Reply to: Reasons NOT to offshore development ....

[vetran]

They already have

The main concern of permies at my last client was that they were off-shoring expertise, and losing control of the work. Presumably TCS et al will be working their way up the food chain and will before long produce product directly.

They are already producing single point solutions, occasionally rather well. Unfortunately until they overtake General Motors or Microsoft all the suits will just laugh at them and think they are exploiting them, a bit like the Thai's, Chinese and Japanese. Sad really, Rover or Walkman anyone?

[bored]

It also helps when all the comments in the code are in Chinese I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that...

[mcquiggd]

Reasons not to offshore development:

1) They are moving here anyway. To Barking apparently.

[Fungus]

According to Computing Weekly, outsourcing can work, but only if a lot of effort is put into managing the work, in which case the costs are not much less than doing it in the UK. My last client had some success with outsourcing, but some projects were outsourced and then brought back.

My own experience of Indian developers supplied by Indian body shops is that quality is variable. The best are excellent, but many are poor. The ideal is for the client to hire directly, by setting up an office in India (Bangalore say). Then they get to hire the best, and cut out the parasites i.e. Indian management and shareholders.

From what I heard the engineers supplied by an Indian body shop cost about the same as a UK employee, but without the employment overheads (sick pay, BUPA, pension, redundancy payments etc). In other words they are contractors, but at permie salaries with no overheads.

The main concern of permies at my last client was that they were off-shoring expertise, and losing control of the work. Presumably TCS et al will be working their way up the food chain and will before long produce product directly.

[threaded]

There's a vast difference between a MacDonalds manager and a CEO. The McD manager is measured on his performance constantly by the owner looking at the till receipts, the CEO is measured on his performance by looking at the till receipts and telling the owner.

HTH

[bfg]

How sad that this knowledge i.e. outsourcing is crap will not get anywhere near the ears of people who matter

They know.
They don't care.


I am sure that this event will be reported as 45*(onshore cost - offshore cost) savings with never a mention of the 250 days extra onshore cost, that's a different budget. Someone will get a nice little tick in the box towards their multi-million pound bonus and the share price will creep a little higher on the back of the great cost savings being made.

[sasguru]

How sad that this knowledge i.e. outsourcing is crap will not get anywhere near the ears of people who matter - because none of you have the desire to become senior managers.
That being the case you can hardly complain when the numpties who know zilch about anything, outsource.

[bfg]

Bfg

25 people switched from other work to support for 2 weeks to sort out a delivery of just 15 programs. LOADS of extra contractor income, thank you so much offshore development team and offshore testing team.

Original estimate was approx 3 man days each or 45 days, it took 250 man days to sort out the programs and the mess they made of the database.

If any senior manager or accountant is reading this who thinks it is cheaper to pay a numpty from wherever to build it and then get someone else to fix it, you are 100% correct and to be encouraged.

KERCHING.

[Gold Dalek]

Why are there no Daleks posting on this thread?

[privateeye]

In every try/catch I've found the following from an outsourced project

System.exit();

so when anyone of the 70,000 users got an error they were all booted off the system upsetting the customers somewhat.

To add insult to injury database connections were opened and never closed meaning the web server was constantly being rebooted everyday to cope.

[Fleetwood]

some 16 year old wannabe just out of school whose never taken any formal programming courses

who's

[threaded]

I do lurv it when they offshore stuff. I get paid lots to sort such things out when they goes titsup.

It's a win-win for contractors: either you get paid to write it, or get paid to fix it, which, lets face it, if you're any good at handling the client, means re-writing it.

It's called contractor rodeo!

(You know, just like the rodeo position, but you and the offshorer are doing it to the client.)

It is my ambition to one day run a project where the client offshores the development to a company I own and when it fscks up bring it back onshore to a company I own. In so doing I get paid twice or even more for exactly the same work... I have to admit I gained this aspiration by watching big 4 Co's who are past masters at such shenanigans.

Anyone who thinks this is wrong; well lets just point out the new terrorist laws...

[Captain Jack]

If what we've written doesn't work, we keep at it until it does. We write the code well. We test it. We are professionals.

Steady on, Jakes Daddy.

[Jakes Daddy]

It's becoz you is a racialist, innit.

No, not at all. It just happens that this code was written by a bunch of Indibums (TCS I think ??)
Its any of this new fangled cheaper offshore development that I have a problem with.
If this were you or I doing the work, we are on site, in front of the customer. If what we've written doesn't work, we keep at it until it does. We write the code well. We test it. We are professionals
But with offshore development, its too easy to hide behind the geographical distance. They are not customer facing, so dont have the accountability to the customer that we have. They dont have proper access to the DB to test (in this case 'tis true, but I accept that it doesn't have to be that way). I just see it as being too easy to knock up a quick'n'dirty bit of code that works when they ran it once, email it over, and forget about it.

[Jakes Daddy]

There is of course some positive spin you could put on all this - I've been contracted to do a block of work for a period of time. Given that I've lost a day through this, my contract will get extended by that day, and I'll get paid for another days work !