India software outsourcing: One unhappy customer

Thank you for making these complaints known to the world. I hear horror stories about outsourcing projects gone wild many times. But for some reasons, journalists don't want to write about the subject. But I really doubt whether Ukraine, Russia or China is any better, especially when they grow to be as big as India.

We recently outsourced a software development project to India. However, in our case we had the offshore team come up with the product design after several conversations. Also, we expected them to follow a process (not documented) to build similar components. In the end, the business knowledge required to create the components were not sufficient, but also there was plain bad programming. Lack of error management, logging, and code formatting to our declared standards. In any case, we found that software testing works extremely well, but software development (with requirments of high domain knowledge) require much much more hand holding.This leads to too many cycles between the offshore and onshore teams, and it leads to too many conversations thru Skype / phone / video. We found it easier to do it at home. However, it was worth a try. Like in finance, no risk / no return.

"The top Indian software services outfits say companies would be better off dealing with them because they manage the projects, assure quality, and can scale up and down quickly."

Come on Steve - isnt there something called marketing? :)

The analysis is quite apt and does apply to the vast set of companies other than the big-six. But then the big- INFY, CTSH, TCS, WIT, SAY etc will refrain from touching anything less than $5M unless there is a strategic intent.

The fundamental problem is that India has a large mass of technical and engineering skills. However the vast majority of these lack formal software education. The Big-six offset this by providing an induction training before they are allocated to a project. Their position is slightly better. The smaller shops lack this infrastructure and are encumbered with folks who really spend time picking up skills on the job. Also for the vast majority the goal is to acquire the skill in demand rather than being a passion. This is the principal difference I used to see with software engineers here in the US.

Now on the management. The industry thrives on the low margin masses, which are mainly the fresh or low experienced engineers. Managing them is a challenge. Further it is also a matter of status to move quickly to managing. Thus you find a person with 3-5 years of programming experience now managing a team of 10-20 engineers. First 3-5 years is not even sufficient to master software skills without formal education, then without any training in mangement they are thrust into an environment of managing people in a high-churn low loyalty environment. This is why micro-managing as you pointed out is an issue.

The Indian software industry runs as a software factory and the quality is comparable to the shoddy manufacturing in the incipience of the Chinese manufacturing industry. However, just as that industry has matured - so will the quality in Indian software industry in due course of time.

You will get better pockets software engineers all over - Ukraine, Poland, Ireland, Estonia but the masses are limited and initial costs are high.

Dont get me worked up about the 11th-hour syndrome. Its always communicated at the last hour that the deadline cannot be met.

Thanks to the herd mentality in the US - we let software go out of our hands. Now, sit back and enjoy the wild ride.

Why BW is full of India bashing? Why can’t the reasons for Indian’s success and dominance in IT services be as simple as Indians enjoys dazzling brilliance and high IQ and superior EQ? Here are some hints:

38% of doctors in USA are INDIANs.
12% scientists in USA are INDIANs.
36% of NASA scientists are INDIANs.
34% of Microsoft employees are INDIANs.
28% of IBM employees are INDIANs.
17% of INTEL scientists are INDIANs.
13% of XEROX employees are INDIANs.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems: Vinod Khosla
Creator of Pentium chip (90% of the today's computers run on it) Vinod Dham

We are the RISHEST ethnic group in US! American IT boom is not possible without Indians. Give us credit.

Ravi, I will not let these lies spread. These figures about Indian success in America are FALSE. There are nothing to back them up! So stop lying!

I bought 200 shares of Sun Microsystems stock in 2001 for $21 a share and sold it at $5 last month, while my other tech stocks have all recovered nicely. Now I know why I lost a whole bunch of money. I owe it all to the "dazzling brilliance and high IQ and superior EQ" of the Indians.

Chris's story is not quite unique and neither his reaction to the experience. Several offshore projects do not provide desired results and that could be from various factors including but not limited to the right process framework, knowledge and experience of cultural issues, Proj management and resources. I am in the industry and have been providing similar services for close to 10 yrs both from India and currently from US. I have seen my share of successful projects and failures based on which I can clearly say that generalization based on the experiences of Chris is not fair. Like with any execution model whether India based delivery or even if every developer is in the same room, if you are not ready to invest time in or cant get hold of some vendor with experience it can lead to failure. Leading researchers have reported that only close to 31% of all Software development projects succeed and a large % of failure in projects is attributable to poor management of the Development Process.I am glad at least you had some initial success in Ukraine but I would recommend you invest time in getting the process right, get the right level of local leadership and understand socio political nuances if you wish continued success. FYI most of the top Indian Software companies are in eastern Europe so dont be surprised if some your existing team moves to Infosys or TCS or Satyam for a 20% higher salary - money still is a huge motivator & nationality does not matter

While its pretty amusing to see the self righteous comments of my fellow indians going gaga over the indian intellectual might .....we should also understand the circumstances in which the indian scene has been created...with the least amount of investments the 'Indian IQ' has managed to capture the fancy of the world.While i agree that it still has a long way to go to be at the peak of the intellectual capabilties of the world, no one can deny that we are on the wrong track.

The key for the next 20 years is to put in more investments into basic infrastructure and education so that the current goodwill could be leveraged upon.

And as far as the performance of the sun stocks are concerned we all know that leadership/PR is more critical to a company's short term performance as opposed to everything else.

I will have to strongly disagree with this article and the comments given so far. No need to do bashing, no need to call people names. Here are some different comments (for all they are worth): The nature of the world economy is such that when India or China for example build up their industries so do the local standards of living and in parallel the salaries....

Have you thought that as outsourcing grows to these countries so does the competition for talent locally. Have you looked at what the salaries are for experienced / productive employees (engineers, programmers...) are in China? Have you looked at the cost of real estate (appartments / villas) in Beijing? in Shanghai? in Shenzhen? Have you thought who buys these places and continues to drive the prices up.... Have you thought that mortgages get paid off in 5 years (on average) in Shanghai...

The answers are relatively simple -- salaries are growing and as a result local professionals are buying cars (more expensive than in the US), apartments, flat panel TVs etc....
All this points to the fact that as standards of living are going up, outsourcing is going to change its direction too -- rather than China or India, next is Vietnam....and then?

There is no doubt that the proliferation of IT companies in India, in last 10-15 years, has added few badly managed companies compared to companies (Read Infosys,TCS, Wipro and Satyam) which are creating a niche for themselves in IT world. Even the NASSCOM, a consortium of major software companies in India, is equally concerned about the issues raised by Gentleman Chris Stone.

We Indians cannot turn a blind eye if such kind of issues are reported from the country with still holds the key to success for Indian IT companies. At the same time I would submit that lot of Indian Companies are working much harder to keep their customers and themselves upbeat in ever changing market.

Unhappy customers can report their issues to NASSCOM so that something can be done to curb these one-project-profit companies. Secondly, it would be good to get proper reference from existing customers before offshoring development work to India (or to any other country).

Thanks for bringing the issue out in the open for discussion. Before we launch into flame wars, consider a very simple explanation, failures happen everywhere and with anyone. Out of 100 projects some will fail irrespective of the location of development and cultures. I have seen multi million dollar projects fail for the same reason in US and in India.
While I am an Indian and can be accused of biases, irrespective of that, the simple solution to the difficult question is not in blaming off shoring , it lies in effectively managing your risks, recruitment processes and development processes, just as you would do with any other project.

With close to 2 decade of software development experience, I feel that the availability of technical talent is increasing in India. But, in general it is still a problem. For successful outsourcing, key is in having right process in place and bringing in the right people. Wherever this is overlooked, it fails.

Hi all,
Everybody seems to miss one obvious and simple explanation here. The population of India is very large ( maybe 1 billion?). There is bound to be a 1% creamy layer in any population. However in a sample size of 1 billion, this 1 % of 1 billion is a very large number. Then again the best among this cream (the cream of this cream like IIT graduates,etc) comes to western countries in search of greener pastures. Naturally since these are the cream of society , you get to see only the best. This clouds the thinking of the lay western person, who thinks all Indians are geniuses, because he has met only the geniuses. Now with this faulty assumption he comes to India to allocate the hi-tech programming work, thinking that everybody in India is a genius. The result then shocks and confuses him.

