Offshore software services

[roteiro]

What do you know about them? Maybe you used some

[Gawes]

I know that some companies use offshore engineering software services for their needs as it is really very convenient thing. You can ask some specialists from other companies to do a certain work for you if you don't have time or opportunity for it. I guess it is a very useful thing these days and more and more specialist are using it

[specsaregood]

My business partner spent over an hour trying to explain to the senior engineer at an offshore software firm why he couldn't do .Length on a variable that had a null value. He was convinced it was a bug in the system returning the null (which was working according to the spec) and he just couldn't understand why he couldn't get a Length attribute back and why his application kept crashing as a result. This is something that a first year programmer should have grasped (and fixed) within minutes.

Sometimes you truly get what you pay for...

[DamianTV]

Lets see, they suck our jobs out of the US for one, create new issues by having programmers and users speak different languages for two, pay non US programmers poorly for three, quality of work is garbage for four, should we continue?

[oyarde]

Off shore is for hiding money , fishing and tropical vacations . If you want some work done , stay local .

[Davideer]

Some companies use different offshore engineer software for those types of work which they can not conduct on their own, I guess. I have dealt with different types of them at work and it is a pretty useful thing, I have to say

[oyarde]

If I cannot conduct it on my own there is some guy down the street or next door who can .

[specsaregood]

If I cannot conduct it on my own there is some guy down the street or next door who can .

I don't know. Usually when a customer decides that they want to: spend hours on conference calls with a dozen people and get nothing accomplished, go well over budget, go months past delivery date without delivery, and generally have a project fail; I recommend they offshore the work. I don't have the time nor patience to deal with that and wouldn't want to put that on a neighbor either.

[oyarde]

I don't know. Usually when a customer decides that they want to: spend hours on conference calls with a dozen people and get nothing accomplished, go well over budget, go months past delivery date without delivery, and generally have a project fail; I recommend they offshore the work. I don't have the time nor patience to deal with that and wouldn't want to put that on a neighbor either.

Yeah , if they are dicks , send 'em to India .

[fisharmor]

You are absolutely right, specs... about contractors.

We actually have offices in Bangalore, Vilnius, and Birmingham. The company employees in Bangalore are a crap shoot... but there is one woman there who is my peer in every sense of the word. There is another new hire there who is already tearing apart the app engine settings in his free time.

In Vilnius there are two other guys, one Lithuanian and one Indian expat, who likewise turn whatever they touch to gold.

But yeah, I have dealt with offshore contractors who weren't worth the extra plumbing cost to have them in a building. More specifically, I have thrown out and redeveloped a lot of what they have done.

[DGambler]

Many times, when you factor in rework and the baseline 30% loss in productivity, it costs the same or more... But people that use it for projects are only lying looking at the quoted price and don't understand the TCO.

[Jamesiv1]

Manufacturing in China is lots cheaper than in the US.

Programming in India is lots cheaper than in the US.

Reality.

Plus, school kids start learning to code a lot earlier than public schools in the US.

Consumer Prices in United States are 180.97% higher than in India
Consumer Prices Including Rent in United States are 237.28% higher than in India
Rent Prices in United States are 472.34% higher than in India
Restaurant Prices in United States are 302.83% higher than in India
Groceries Prices in United States are 178.50% higher than in India
Local Purchasing Power in United States is 66.68% higher than in India

I provide tech support for programmers in India every day. Talking on the phone can be a challenge, but via email it's not much different from English-speaking folks (English is first language). The time difference easily makes email the preferred method.

"You get what you pay for" is a misnomer when it costs so much less to live there.

[specsaregood]

You are absolutely right, specs... about contractors.

We actually have offices in Bangalore, Vilnius, and Birmingham. The company employees in Bangalore are a crap shoot... but there is one woman there who is my peer in every sense of the word. There is another new hire there who is already tearing apart the app engine settings in his free time.

In Vilnius there are two other guys, one Lithuanian and one Indian expat, who likewise turn whatever they touch to gold.

But yeah, I have dealt with offshore contractors who weren't worth the extra plumbing cost to have them in a building. More specifically, I have thrown out and redeveloped a lot of what they have done.

I have no doubt there are good programmers/engineers in other parts of the world, and having them as a fulltime/long term employee would probably be a better experience. I was generalizing about contracted offshore work, I've had to work with a lot of them and taken over a lot of projects they failed to deliver on over the years. I can count the positive experiences from memory, the negative are too many to recall.

