenKick technologies provides Jr. Developers but we in general have no issues in executing successful projects at North American rates. When Client asks for a lower rate, we tell them what they get.
Key here is always going to be your expertise and today its more about sharing knowledge and quality of code. When you find a developer for your open source project, find out how much they have given back to the community i.e code contribution, documentation, supporting others in forum, etc. It goes a long way to work with such developers rather than eLance or Guru. Most companies in eLance or Guru are sort of jack of all and bid on everything at lowest price and clients end up spending hours and hours to explain their project.
I travel a lot to India nowadays and stay there for long time to help bridge the gaps.
Service firms must find a way to control attrition because certainly a client don’t want to talk to a different developer every other month. This is where there is lot of frustration to live with. “You get what you pay for” is in most cases true. Key here is to find someone who has deep expertise and has been able to retain the technical team.
On a different note - Ryan -We also have a 14 member rails team in Railshouse.com. We are planning a RoR Camp in Ahmedabad in October 2008 after our August 08 Drupal Camp (http://drupalcamp08.drupalindia.in/). Would love to see your India team participate.
Wow! Never seen so many fellow Indians reply to a post that much!
Excellent article Ryan, but………
I believe you’ve experienced(luckily) the better share of developers. In my opinion, most of the developers in India are poorly educated engineers who are the outcome of an aging, outdated education system.
Most of the big IT companies in India send their new recruits (who often happen to be fresh graduates) for 2-3 month training courses. This is NOT an indicator of a good education system. Which is why the Top 5 IT companies in India have year-long dev cycles with 250+ people working on a single project.
Saying that, there are a large number of skilled developers and designers in India. What I have observed however is that most of them are self-educated, especially the web developers.
Hope I haven’t offended anyone. its just my opinion :-)
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A very nice article I must say.
Let me put forward my point of view since I am an Indian myself -
1. I am pursuing my engn. from one of the top Engineering colleges in India and I am absolutely staggered to find how low the average Indian commercial developer is as compared to us students in college. Majority of these developers (as someone already pointed out) have done short term courses and level of skill and expertise is absolutely crap. Just try surf through the myriad of Outsourcing firms and check the level of work themselves. So, what is the reason ?
Reason is that the highly proficient and skilled developer doesn’t remain in the trade any longer. They move on to management or join a well established company. All of the great coders and developers from my college either move over to MBA or join the big-boys like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or other s/w firms. They just do not remain in this business. So, what is left, is generally a less qualified, skilled developer. I have seen so many people do a 3-month course and become a “web-developer”.
But that’s the majority. There are a number of highly skilled and proficient firms and developers who hire the top-notch developers from many of the tech colleges and this is where one sees the real strength. This group of people are the absolute cream and deliver the most outstanding work possible. But, their price is higher as well.
So, I feel that majority is crap but there is a group which is absolutely amazing and its your duty to find this minority group.
Regards
Rooney
Great Article, I have had some great results using web developers from India, it takes time and effort to establish good working relationships but for me its the way to go, and the reason why I started to use them is because I wanted to grow the services that my business offers. I am an expat who has moved to 5 countries in 10 years so I dont have the traditional home base with a network of contacts and the Indian developers were the guys that got in touch with me offering their services, I have not had one single sales pitch from developers in other countries. So I started to keep a file on the companies that contacted me and did some research, then a few few test projects to narrow down who I want to work with and thats how I started and will continue.
thanks
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Thanks
Great article. There are a lot of misconceptions about offshoring work and your piece addresses most.
For a more strategic view on Globalization and India, check out Wim Elfrink’s video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p303tLTCKxA
Also, for people concerned about having our grandkids on welfare, don’t give up yet - US has not lost its edge. Our research is outstanding. There are many myths predicting downfall of US due to outsourcing. But the innovation that happens here - mainly stemming from our education system - where students are encouraged to think out of the box, innovate and research, is not something that can be replicated elsewhere. Many of the asian cultures are wired to “follow instructions” not question the status quo and propose alternative solutions.
An interesting piece Duke on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvqqYDmLgjY
Excellent article…worth reading.
Yeah that personalsidekick.com site isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.
You outsource to India b/c your cheap. Plenty of good developers in the USA that want work to do. Keep ruining the dollar buddy.
@USA Developer. Your an idiot.
[…] Ryan Norbauer, entrepreneur, expose ses impressions et démonte les freins culturels que peuvent avoir certaine personne sur l’outsourcing , avec notamment, des compagnies Indiennes. http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/working-with-web-developers-in-india-why-whom-and-how […]
This is an excellent article and I would urge all web designers who are seeking to use outside talent read this article.
Great article. Having worked with Indian outsourcing teams of various sizes for the last 5 years this really covers most of the main points that are important to think about in this areas. For me it has been a real eye opener in terms of the speed at which they aquire new skills and the lvel of technical knowledge which already exists. The one thing I found was of the most importance was to document everything and to define scope of work to the finest detail, that wasy you could be pretty sure the end results would be what you are expecting.
That’s an excellent article thanks!
We had 3 calls yesterday from various Indian outsourcing firms wanting to become partners with us and it’s becoming a bit of a pain, but it’s encouraging to hear how this type of arrangement can work quite well.
What do you think about these companies that email and cold call? I presume we’re not the only company being inundated by this.
[…] Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how Interesting commentary and experiences of offshoring to India including some characteristics of Indian development teams and some cultural facets. 8 July 2008 in Uncategorized | tags: india, outsourcing, programming […]
I wrote a blog - http://blogs.srijan.in/2008/08/01/what-has-changed-at-srijan/ - as an expression of how we (an Indian open source consulting company) have continuously worked on improving our processes and general problems we face. This might provide some insight to the readers of this article.
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http://www.srijan.in
http://blogs.srijan.in
Impressive article and good insights from the readers in this post.
I have another vision on outsourcing to others countries.
When I first graduate in London, my teacher told me something that I carry for the rest of my life. He started teaching because he couldn’t find a job. Owo! I though, this is London, the is my best and I’m not in Rio de Janeiro neither São Paulo. What happened?! This is not Brazil. (I don’t think this happens here).
So… People don’t have money or they want to escape from local taxis and spend less to make money. More money, always money!
Actually when someone decides for such business, this someone is meaning a manifest of disagreement with the laws and rules in the country they live. We know that the things are expensive, government apply lots of taxis. The inferno!
But instead of solve the problem in the source they go straight into another direction. The easiest way is always escape and blind ourselves.
Ok. I know some company charge much higher that they need to. Specially because they don’t pay the half of what they
won with the person who has the skills and makes the work happens. That’s the system! Is normal win money with the work force of another one.
We have to face that we are always trying to make money however we can and who minds the life condition of the living in India, chine. Doesn’t matter if they are slaves. The less we pay, the happy we are.
My teacher was a great professional and I always remember him in my career back in Brazil. I like to think that was his destiny (but I wouldn’t for the rest of world).
To be realist; India, Chine and all third world (or developing) countries has good programmers. The market says to them to focus on this area. The best of the best goes to US, UK and the good countries, so that happens Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and oracle and all big one which roles the world.
I can assure you that Brazil has the best developers in the world, but I cannot assure myself of that, neither in chine, india…
Best
[…] 13, 2008 Working With Developers in India Posted by akantos under Uncategorized | Tags: outsourcing | Ryan Norbauer wrote a greatarticle about working with web developers in India. He shows a detailed view and plans for such business and the insights from the readers are amazing. […]