I created in the middle of 2002 an development unit in the ukraine from scratch. step by step i expanded the team to more than 70 prof. developers right now. beside Chris, some other customers told me about their bad experience with India and especially the culture there. I never looked at the indians people to create an development unit there, because everybody knows or should know that the most significant properties beside coding is the culture. As european´s (germany and the ukraine) we are mostly like americans and we understand to drive for the long and successful run and if you are a lucky guy who knows how to double-check, you will find good developers and leaders in every country. while salery in software development increases overall, its going to be more difficult to make it happen. As a customer with some near- or offshore locations, you always should move an trusted person to your project and double-check the upcoming results every month. Thanks to my best ukraine developers and also some respect to the Indian guys - especially to thoose who are in some european or russian locations right now and searching for cheap european software developers.

Typical human mentality!! One person does something stupid and you blame him, his clan, his society and what not! There are thousands of IT service providers in India, more than a million people in the software industry. How on earth can you generalize on such a wide segment of the indutsry. Some of the companies do a good quality job and some dont. You cant credit all the Indian programmers for a quality work, nor can you blame the programmer community for some shoddy work done by someone.

Also for the top Indian IT companies, they are servicing clients in thousands of projects. All the projects cannot be a smooth ride and you cant make the customers always happy.

I find some of the comments quite ridiculous when someone suggests that they believed a company making the right promises but it failed to deliver. Now have not you heard of anything called reference? Talk to the customers which the company has serviced and get feedback in writing and then decide who the project should be awarded to.

Stop generalizing! Some of the American readers of BW keep moaning about outsourcing and sound so hypocritical. In the event that the american car makers are taking a beating from the Japanese car makers, shall we forget all the contribution the American automotive industry has done to the world? Shall we bash the GMs, Fords and Chryslers for producing inferior cars compared to the Toyotas and Nissans? I am sure each of the American car makers is trying its best to bring out high quality innovative models. For some models, they succed and for some they fail. We cant generalize that all american cars are bad.

US workforce will have jobs and US itself will be a major driving force behind growth and world economy for few more decades.

In US like today more and more managerial roles are created and appreciated than plain ones, it will not go away soon.

Unfortunately to some extent its true. Its true for all over world software industry as even today projects and success ratio is very low.

In India companies need to invest in learnring and constant development of human resources than just beating bourses expectations and hiring in hordes. In long term its not very healthy and productive.

Other side Indian companies have started taking bigger initiatives and roles and deliverables. Every human being and industry always have a learning curve and Indian companies, human resources are on this curve. Just giving a project here or there does not integrate work force into mainstream and help them look at bigger picture.

So be assured of long term success and healthy realtionships every customer or vendor getting jobs done out of India. Help build best of best IT workforce, as only cost effectiveness isnt healthy and good.

India and China have potential and will Deliver.
Just help them fill those gaps as its everyones future.

Stop saying lies with out any solid evdience..i think he is an agent from Ukrian company but it will never works in Indian market..soory to say that...Good luck you steave

Learning the correct lession from our mistake or failure is as important as achieving success. Otherwise, don't be surprised to get a similar kind of code delivery from your much boosted of Ukraine team next time.
If Chris has got his project successfully completed after shifting it to Ukraine, because he learnt from his mistakes while outsoursing to India, then probably he will get success in his future projects as well. Otherwise, I would like to warn you that there are poor programmers everywhere.

When it comes to poor code, I would like to say that in my seven years of my programming career I have re-written so many lines of code originally written by other programmers, and most of those programmers were not surprisingly, from the US only. Now, I wont blame that they are having less IQ or EQ, neither I can say they write poor code because of their culture. I think it's more about finding the right skills and then managing your projects well.
Once you have significantly invested in learning how to handle an offshoring project, I hope you will get success in India as well. Else, I would suggest you go for a reputed software vendor who is having prior experience in working in this model. Either the client or the software vendor should have certain level of maturity to work in an offshoring model.

I would like to suggest Chris to try India again with his learnings from outsourcing to Ukraine. Its simply because, India is having such a huge talent pool which no one should ignore.
People who have been able to leverage upon this large pool of talents in time have always been the fortunate ones. The huge success of India as an outsourcing destination says that much louder than the complaints of customers like you.

Nice to see all the comments. Its indeed a fact that the softwares created in India do maintain inferior quality most of the times. Companies in US/Europe will need get involved in Project Management and maintain better relationship with these Indian companies.

Please note that in some projects more than 100 developers work over a period of 1-2 years to bring out a software, taking it through the different stages of development.

Project Management holds a very strong key and US/Europe companies will need to get involved in day to day affairs of Project Management (After all, they are going to pay for the application and use the software)

I am sure it was purely fault of Steve management skills. It shows his inability to get things done what he wants...

What is the guarantee that he will not face same situation in Ukraine..

If the requirement is clear enough then it was the responsibility of steve's team to verify and provide sign-Off on each delevirable they made.

Anyway all the best Steve...Hope you will have good time with your Ukraine folks.

Well, I was in the team 'which did not deliver as per the expectations' as Chris mentions it. What he does not mention is what they did with what product they had and things that they could not decide. First we put up a year making a product named E-pay then they discarded it just like that. Then we invested time and money in making a product webplatform which by the way was done in parallel with team members from Sweden as well (name withheld). So when the delivery was not right it was because the direction from the top mgmt was not at all right. When the cart stops do you whip the cart or whip the ox? As for the claim of poor code quality etc, I throw an open challenge to put that code out in open and let it go thru the code quality tests. We have followed the best of methodologies and the best of XP practices (much more than the parent team in Sweden). This is just his own personal prejudice (just check his history at Novel) coming out in nice words... its always feels good and relives you out of responsibility if you can manage to put the blame squarely on others efficiently...

Steve - I was part of "your" team then. It is not ethical to blame when business drivers change and business decisions are bound to change. The then CEO had a different roadmap aligning to the kind of work under development in India and StreamServe came to India after aquiring that Indian operations. FYI - All the people working who where then in the team are working for ace companies on ace positions at present. Not to mention, StreamServe has two star performers their Indian counterparts. Please accept that business to India was closed because of chnage in business strategy and your self-centered perceptions carried forward from Novell which are not hidden from rest of the world.

Not to mention that Ukraine too is good, probably as good as Indians, may be more, may be less, but since it aligns to your perspectives, all the best to you.

As an experienced software engineer, I think this illustrated one very importan but often overlooked fact of software projects, which makes software outsourcing just as much a problem to businesses as it is to IT professionals in America.

The corporate world thought it has figured out how to lower IT cost by outsourcing software projects to development shops so that they can concentrate on building their core business. It turns out, things are very different with software. Over 90% of the software created today are custom products specifically designed for particular companies and their unique business models, structures and processes. The business domain knowledge is often more important than the technical skills when building the software. This is particularly true with service-oriented companies. For example, the requirements for a CRM product of AT&T is vastly different from those of Safeway or even Sprint. To successfully complete an IT project that provides a business value, the developers must either have very good knowledge of the proprietary business rules or work closely with those who do.

Having analysts to gather requirements and hand them over to the engineers does not work in reality because the projects are way too complex. Even if the project somehow gets done, the ongoing maintanence such as bug fixes and modifications is a big problem. The lack of in-house knowlege about the inner workings of the software often lead to big losses in financial terms. It's like visiting a different doctor every time you have a cold. You might save some money now if you are lucky enough not to be misdiagnosed, but you are putting your long-term health at risk. This is the reason demestic software vendors like Accenture and IBM often send their developers to work directly on site. Many of these contractors end up staying on one client site for many years and even hired as permenant employees because their domain knowlege is too valuable to the customers. Foreign outsourcers are not able to do this, and thus cannot provide good IT solutions to American businesses regardless of how competent their engineers are.

In my experience with off shoring new software application development I have never heard of or participated in one that was successful. If the product was actually delivered, they missed delivery dates, the product was incomplete with missed requirements or they were so poorly coded that they were no longer maintainable onshore. This is not a criticism of India, but of all offshore. If you cannot build/deliver new applications on shore, how can you expect to do it off shore?

