Mini-Rant: Offshore Outsourcing to Cut Costs is Short-Sighted

High Cost of Saving Money on Outsourcing

Indeed, there is a general belief that outsourcing is supposed to save you money. This is especially true when it comes to outsourcing mission critical work like software development, typically done offshore, with companies who enjoy very low labor rates. Unfortunately, the saying “Outsourcing will save you money,” is a lot like the old adage of, “Practice makes perfect.” They’re both half-truths. The real truth is: “Only perfect practice makes perfect.” If you repeat the same mistakes again and again, practicing something wrong for any amount of time won’t make it right. Similarly, only outsourcing with the right partner will save you money in the long run. Pick the wrong one and you’ll pay dearly for that decision.
www.executivebrief.com/article/the-incredibly-high-cost-of-saving-money-on-outsourcing.

Take my comment with a grain of salt...

Because I'm a web developer and I've just had a really lousy freaking day. I would say we've got about 20 times the guys we need on the back end. This, no doubt, started with somebody in management hiring 'more than enough' guys to replace the real back end devs we should have hired in the first place and their numbers simply grew larger and larger as it became clear that the work just wasn't getting done right.

While some are reasonably competent devs, and even likable people, the general skill levels are all over the place and the communication sucks almost universally. Ever tried to teleconference with heavy Hindi accents over a fuzzy phone line? It's not fun. And for some reason they don't want to write, just talk. This is partially because they hate to have to commit to anything in writing.

Second, I'm pretty sure their home company treats them like dirt because they don't ever want to tell us there's a problem. Even when it's clearly our fault! And now for some reason, we can't get them to do anything on the back end now. They want to build entire sections of pages with JavaScript on the front end. We're clearing form entries with Javascript. And our databases are now failing regularly.

My advice? Offshore when it makes something possible that otherwise wasn't. QA for instance. Nice to have if they don't suck at it and in a lot of smaller organizations you'd never be able to afford it. But in our case, it wasn't worth it. None of it from what I can tell has been worth it. And we're stuck with it because nobody wants to admits there's a problem when it's so much easier to just point at how much more they'd be paying for an equal number of real back end devs.

But be REAL careful if you're even thinking of giving the go-ahead on off-shoring at a large organization because once you commit to it, it's a long and hard dig out of that hole to get through all the BS that will ultimately get used to justify it.