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Outsourcing... any experience?
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 6:24 am
by Lucy_D4M
Hi! I'm just curious if anybody has ever used outsourcing services. what countries you worked with? is it really worth doing?
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 6:29 am
by Chris Corbyn
I'm not willing to watch this thread burst into flames and go political so potential posters, be warned.
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 6:40 am
by Lucy_D4M
I'm not willing it too

I hope that's not gonna happen. It's not about political issues, it's about programming, I'm just asking opinion...
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 8:11 am
by Jenk
It depends on what you seek as part of the services, really. In todays world of global communications, geographical location makes surprisingly little difference.
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 9:19 am
by Kieran Huggins
Good communication is vital to the success of a team IMO - as long as you're able to maintain that communication with your programmer(s) it makes little difference where they are. I've worked 30 minutes from the office for years, and I could just as well have been on another continent (working nights, I guess). The same normal employee caveats apply.
The only concern that springs to mind (due entirely to lack of knowledge) is the contractual law issues between people in different countries. You may wish to consult a lawyer.
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:00 am
by shiznatix
It depends on what country you are outsourcing to. If you do the whole india pakistan thing then no, bad bad bad.
When I was working in Estonia I worked for 2 companies that where outsourcing to Estonia. This was good for several reasons.
1, because the language of communication was always English and everyone spoke English perfectly.
2, We knew what we where doing better than the parent company so we where always ahead of the game.
3, The parent company countries where only off by 1 time zone so we where able to communicate with them during regular business hours no problem.
4, it was a good move for the company to move its IT section to Estonia because of its infrastructure and because of the tax laws for businesses which gave money to companies that reinvested its profits into the company (the Estonian division at least).
but when you look at other options like India and whatnot, they dont have any of these benefits, all they have is cheap labor which only gets you so far. Moving current employees to the new location would not be a bad idea either, I know I would move to somewhere reasonable for a job. Just make sure if you do outsource, you do it correctly.
*shiznatix bursts into flames and catches fire to the thread just to spite d11wtq*
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 11:07 am
by alex.barylski
I work from home as an outsourced PHP developer.
Here is what I can tell you based on my experience: Communication is *very* important
Language barriers could be an issue, something to consider if your outsourcing to countries other than your own.
Legalities are slightly different in different countries.
Outsourcing free's you from alot of work but it also adds more work. You won't need to focus on development but you better be a people person and be capable of managing your outsourced employees. Communication, communication, communication!!!
If your outsourcing to a company, you alleviate alot of work but it'll cost you alot more (even in India - look to spend $35-45/hour for quality work). If you outsource to individuals, your workload will increase, but your expense will decrease. It's a catch 22 really.
From a developer perspective, it takes alot of discipline to wake every morning and work an entire day. Not everyone is cut out to work unsupervised. I love what I do, but working on something I don't always want to work on, takes dedication and self-motivation.
A lot of people don't like outsourcing because of the communication barrier, I find in my day to day routine, a majority of people want at least phone contact. However based on my experience email is the best way to go. On average I can answer 10 times the number of questions when using email as opposed to immediate line of communication (Instant messaging, Phone, etc).
Email lets me filter through the easy questions first and focus on the difficult ones last. When someone wishes to contact me immediately, I'd say there is a 75% chance I won't know the answer immediately so time is wasted while I try and diagnose the problem verbally over the phone, wasting both the clients time and my own. Plus using Email gives you a record of previous fixes, which can later be used as a quasi-knowledge base.
Just my experiences

Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:55 pm
by Lucy_D4M
Ok, I see... You say India is not worth spending time, what about Russia?
Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 12:06 pm
by daedalus__
Personally, I would stay away from it altogether but I suppose it depends on what you need.