If you believe in manufacturing software off shore (and I do) you need to look at how China has been successful in delivering hard goods. In that case, there were drawings and actual machinery shipped to China. They did not build the machines or tooling from scratch to manufacture. They initially used the machines and tooling we sent them and then built what they needed.

This is absent in application development we have tried to shift to off shore. We are expecting off shore developers to build something that they have no idea what it is.

U.S., business people are like raccoons and shiny objects. They see a lower cost per development dollar and they have to have it. What they lose sight of is that to manufacture software a world away you should have already be able to do it here.

What they also have lost sight of and fail to take into account is that for every mile the developers is away from the end user the cost of managing the development effort grows exponentially. So, while a developer in India may cost you 25 dollars an hour, the number of management hours more than eats away that economic advantage.

Too many years ago I sold accounting software to small businesses. I went back and studied the results of the automation 12 months later. What I found was that companies that previously maintained good accounting practices did very well. Those firms that never maintained their manual accounting systems properly were out of business. The accounting system magnified either the good or bad practices.

There is a lesson there. Off shore will magnify you best and worst practices.

I completely agree with the experience documented above. The costs are high. As a project manager managing several off-shore projects, I find myself diving into every aspect of the software design and development cycle, micro-managing the project. Basic elements such as error management, proper user on-screen messages, UI layouts etc are lacking. There are a few talented software folks and the rest lean on these few pricy ones. In the 80s and 90s, software or system engineers spent considerable years as programmers, analysts, designers and testers until they were made senior consultants and architects.

What i read in the article and the comments is not new, this is a common complaint i have heard working in captive units and now in a product engineering company.

A large part of the problem lies in what kind of career map one provides for engineers and the salary hike associated with it.

Unlike US; where the starting salary of a S/W engineer provides enough for a decent living; in India this number comes only at senior lead/manager level. Therefore there is a haste for people to move up the value chain.

The salary increment per year is aroud 15-20% whereas the rate increase at around 3% per anum. Therefore the only way to keep the cost matching the revenue is to keep the average experience of the team same.

Since the quality of the s/w delivered would be closely linked to the average experience of the team; companies invariably get what they pay for. Due to the above mentoined fact of big hike per year of experience; the cost difference between a company providing average experience of 3 yrs vs 5 yrs can be significant enough not be even considered in the initial negotiation stages.

Failure on delivery can be due to several reasons even after the right team is selected.

The first thing is that are the requirements documented well. Here we have to note that time difference and the lack of the ability to walk upto somebody's room and discuss an issue brings in lot of handicap in developing s/w where requirements are not well documented or being evolved. Having a crisp requirement document is helpful to everybody but the need's not felt compeling enough till you actually find that the project has failed.

After a well documented requirement we have to setup a team with a set of team who are motivated to do the job at hand. I have seen so many times a desire for the company which is outsourcing to have a very high experienced person(s) for a job which can be done with much less skill set. The job at hand is oversold; result is that people join and feel dejected after some time. The team has to be constructed such that each person feels there is something to gain from this engagement. Its common in captive units to hire top people at ming boggling salary and then left with money only to hire 1-2 yrs experience people (at mind boggling salaries again!) but really not create the right structure in terms of experience.

However the biggest problem is the expectations. Most people outsource with soaring expectations. In reality its difficult to achieve 30-40% of the desired producitivity in the first 2-3 months; about 60% for the next 6 months or so and its only after a year that the productivity is at about 80%.

To make it go beyond 80%; lot of planning and thought is required from both sides.

Most companies get really disappointed during the first few months and show it really well too. This creates a negative spiral of morale and productivity. With so many options available outside the barrier to live thru this is low enough. Finally everybody losses.

Cost advantages of outsourcing to India are immense (atleast 50%); but they occur only if you are able to create teams which are made to reach the right productivity level over 1-2 years. I am generally surprised how CEO's of companies fail to compute the cost right; they compare outsource rate with the salaries of their employees completely forgetting to add infrastructure and mgmt overhead.

Working for a company which has development centre in Ukraine; i can definitely vouch for the high experience and cultural fitment to US that country provides. But there too such things have to be taken care of for it work in the long run.

Eventually s/w talent is in shortage world wide and is not restricted to a few countries or cities in those countries. In a flattened world the ability to outsource is a key to success. Ignoring big supply pool like India will only restrict your choices.

Coming years will decide what s/w holds for India. Outsourcing is there right now and slow down will improve the quality signficantly as it would reduce pressure to grow. Further most Indian IT companies have offices everywhere and therfore are best suited to capitalise on the talents available elsewhere. However the next wave seems to be creating products for the Indian market; if this becomes reality then a tipping point would be achieved when the shortage for s/w engineers for outsourcing would become even higher leading to dillution of the price arbitrage advantage outsourcing brings today. What that would lead to would be all of us to see.

Complaints and bashing about outsourcing is not new. As with any industry where human being are involved in all the activities and machines are used simply as tools, there are good and bad experiences. But in case of a failure, it is human nature to get away and put the blame on other.

As an engineer and as a manager my best bet would be to actually analyze the scenario and closely monitor the situation from time to time and try to fix the holes. Drawing a parallel with software development - Just like a white box testing is needed for the software development from time to time, there is a white box testing needed for relationship development too. This white box testing can be in the form of closely monitoring the situation/relationship, quality of delilverables, appreciating the efforts, pat on the back for successful deliveries, showing disappointments for bad ones, kind of response from the both of teams in case of questions, etc from time to time. This time may varies depending upon kind relationship and kind of white box testing you want. But please try to fix the issues on time which saves a nine later.

Biggest challenge in outsourcing is to have proper communication (IM, email, phone, skype) etc and openness in conveying the messages to other side. This is true for both of the parties involved in relationship.

Being fortunate enough to be on both side of relationship at different times in my career, I learnt a lot from the situations. I have seen in most cases both sides starts the relationship with a pre-mindset and level of expectations, but hardly anyone shares that with other at the beginining.

Coming back to basics, we have learnt since our childhood that one of the better ways to resolve a issue in any relationship is to "Speak Up and Discuss", business relationship is no different, other than some usual business constraints.

I have been working in India for over an year now, and when I started the current relationship with a US company, I could easily read the doubts on various faces there. Now they are happy with the relationship.

Hi,

Iam a provider of outsourcing services to several clients in US and UK in the US 500 - 5000 range. And in a way my experience is exactly opposite of Chris.

I think that there is a tectonic shift-taking place in the sector and that is that the American SMB’s are now unable to afford the Indian software industry. At the enquiry level most of the clients don’t have any idea of what they want. We regularly get queries such as - clone yahoo/monster/youtube, budget US $ 2500.We send a spec sheet before accepting a project, which is always taken lightly by client. At the development level the scope of project is increased considerably. However the funniest thing about the process is that the behavior/communication with us is very aggressive as though they have placed a multimillion-dollar project with IBM.

Like Chris, am equally disillusioned with the outsourcing business have started sacking clients and plan to shift to some other venture soon.

I totally agree with what Vikas says here. We are a bay area-based company with operations/execution unit in India. I run the firm, working with the clients closely and travel back and forth quite extensively. We have some huge successes where our clients reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, be able to go to market with solutions we have developed, and basically be nothing but totally satisfied. We also have instances where things have gone south. I do detailed analysis every few months to see how we can recetify the negative scenarios and it all boils down to the following:

....Requirements, Requirements, Requirements: When we have client who does not see the value of defining the requirements in detail, that is a deal that is going to doom one day, sooner or later.....

Our tagline is "Locally delivered offshore solutions" - for a smaller sized firm, we take serious effort to connect locally before working on the solution. When the local part goes thru correctly, the project is often a huge success.

This artical and half of the comments just smell of prejudice, racism and frustation - of the author and his fellow friends' inability to deliver quality themselves, and then pass the blame on Indians!

I have spent a while in the Indian software industry and I certainly know that the quality of code written by the 'the big'- INFY, CTSH, TCS, WIT, SAY is a hundred times better than the trash written by most s/w companies in the authors' country. This comes again from my frustation correcting their substandard code all these long years...

For one, these guys who love to blame the Indians fall behind in skillsets. Two, they demand sky high salaries, and three, when they fail to do a good job themselves they pass on the blame to indians!!! Ridiculous!!!