[timosman]

I have no doubt there are good programmers/engineers in other parts of the world, and having them as a fulltime/long term employee would probably be a better experience. I was generalizing about contracted offshore work, I've had to work with a lot of them and taken over a lot of projects they failed to deliver on over the years. I can count the positive experiences from memory, the negative are too many to recall.

Somehow other parts of the world does not include China, a country with a bigger population than India and probably more software engineering talent judging by the number of contributions to free software projects. Ever wondered what the reason is?

[specsaregood]

Somehow other parts of the world does not include China, a country with a bigger population than India and probably more software engineering talent judging by the number of contributions to free software projects. Ever wondered what the reason is?

I've had mediocre experiences with Chinese programmers. In general they are ok to good when working off well-written, detailed specs where there is nothing required other than to do exactly what is spelled out, but they are $#@! when it comes to taking requirements and generating the specifications and project details. Especially making them flexible with future changes/additions in mind. We've had a number of companies pay us to do that part, just to hand off to their Chinese developers with success.

[timosman]

I've had mediocre experiences with Chinese programmers. In general they are ok to good when working off well-written, detailed specs where there is nothing required other than to do exactly what is spelled out, but they are $#@! when it comes to taking requirements and generating the specifications and project details. Especially making them flexible with future changes/additions in mind. We've had a number of companies pay us to do that part, just to hand off to their Chinese developers with success.

This somehow makes them worse than their Indian counterparts?

[LibForestPaul]

They are fine. They are many of high quality. The engineers usually make half of what US counterparts. With markup, they can easily undercut in-house development by a large margin, and will deliver faster. However, there will be additional expenses incurred with project planning and QA. Also, it is a risk of outsourcing too many functions, as they have started competing directly with US companies. Many large US firms will simply purchase outside development shops and QA firms. This reduces risk of "leaks" and "dependency". Many future jobs will start to be affected by offshoring, maybe accelerated under Trump. One reason firms do not want offshoring is the risk of "leaks", "espionage", and "dependency". Accounting and law are both starting offshoring trends. The jobs left in the US will be few.

[fisharmor]

....Then you have days like today, where I got to spend 10 minutes in a board room with the VP of development and his gang of cronies, trying to convince them that it doesn't matter how the damned API was designed: you cannot name an API "remove this record" and have it return a success result when the record didn't exist, and expect that to make sense to anybody outside this boardroom.

[specsaregood]

And the reason I don't worry about Indian contractors, example #9800.

Having to work with some Indians for an integration gig. the specs call for them to use a CSV file. my partner sends them a CSV file with a .txt extension on the file name. he gets an uppity reply about how we are supposed to supply a csv file.

he asks them, "it is a CSV, did you look at the file?"
them: "it says .txt"
him: "yeah, its still a csv, just rename it .csv if you need" -- this is just for initial devel purposes
them: "but that wont work it still wont be in the CSV format"
him: "have you opened the file in a text editor, it is CSV format"
--they go back and forth and dude just doesn't get it, evidently he doesn't realize that csv is a text format
partner finally just renames the file to .csv himself and resend the same exact file
them: "Thanks, that works fine and what we were hoping you would send initially"

ugh, he tells me about.
me: "and I bet the guy has a 'masters in engineering or something'"
him: "yup, says he has a 'Masters in Computer Applications' on his linkedin page"

[timosman]

And the reason I don't worry about Indian contractors, example #9800.

Having to work with some Indians for an integration gig. the specs call for them to use a CSV file. my partner sends them a CSV file with a .txt extension on the file name. he gets an uppity reply about how we are supposed to supply a csv file.

he asks them, "it is a CSV, did you look at the file?"
them: "it says .txt"
him: "yeah, its still a csv, just rename it .csv if you need" -- this is just for initial devel purposes
them: "but that wont work it still wont be in the CSV format"
him: "have you opened the file in a text editor, it is CSV format"
--they go back and forth and dude just doesn't get it, evidently he doesn't realize that csv is a text format
partner finally just renames the file to .csv himself and resend the same exact file
them: "Thanks, that works fine and what we were hoping you would send initially"

ugh, he tells me about.
me: "and I bet the guy has a 'masters in engineering or something'"
him: "yup, says he has a 'Masters in Computer Applications' on his linkedin page"

Nobody is that dumb. He must have read the CIA memo on how to sabotage employers - http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...s-annoy-bosses