I for India and I for IT.........so don't underestemate us.We are the pillars for the IT industry.There might be problem in 1% cases bur again 99% indian IT componies are providing the best solutios to its clients!!

Our firm has an Indian IDC. The code quality is terrible. Entire sections of code are lifted from the internet with no regard for ethics or IP

You all need to be patient. The IT industry in India has just about started making its mark in the international market. We're still learning from mistakes and correcting them quite rapidly and making good progress with annual revenues. In an impatient world where everybody wants their work done ASAP, you have to consider the fact that learners will improve. Efficiency combined with quality cannot be delivered overnight. Patience. Give it a few years. We (Indian IT Sector) will double our revenues and infrastructure management, quality, efficiency and grow beyond the expected. Cheers!

If Indians stopped boasting and talking in hyperbole in their comments, it would probably help have a reasonable discussion. Useless comments about IQ and EQ are out of place.

A lot of Indian firms do good work and a lot do OK work. I worked with Indian, Australian, Singaporean and Australian companies for 7 yrs. I found good and bad instances in all .... A lot of Indian coders are bad and some companies do sub-standard work but one should look at the distribution of good and bad work

I read thru all the comments

The arguments for and against Indian Software firms and professionals I must say is all personal and is in no way justified or verified by any survey.
People can have bad experiences - but that in no way can be used as an yard stick for any kind of assessment.
Steve says his project failed because of poor coding - Do we know who hired these professionals and who retained them? If Steve and his team had hired them, in my opinion they need to take the blame and get the stick. If you hire bad programmers [it doesnt matter if they are Indians or Americans or Ukranians] they will write bad codes. You dont need to have a failed product to identify a bad programmer!!!!
I have seen terrible codes written by Indians and by Americans as well. The question is who accpets these codes? If accepted then there should be no complaint. What happened to the good old Quality Control Systems????
I find the entire set of arguments lacking scientific rigor and is all personal prejudices - I was looking for some scientific approaches and surveys on outsourcing software projects to India. The set of points highlighted here doesnt make anybody any wiser.

Good luck to everybody - Indians for supporting their lot and Americans for their skewed view point

Is anybody thinking in terms of "How to make Outsourcing a Success" in India or else where???

Thanks

If the requirements are not clear and you do not have functional / domain experts how do you expect offshore teams to build what you want?
This not a tirade that US or Indian or Chinese developers are good or bad. I have seem ample instances of both, if your basics are not right then you can do jack.

China or India Do I care now. No Sir
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This is what I call the friendship. Even if Mr. Blaire does not become the secretary of the UN, even he is not the manager of the World Bank (Already now in the chair and signing the cheques), Mr. Bush has the veto to stated “Mr. Blaire, I do not forget the assistance you gave me in the Iraq war and stood by me soldier to soldier in the Afghanistan. Look I know Mr. Hamid Karzai does not like my (our) policy but he is such a state that your choice is the right one this time. EU is having the problem with the French, Poland, Check and Russians are pressing for the missile shield but the missile is pointed away from Russia or else Putin becomes angry”.

I read all the comments and other things. I will be do my job well because I am new Indian programmer. I will try to do my work better as they give much money to our company. I learned from document. I will start from myself.

Wow so many comments? Well looks like its gaining momentum again. I agree to most of the views those are written in here. I think good or bad programmers are not linked to any country they are everywhere in the world. I remember I was assigned on a project in US for one of the largest financial organization which was screwed by the internal developers and we picked up from there till the delivery. I have seen worst possible coders in US as well as in India. No country is untouched with it. I should also add that there are good programmers in US and in India too. The only comment I would agree with the writer is about the ethics, there is a huge attrition in India and that might just pose a threat is domain knowledge containment. Rest all I think can be applied to any other country in the world.

The Indians who complained about the article can't spell English very well. Another example of what you get.

The crux a software manufacturing success is in the Process adopted to execute the assignmnet and the Quality Management Plan. Learn from the earlier failures and come-up with Lessons learned and implement Best Practices. This could solve any complex issue.

Now, there is no point in blaming anyone's coding capability or communication inability or attrition. These are spams of Offshoring model. Before offshoring, these aspects should be considered and preventive actions should be adopted. Proven Industry standards and effective quality approaches should make s/w manufacturing a success story.

Hey Frank...

Should not that be can't write English well..and not spell English.

hmmmm....maybe then Englis is not my mother tongue and i do not know much of Queen's English

Well what the hell.. another bad day in office and Indian cricket team does not look like they will beat the English cricket team.

The problem with India is that the industry there has grown too fast in the last few years. Most companies are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to hiring programmers and there are a lot of marginal programmers entering the industry. Another outcome of the high growth is that a very large proportion of developers have only a few years of experience. You don't get the mentoring or interaction with senior developers that you get in countries with more mature (i.e. slower growing) software industries.

Eventually, the Indian educational system will catch up to the demand (this may take a decade or more) since the population numbers indicate that there's a lot more talent waiting to be tapped. Also, the proportion of experienced developers will increase as growth slows. At present I think it makes sense for companies to seriously consider countries where the software industry is not as stretched as India's.

At the same time, the companies that are able to hire the best talent in India (i.e. the Googles, the Microsofts etc.) do get really good programmers.

East or west *INDIA is the BEST*!!
So I warn you no more India BASHING ...

I am an Oracle IT Developer. I do contract work for companies all over the world. For the past 5 years I've spent about 1/3 of my development time on projects re-writing poorly written offshore code from India. When you look at the cost of an Indian developer to the re-work cost which is required on 90% of offshore written code, it is far more efficient, cost effective and less risky to build onshore using qualified (and yes more expensive) consultants.

There is a simple rule, you get a better solution when there are less developers. 5 experienced developers onshore can handle a medium sized Oracle Applications implementation (that has a project life span of say 1-2 years and a budget around US$40M). Between these 5 developers, a solid, coherent, consistent and virtually bug free solution will result. The cost equivalent to doing it offshore has 20 Indian developers, all writing bad code that eventually a small onshore team has to re-write anyway. This in all projects causes delays due to the expanded level of testing and re-work that is required. I have seen 1 year projects become 2 years and even a 2 year project get cancelled due to this very fact.

I now bet money with colleagues where I say I can re-write offshore code and at the very least make it 50% better performance-wise. Oracle Applications is a financial database system that can have schemas that span the terabytes and records/transactions that span the billions. For example, only last month I re-wrote an Invoice generation program that was written by an Indian offshore developer. It initially took 1.5 hours to produce 300 invoices!! Within 3 days I re-wrote it from scratch, getting it down to less than 5 minutes!! Think of the money saved by having such improvements on the front end and so much less stress on the server's back end? By the way, the Indian developer took 3 weeks to come up with the initial Invoice solution. So cheaper had I done it from the start.

The reason why we need terabytes of memory, clustered databases, load-balanced web tiers these days is to run Indian offshore code!

And what of the future? Well as companies use Indians more and more, this will cause countries to produce less and less IT workers. Then eventually instead of offshore development becoming a pretend dollar saver to managers, it will become a life line because there is noone locally who can do the work! Then India raises their premiums because they have a niche now. And then the IT industry crashes again! Just you wait.

NEVER USE INDIAN OFFSHORE DEVELOPMENT.

Well then ... the race ticket and the well worn path of ...leave the poor Inidan´s alone... Bashing.

August the 7th note could have been written by me...

18 years IT after 12 years in Accountancy I can understand the LOW COST as long as you should expect the LOW quality. In all I have worked on and with 17 projects where Indian outsourced workers were used. Not one project was on time and 15 of the projects have been re-written completely or cancelled because they were late being delevered. 8 of the projects were from the elite best Indian companies.

The present contract I am involved in is brilliant as I am earning loads of money checking the support and configuration work done by the higly inexperienced staff working for two of the BIG Indian names.

Some samples of findings:

Rate of repeeat problems 72%.
Problems re-occuring after being fixed 35%
Database degradation 31%

Issues with direct manipulation of the data - unauthorized.

Audit files emptied or deleted.

We even have discovered the whole US payroll database was extracted from India by a SUPERUSER who had made everyone of the PEOPLESOFT support staff a SUPERUSER.

Problem Logs closed by the developers without even being accessed - tehy were paid by closed logs until this was discovered.

Staff turnover and loss of ANY experience.

SQL reports copied from the INTERNET and producing inaccurate data.

Customised tables within the database following NO standards.

Relational Database links based on 100 character freeform text fields.

The database containing 17,000 tables being copied continually when only 4,000 tables were ever used.

My findings number in excess of 500 in all aspects but the one significant and worst of all is that the whole GLOBAL company staff had started to expect and anticapte the LOWEST of standards and the downtime of 29% of the production system. The Test system has now been recorded as the lowest I have evr come across at 41% availiability.

A most amazing element was the costings by Senior Program Manager who stated that the cost associated with the Indian quotation for a Project included a 20% factor on cost for Low qualtiy and repeat work.......

In two or three years I will be rich at this rate sorry carry on nice CEO and CFO´s and keep hiring the outsourcing solution...

Thanks for the extra work

Low quality work is the result of businesses trying to commoditize IT. Outsourcing is only part of this strategy. Software can be a best friend to a business if it is done well, but its worst enemy otherwise. One good engineer can do more for the company than 5 or 10 average ones. Management never understood that concept. They keep playing the head count game and don't have a clue what a software project really is. Given a set of real problems, a talented engineer can solve them with creative and practical solutions while 10 average ones will be scratching their heads or flipping through books trying to find any random solutions to apply onto the wrong problems.

The IT business environment in the US is very much buzz word driven instead of result driven. "Outsourcing" is the buzz word that every executive must have on their resume just like "SOA" must be on a software engineer's resume. It doesn't matter if a manager has more profit/revenues to show for, all he has to do is claim that he has outsourcing experience. A software guy don't have to show a finished, successful project that is working well in production. He just has to come up with a quick demo loaded with the latest buzz words that doesn't even remotely touch the complexity of the real problems.

I am a Simple PHP programmer and I got INR 4000 per month i.e. $100 per month then why should you expept quality from us. The company gets lot of money without caring us. Please Dont blame on us.

Consider these two facts:
[1] Outsourcing is an old business process with a new name and it is not a silver bullet.
[2] When ppl like Chris gets into offshore types,
then they should first remember that this is their
business and if they are not careful they are going
to loose money.
These are the following things u must do before u start offshore: Hire a guy at your side who had offshore experience, hire a guy at the offshore
who has done work with US and know your work culture, make both of these guyz managing the project and force them having real stake in the effort, when u hire offshore resources get their resume and take technical i/v. If this seems to be a pain in the ass, then remember "no pain no gain".

Now coming to peter and some other people's comments on their technical superiority, for every technically competent US tech worker there are 100 more who are worthless. This is same for offshore people...only ratio is slightly higher. When there is lots of money to be made, fakes will always be there. Be careful.

I just saw one of my fellow country member commenting like "I got INR 4000 per month....why should you expect quality from us". Buddy, u need a change of job, u r angry at your employer. Do not give racists like Peter another reason to abuse you.

Peter just to complement your experience I can say this: I have spent last three days fixing the data model that your brilliant American data architect created and messed up analytics reports.
Today I finished it and reports are fine now. I did that job with much less time and money.

I am simple contractor who is getting paid in excess of 1,000 dollars a day correcting the work of the Indian (we are the best and only emplyee staff who have degress or MBAs) companies.

I do not blame the programmers I DO BLAME THE OWNERS and the people who beleive the crud they spout.

Do not blame me for getting rich from a trend created by idiots "usually bean counters" who know everything there is about IT because they read one magazine and that could have been Playboy ...........

IT gave a lot of opportunity for the so called Middle class INDIANS. Earlier only people from good coleges viz IIT, REC's used to go & the quality of work & culture was good. Now it is mediocore. Every TOM dick & harry goes to US,makes money by saving dollars, cent & flaunts it in INDIA. Quality has gone to Dogs.

Work is secondary & Quality is tertiry . Only money is important for the people now. No ethics, no dedication & loads of Attitude....that is what a IT worker its now...

Hello Steve,
I appreciate you and Chris for sharing your experiences with the world.
While it is disappointing to read for all the IT services companies in India, there is a lesson that we need to take back and learn the ethics of business, end of the day if we are serious about business we should not look at short term objectives and thats precisely what the other company would have done.

A coin has two sides to it.
We are an IT services company in India, and have been royally cheated by one of our ex-customer who ran away without paying us for a considerable effort. The reason we could not chase is again being a start up we did not have the courage and capability to file a legal proceeding and well as the culture says, we leave the destiny to take care of such folks.

Having said all this, I dont mean to project the customers are bad and neither do I want to say that the service providers are bad, its just diligence that we need to have while choosing the other side of the working side and as someone said, in business, no risk= no money.

Alright, I think this blog is quite old, but was indeed an eye opener for us to stay more focussed on what we are promising.

Good Luck to All of us :)

Cheers
Venkat
venkat@prodigygroupindia.com

Nothing much to add.

For those who are new to this page: This is a load of trash. Go find some better pages.

For those who are supporting Steve and have had bad experiences with Indian companies: Spend some

time and money, dig a bit about the company's previous clients and products. Afer all its your money.

You will find substandard coding and products everywhere, not just in India. Release your frustration

on the company, not the country. Throw away your prejudices. I mean if we are not so good then why

are so many of your companies coming to India? Either our companies are good or you guys are

stupid(Now look who's generalizing :D)

For those who are against Steve and are supporting our companies: Well let them make a hue and cry.

Its good for us, it will make the Americans think twice before handing projects to small,'cheap

service' companies. Eventually it will help in weeding out the sub-standard companies and make the

big players stronger.

PS:- This is a dicussion on Indian IT Industry and not about formal education in India or the quality

of Indian English. Correct me if Im wrong but I've heard that most americans don't know whether

Germany fought with or against the US and that you can't point out any country on the map except

maybe Canada and Mexico :D. Do you know the number of spelling errors in your 'Declaration of

Independence'? Did you know that George Washington spelled 'cat' as 'Kat'(Note: The first one is the

right spelling). You guys made such a mockery of the King's english that your language is no longer

fit to be called english but as 'American English'. Please dont get me started....

Well Mr. Steve, you got what u wanted... 'Publicity'. Now can we stop this bullshit?

Hello All,
I am a part of a leading IT Industry (Onsite/ Offshore model)and to some extend agree with what Chris/Others are saying.
Before,I say something here..I would like to ask something .Is it so that whenever an Non- Indian writes a code it does not contain defect? Had then been so the concept of testing would not have ever born? Can all the people who are crying on quality,proclaim that they would deliver code in perfect quality within the limited time frame which is given to offshore?
I guess not..!!
I would not get into this blame game instead i would talk in terms of a person who has coded at offshore and onsite as well.
This issue could be resolved only if proper project managment + constant reviews is done.I think condeming others is the easiest thing that could be done..i strongly feel that allegations made by chris and others are more of emotional than logical.

Cheers
Prad

P.S. We are able to make softwares which are platform independent but are missing people who are culture independent

Fair comment NR.

At the end of the day, your vendor is going to market like he is the best to do business with and go the limits to sell himself.

A practical solution would be to pilot a smaller project and see if all the communication/management/infrastructure/etc is in place to scale the project. Every project is unique and so would be the vendor and the particular team working on it. It is negotiation skills and a deeper understanding by the likes of Chris to make sure they know what they are getting their company into. To share best/worst practices is definitely appreciable, but I think it is as much the failure of Chris as a manager as it is of the vendor/team.

Am sure he could learn from best practices of other managers who have successfully executed/executing projects on a similar scale. To spot them and talk to them would probably be the first step.

Very troubled...

Racist again.

Poor Indians...

I am really sorry. poor start up company could not sue the bad customer.

Project I was involved in saw Indian companyx offer itself and be selected. Nothing produced after 2 years the contract cancelled and cost the company 3.2 Million sterling redress. None existent company set up by one the famous Indian IT companies vanished without trace but had the cheek before they closed to demand payment of 600K arrears. Now the company has discovered that Telephone costs and software was stolen software had timebombs and would never have been useable beyond two years even if it ever was completed.

NO ETHICS AND NO MORALS.

Employ people you can sue in your countries courts if things go wrong simple as that.

Well I guess, the reason behind poor quality is the IT resource crunch that india is facing... and companies do not stop hiring here.. now they are up for any damn graduate who has toched computer in the past... No matter, how much the knowlegde/abilities resource has, companies want to get them and at cheaper rates... if you look some where in the past ..lets say near to 2000, indian companies have delivered really good stuff at cheaper rates, but now as they are getting more projects, the quality is bound to get even worse.... so offshoring in some(will be most in no time) cases is a nightmare for clients...

Well I guess, the reason behind poor quality is the IT resource crunch that india is facing... and companies do not stop hiring here.. now they are up for any damn graduate who has toched computer in the past... No matter, how much the knowlegde/abilities resource has, companies want to get them and at cheaper rates... if you look some where in the past ..lets say near to 2000, indian companies have delivered really good stuff at cheaper rates, but now as they are getting more projects, the quality is bound to get even worse.... so offshoring in some(will be most in no time) cases is a nightmare for clients...

Hey steve, first of all! you are a dumbhead! if americans know to devolop quality code then why do you outsource to India?. Having one bad experience with an Indian company and clients doesn't mean that you can berate the whole of indians, Just see the facts posted by Ravi about Indians(It's true that we are the largest ethnic group in US) and if you don't know, after China India has the best quality software Engineers. You americans cannot accept the fact that India and China are going to be the next super powers(this is because of our hardwork and efficency! which you lack). Many of the americans don't even know how to operate a windows OS(or any soft product) without reading help. The only thing you know is to make WAR and destroy others culture and traditions!. So STEVE and CHRIS stop talking bullshit.........

There are certainly great coders and programmers in India, but they are in small number - let us remember greatness is never available in abundance which is why its great!

Most of the software engineers in India(be it big or small) aren't from Computer Science background and they are not given proper training, not educated with programming best practices and nor given the time to learn. Companies just want to bill them and make profits.

IT in India is purely a successful business model and so everyone wants to get in and get a portion of money, as simple as that. They want fat margins and quality only gets a lip service.

Come to India if you want a mass of people to maintain code, develop patches and do rudimentary work. If you want product development and if you are not one of those big brands that can get the best talent from top Indian institutes, then you are in for serious trouble.

Btw, the best programmers in India won't be that cheap and you won't get them in top Indian companies.

test

Hi Steve,
Please close this thread. This is not being taken as an objective business discussion and is turning out more into a battle of personal opinions.
I am from Anantara Solutions, the company covered in your new post - Outsourcing your work.
Thanks for the great post.
I will be watching this space for challenges to the SGO model that are posted by other readers. Best way to know what we have to work on.

Cheers,
Win!

I'm really amazed to read the comments of few people here. They are just playing a blame blame game.
The fact is that the outsourcing by US companies in any country india/china/ukraine is a win-win situation to both of them. Say out of 10 projects if they need to hire brilliant techies (which they assume themselves) in US to fix the poor performing code for 1 project then its a lot of profit they are making out of remaining 9 projects (don't you think).
Every company whether it's US or indian giant, they work for increasing their revenues. US firms are doing lay-offs regularly for cost-cutting and indian firms are recruiting less educated/technical resource, why ? just to increase the profit margin.
I am not in favour of anyone but suggest the people not to blame other side.
Regarding Chris experience, as he agreed that he did not recuited right candidates or not explained requirements well shows his lack of experience in onsite-offshore model. The big IT majors of india are expert into it and hence getting recognized across world (europe/britain/russia/japan etc... I have mentioned country name becoz Americans dont know what the rest of the world is)
So everyone is trying his best to do and keep doing it, finally you are using your brain to earn for yourself and not to benefit your employer, correct ?

Keep smiling !!!

Thanks for your article. I am in process of trying to get at least a minimum for the work that I had a misfortune to outsource to Indian group Synapseindia through Elance. How different is the initial phase of negotiations where they swear to understand the scope of a project and have zero tolerance for programming errors . And when you see a very cute sign "select member" awarded by Elance, you have no doubts. But once you hire them, your options are very limited, as described by your other readers.
A small but rather remarkable example: when I discovered that the site they create for me has 133 programming errors (so far) and is not compliant with XHTML standards, I received the explanation: "....this is not part of the scope of work. However if it is needed, we can give the quote for the work."
But then, who needs compliance with any standards...
The outsourcing is not always less expensive. Cheap costs more.

Totally agree with the article, I have worked for multiple companies as a consultant where programming is “outsourced” to russia/india/china etc.. and the quality of code coming back is a total joke, I would not accept it from a developer in this country let alone outsourced. They do not seem to care about meeting requirements that are set down in documents, but care more about “chucking out another project so they can move onto the next one” this is the reason why you get rubbish code. They are just a production line contininously producing crap moving from project to project. Each projectI have seen has had to be recoded internally by someone wasting time and money as it never met the basic concepts for good design and coding practice.. And from gazing round Coding sites like CodeGuru/CodeProject I am starting to see where they get all their code from.. “Copy and paste jobs”..

Fully agree Ukraine or Russian can give more quality and less problem I had bad expirience with Indian companies several time and we are working only with companies from Russian or Ukraine.

As an American with an Indian background, and having worked with a few indian companies strictly based in India, here are the holes I saw in software outsourcing (btw, all of my projects outsourced to India are failures at some level and required complete to partial redevelopment using local resources).
1. companies promise and show paper documents of processes, but hardly ever follow them
2. communications are reasonable in pre-sales, sales, and opportunity development for the vendor. They are worst when your project requires the much needed support, fixing of bugs, maintenance and fine-tuning. Usually, the vendor stops responding once their $$ have been received and the bug reports are getting generated post launch
3. The vendors, taking advantage of a non-enforceable legal system (in India), hold customer hostage by not returning source code, or not returning original assets of software product or holding some of it thereof. I have had many sleepless nights calling the companies and their personnel with no success.
4. Most companies hardly maintain a staff to support you at YOUR time-zone. If you are in US, you have hardly any choice, but, to stay up and talk to them during their day-time which turns out to be your sleep-time.
5. Due to the demand out there, vendors do not care even if they lose customers by generating a half-baked product, since more fool-hardy customers are in line.
6. In short, India outsourcing is either as expensive as it is in US, or will result in excessive frustration, sometimes, causing a total revamp of your software. I find the work ethics or customer service of the companies I used, do not respect the promise of delivering a final functional product. If you have ever been used to money-back concept in US, good luck with outsourcing!!

Lucky man, As you got your Indian Visa you should visit one of the US consulates in India and check out the peoples experience there personally. You can write a book about their experiences.

Indian programmers are the worst !
I have never dealt with such crappy programmers as there are in India, Bangalore to be specific. They are stupid, don't know how to code, produce awful code. The software is extremely buggy, fragile and under-performing. They always try to put as many people as they can on the project and everything takes them five times longer. They always blame everybody else for their problems and yet have the arrogance to claim they're the best and that everything is going extremely well, like lightspeed ! Stay away from India - you will lose your nerves and customers !

Hi everyone,

Me an Indian currently living in Russia doing a case study on cultural conflict that caused indian SW developers with their US partners.

India do have quality problems and no one can deny that.IT industry also grew rapidly without maturing trying to grab every opportunity that comes by.Surely it would show the negative aspects
But one thing is clear...
People (including me) like it or not India happens to be a promising land for SW outsourcing.The whole world writes about it.Not alone US!

As rightly indicated in one of the comments, the new generation would offer more talent.Now,US or any other country likes it or not,India is a talent pool.But truly needs more tuning.

But Beware fellow Indians,west do hold apprehension to Indians not because they
do not know how to appreciate talent...because "Jack of all trade master of none" is never welcomed.
An opportunist would look for three things:-
Cost Vs time-headaches...when the balance topples ...outsourcing could move out of India.
But then we can say....we have a HUGE domestic market to take care of...we have no time for the west etc etc...and here there is no long distance, no cultural conflict...

This thread can be a case study for a doctoral thesis on mass hysteria. I hold no brief for India but the same post could have been made to arrive at a conclusion that American managers fail. Relook at facts in the original post - Bought a remote outfit but strategic plans changed (does this mean we can generalize that Americans shouldnt do strategy?), rather than bite the bullet they tried to 'reutilise' the team for unrelated work (does this mean we should generalize that American programmers will have no problems if told to do support or work on unrelated technologies to their core skills; or that you shouldn't hire American managers as they don't have a clue about HR management), they have high attrition (should we generalize that American programmers dont leave for higher compensation?, specially in an organization not sure of its strategy and plans?), they find quality of output is poor and code is as if delivered by kids (should we generalize HR& MIS systems of Americans are so bad they didn't know the experience and skill level when they hired employees or that the project management and development processes were so poor they couldn't plan or track performance before the final delivery), they still feel QA can be done in India though the main reason for India not working out is culture (should we generalise that QA is better left to people with an unethical culture?). It is quite amusing to see that even after realizing their failure, the 'management' responsible for the mess carries on. Individual brilliance of the new team recruited in the right context can hide management incompetence for some time, but this shouldn't be seen as success or failure of a country.

After one year Experience I understood that I could not give Bug free software.So
I agree that we could not deliver great software without Bugs. We tend develop software as fast as.Team Lead only overview the work and gives instruction to us. They also don't know about how to do work structurally. Company concentrate only money neither on employee nor client.

Those people who complain about Indian IT professionals, should talk to Bill Gates and the CEOs of hundreds of other companies making lots of money in India.

Those who have generalized the issue must have been good programmer ;) (writing generalized code does not mean looking everything in this perspective). There are some drawbacks in the working style of Indian developers, which could be overcome. We follow SCRUM process in our project and do distributed scrumming. We too had similar problems but at last we resolved it and we have the strategy. Here are some highlights of the shortcomings with Indian developers.

1. Professional experience: When recruiting don't get carried away by the professional experience one has.
2. Jr's , Sr's , Caste and respect to elders: All the developers should work as a team, no team lead, no managers (could be managed from onsite, in India managers plays a lot of politics).
3. Mixing teams (have ambassador from India at onsite and vice-versa)
5. Domain Knowledge (don't give just documents to study, let each member take some topic and explain it to others, track whether the team is grasping everything or not)
6. Cultural barriers (understand the cultural barriers,
7. Question estimate/work (Indian guys are bad at questioning, they don't question at all. If you find things not practical just report it. Needs brainstorming and some trainings to overcome this)
8. Maintaining quality (before taking some one in team, let him write to code, give him feedback- understand his weak areas. Do lot of peer code review during project if you feel its important)
9. Raising impediments (Indian guys are not at all good at raising impediments, at last moment we know things are worse. Train them the importance of raising problems. Brainstorm them. Now my team works brilliantly atleast in raising problems ;) )
10. Help (self esteem and self confidence, shyness these all the qualities of Indian developers :P . Well this are serious issues but again by Personality training we could overcome. With a good trainer in 2 trainings i got the worst shy guy to open up)
11. Time sheet ( Make the guys practice filling time sheet. Start them with 1 hour tracking time, my team practiced for a week during all these trainings and well they know now the importance of time)
12. Improving (Give feedbacks, new innovative ideas from developers. Guys have good ideas that could really improve things)
13. Changing requirements/documentation (One important part, if you want offshore team to work well then you should have minimum and well documentation. I say Minimum don't put lots and lots of docs. Only proper use-case and UI documented should do. Update in case of chaning requirement.)

The above process could be carried out before taking a guy into team (its not so easy nor difficult). It works for us and well could work for others. We do distributed scrumming at Qvantel. We have offices in Finland, Sweden, Spain, Norway and *India.

What ever we write/speak i am sure is understood by everybody who knows English. We don't need to masters in English and remember its not our mother tongue.

Not sure if this area is still open for comments, but if it is, let me have a try too!

About Indians - its not even a united country. There's the north, and there's the south and they hate each other, and then there's some thirty different cultures, all of whom are equally arrogant when it comes to defending their own sub culture. So the trick i've learned is to say - indians are worthless in general, but people who speak your language, or who come from your caste (that gift of the wierd religion they follow) are much better, and they will be your slaves forever. Or if that doesn't work, they've got pockets of Muslims and Christians whom you can use very effectively to turn against the rest of the crowd.

The English used it very effectively for a century and more to enslave them as a nation, and its time the world learned how to use the divisions inherent in the ordinary Indian's psyche today.

They have a tendency to get jingoistic and talk in hyperboles as someone pointed out, and that is how they do business too. The really young ones in their workforce do all the work with low skills and low pay, and then they stop working and start managing the moment they get a 3-5 years of experience. Its very important in their village-driven culture to prove to their other villagers that they've achieved 'success' or whatever it is they call 'success'. And talk to any of them, the'll throw in a few big names like Mittal or Tatas and how they're doing "grand" on a "global" scale.

The fact is, like all third-worlders, they pretty much all aspire to live in Europe or the US (gives them a chance to collect a big dowry from their in-laws, another element of their "Indian culture"). And then they bring their worst traits to the first world, vegetarianism and big, empty words being the worst.

But as long as there are greedy fools driving the US economy, and even greater fools running Washington who're on their payrolls, the average American is only bound to lose.

It's a pity, a whole generation of Americans has been deprived of a chance to become a part of the IT revolution, when America was the one that gave computers and the internet to the world. Once the current generation of American programmers and architects passes away, it's all in the hands of the Indians, or the Chinese, or the Ukrainians or the crazy Russians, whether one likes it or not.

Look out 2050!

we are inteested for software developing out sourceing work

Hi All,

No grudges - no complaints - no regrets, that's what I am going to start with.

Frankly speaking, such debates as seen in this blog lead to nowhere, they can be kept on for more than a decade. The reason is simple, the Perceptions based on Assumptions. Surely hats off to our western counter parts for bringing the great IT revolution down to India. There is no doubt that had they not been there, we wouldn't have seen people turning into millionaires overnight.

The problem is the same old one, which had been with the Humans of every cast creed and culture "Too many assumptions, based on perceptions". I have been in the industry for around 8 yrs now (ever since my school days) and have worked on enormous projects including solutions from Nothing to Everything.

Surely, the biggest obstacle and roadblock we ever encounter is Culture difference and believe me... the only reason it is a roadblock is "We assume it is a roadblock" and none of us tries to take responsibility to understand and overcome the causes lying behind.

People here are debating starting from freshers from the industry up to the most experienced senior people and all every one is doing is blaming blaming and blaming. When all of us say "I am not responsible" than who is responsible ? Lets say its the bad fate or may be God !!

Well that's not the point, because we are all responsible equally. The fresher cribs he gets only USD100 per month to work, but he just disregards the reasons behind it. Boy... just think of the fact, this is just the start, prove yourself where ever you get a chance and the world is never ending, nothing can stop you from becoming a CEO of some of the top names in the industry.

Just like there are many reasons for failures, there always are many many ways to overcome those barriers and excel in our work.

People like Steve are not wrong, because what they have gone through are nightmares coming true and lasting for a long long time, probably for the whole life time. Our responsibility is to think and outline what we can actually deliver, not just go ahead and grab every possible work from everywhere and just think in terms of $$$$$. That's wrong from every angle. The new start up companies are just great, they bring up some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs before the world. The bad part is, just a few $$$ make most of such entrepreneurs deviate from their path, loose their ideologies and Goals they set when starting up their dream. Maintain your focus, don't get misdirected, stop running after a few $$$ in the initial phases of establishing your organization. Have patience and the results will be just splendid. It wont take long to make the $$$ chase you instead of you chasing the $$$.

There are so many examples, both from East and West. Every entrepreneur has to be different, he has to be focused, visionary and long term goal seeker instead of just thinking in terms of $$$. Surely, this wont be easy in the initial phases, but its assured that if you keep focus, keep on working towards the set objectives you had, you surely will come up with great results.

The problem is BOXED thinking just in terms of $$$ of the new enterprises mushrooming in enormous count every year and most of them closing down at the same rate every year.

Our responsibility, as Indians is not to let people like Steve have such experiences, instead, our objective must be to ensure that if Steve does business with us, he never require to look for any other options, not for any reason.

Another aspect is the quick conclusive behavior of Steve, which is a common thing prominent. That is also not at all justified, don't generalize things, surely you had a terrible experience, but who does not have bad experiences, but be willing to accept the mistakes done from your side. Outsourcing is not an easy trade off, its critical and requires people taking responsibilities at least in the initial phases up to the micro management level. No one can come to know what you have in mind unless it is communicated in a comprehensive form. The assumptions are too many and many of them are never conveyed or communicated from both the parties and this is what always leads to confusion.

I have seen companies and Project Managers saying "This is not a part of the requirement" when some of the team member points out something as an issue in an application. This is so wrong. The will is shrunken, if we are asked to deliver 20, we try to convince in 15... the target should be 25... that's how good relationships will be made.

Failures are a part of any initiative and they are bound to happen, but getting totally shattered of those failures and deciding never to risk it ever again is the biggest foolishness we can ever do... and the worst part is... this is what we always do !! If we fail, do some Analysis, identify the loop holes, the mistakes the causes, prepare yourself more thoroughly and then charge again !!! Believe me, if initially you thought that "this will be just great", surely it will be... !!!

By the way, I am myself an entrepreneur, and have a good tie ups with clients from across the globe. I also face similar situations, but the best part is, when ever such things happen, we both sit together, analyze, and overcome every adverse situation and devise appropriate counter measures to ensure it doesn't get repeated.

My suggestion to my new entrepreneur mates in India is simple... dont loose your path, dont deviate from it... maintain focus... keep the rhythm, hurdles will be many, but dont start running after $$$ initially... you will surely succeed !! Its just some patience, intense hard work and many many sleepless nights that are needed to nurture your child which we call "The Company" and make it grow to the level that you ever dreamed off.

We as new entrepreneurs, have to take responsibility to NOT let people have experiences like Steve, he is right on his part, but surely racism is not the reason he is saying all this, had that been the reason, he would have never started that venture in India. Its our responsibility, as new age entrepreneurs that we Comply with the standards, because, if we dont, that doesnt only ruins us, instead it even maligns the reputation of other organizations and it even completely ruins the reputation and credibility of the whole nation.

Take responsibility and ownership... that soon, Steve will be back in business with India and will come down to this blog and say "Friends... I agree, earlier experience was just a nightmare, India is a great place to find great resources for any part of the IT industry and I am very happy now :) ".

All the best to everyone

P.S. Steve, you can abuse me, but I have targeted you as my next prospective major client and I will surely succeed !! :)

I think the biggest issue is that U.S. managers are laying off top tier personnel and replacing them with bottom tier Indian personnel and expecting them to be equal.

I've worked with really really good U.S. coders and really really good Indian coders, albeit both in this country.

I case in point, our company decided to lay off our only report writer who was making 60K a year after 10 years with the company. Our database design (ERD) was moved over from an old ADS (Advantage) flat file database and is, in a word, horrible.

Since she was our only report writer, of course all of her knowledge of the ERD went with her. It wasn't totally lost because I know it pretty well and another architect knows it even better.

Once we got the TCS resource, the other software architect (who gets around 120K a year) spent about 50% of his time teaching the resource about the ERD. It of course was a slow painful process. English being a second language was a big part of it because the old ADS systems only allowed 10 characters for table names. It's hard enough remembering the abbreviated names speaking English as a native language much less as a second or third language. The table names might as well have been jibberish, which I'm sure they seemed to the TCS resource.

Anyhow, simply because of this cultural difference, it took about 2 months before the first report was generated. We started off with really simple ones. The reports weren't to spec, and whether or not it was explained that page numbers should be on each report, this could easily have been surmised by looking at the other 300 reports available. The fonts were off as well. Sure, that could be blamed on spec, but most of not all of the good U.S. workers would have modeled the report's look and feel based off of the other 300+ in existence, or would have at least asked. That is another cultural difference. Indians will nod that they understand even when they don't.

I won't assume that her technical skills were lacking, but 9 months later, only 10 reports were completed. Our 60K a year laid off report writer kicked out about one a day. We finally let her go and got one of our technical support people, who recently took a PL/SQL class, do the reports. She picked it up and ran with it after about a week of working with our other architect. Now she rarely pesters him.

Bottom line: I'm not sure how much the TCS resource cost, but just training her for 9 months was took 50% of the architect's time and the architect made double what our old report writer made. After 9 months, he was still training her because of cultural and possibly technical reasons, she just wasn't getting it.

Cost savings for the report writer: 30K / year.
Cost incursion for 9 months of training, 40K.
Net cost after 9 months: +10K. Project completed? Nope.

Also understand, this is the first incursion with TCS I've had and we just recently started using them, but being sold that Indian developers are just as good as U.S. developers is of course, bait-and-switch. Does India have developers who are as good as U.S. developers? Absolutely. Are the chances you will get one based on the cut-rate good? Absolutely not.

Holy crap, ignore the gross grammatical errors. I had just finished a coding stent and couldn't sleep. The point still stands though.

Before starting or raising issue u should be specific not generic. There are more than 100,000 software companies in india may be even more.

If u got bad output its problem of your managment. Without proper managment how can u expect good result.

Q's related to salary, just a example, I am working with one onsite project.My onsite salary is 1/4 or 1/5 of the salary of any stupid employee of my client. But if we see Indian salary then still it is 8 times i.e. indian employees are getting 20 to 25 times less salary. here hr cost of employee is 100 US$ and India salary is 5$ per hr or less in an avg.

Wt ever work my client employees doing in one month we are doing it in 2 days.

Without doing any proper survey if u r raising any issue then its a stupidity.

Q's related to inidan talents, its doubtless wtever fig RAVI mentioned in this artical is wrong (38% of doctors in USA are INDIANs.
12% scientists in USA are INDIANs.
36% of NASA scientists are INDIANs.
34% of Microsoft employees are INDIANs.
28% of IBM employees are INDIANs.
17% of INTEL scientists are INDIANs.
13% of XEROX employees are INDIANs.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems: Vinod Khosla
Creator of Pentium chip (90% of the today's computers run on it) Vinod Dham)

Actually its even more than this,
I dont want to touch fig.. related to NASA or other.
34% of Microsoft employees are INDIANs.
>>> Wt about support they are getting from indian offshore or indian contract employees.
28% of IBM employees are INDIANs.
>>> Wt about support they are getting from indian offshore or indian contract employees.
17% of INTEL scientists are INDIANs.
>>> Wt about support they are getting from indian offshore or indian contract employees.
13% of XEROX employees are INDIANs.
>>> Wt about support they are getting from indian offshore or indian contract employees.
Co-founder of Sun Microsystems: Vinod Khosla
Creator of Pentium chip (90% of the today's computers run on it) Vinod Dham)

see india is much fast then any other country in world today u cant see its speed because our country dont have suffiicent money but after some yrs no one can challenge us.

I am a software professional moved from India, now working for a large US company.
Now, without any bias, let me explain my experience here. My company decided to offshore some of the work to IBM. IBM has built offshore teams in India and Brazil.

The biggest issues we have faced with Indian offshore team.
- Very inexperience team members(in the range of 3-5 years). After 5 years of experience most of them move to managerial role and thus creating a team with very limited technical experience
- Loosing team members very frequently. They move to another company who offered little more than they make.
- Very bad work ethics among developers. (Note: I found testers are extremely ethical). Developers spend time on an issue 'only if that helps him gain more knowledge'. Otherwise you can see a very disinterested pattern in problem solving.

Compare to the Indian counterparts, I found Brazil counterparts were extremely knowledgeable with great work ethics.
I have not exaggerated anything here. There were pure facts based on my experience.

I used to work in the offshoring industry. No doubt India has some extremely talented programmers.

I think the question truly is:

Does it make sense to outsource work 18 hrs away without the right management and infrastructure?

Outsourcing development to nearshore locations makes much more sense. For US companies its Mexico and Canada. 2-4 hrs by flight and +/-2 time zones.

Work in real time please!

Also, I would challenge the failure stats of India with domestic US figures. I think the main problem here is iterative and waterfall project methodologies.

Agile project management will help improve the probability of success with your software projects.