anyone else deal with an offshore development? we happen to have our developers offshore in India; 90 percent of them. it’s a disaster. they constantly deliver broken patches or break other things when tjey invite their code in. Rarely ever deliver anything on time, and have difficulty explaining anything. anyone with similar experiences?
Don't do it. Only garbage comes out. There are only a selected few who do well. But you need a lot of luck in finding them and then keeping them
Yeah, in the past I’ve worked with offshore developers in India and the stuff you mentioned pretty much sums up my experience as well. Quality control just goes out the window and you end up spending more time fixing their bugs, mistakes, and garbage code than it would have taken just to do it all yourself, or at least in house.
This
Companies know their product will become shittier once they start offshore development. They want to save money. Soon they will send experts from your office to India to explain them how it's done. But that does not help in the long term.
A lot of companies have had good success with India offshore model.. you have to know that all the problems that you listed are organization structure problems. If you setup a CI/CD pipeline, spend time explaining the requirements and set expectations on the outcome, this can work wonders.
This only works until the offshore team manually disables all tests so they can push their broken stuff and don’t tell the onshore team about it. Then you find out you can’t fire the offshore team anymore for “political” reasons.
They stink lesser if you pay them well. Also, in most cases they don't get enough context about the product or feature, so they are not motivated enough and do the bare minimum.
So you are saying they purposely produce crap code because they are paid less than people on SF?
I worked in the offshore team in India and now in the US, I have an offshore team I work with everyday. I also conduct trainings across India, UK, Germany, Australia and US offices on how to better handle these kind of engagements: Here are some pieces you need to consider: 1. They are away from the core business and are sometimes kept away from the bigger goals of the project, walking them through might help. 2. Clear communication is key. I have spent 30mins writing an email to them so I detail every step to them clearly. Note that once you log off, there is no one they can contact and they will do the work as per their understanding if you have not done a clear job of communicating what you exactly need. I use the following to get my ideas across: - goal of the problem - current status of the deliverable - step by step procedure they need to follow - what's more important (accuracy vs time tradeoffs) - soft and hard deadlines - if timelines are tight, what sub parts of the projects need to be prioritized - how the deliverable I expect from them should look like (sometimes I provide a template) If the offshore ain't doing well, there's a high chance they aren't getting clear directions. After I learnt this, my experience has been great. With regards to the communication, it's a cultural aspect. We aren't raised to be as expressive as communicative as the American world. Look up about how communication in the Asian world works (you may be surprised to know how tacit some of those cultures are). Use clear short sentences and bullet points to ask them what you need. Good luck. ------ To give you an example, my above email is the American version. Below is the Asian version of the same email: Explain the project and give clear directions to the offshore team. You see the difference?
Thanks. I’ll give this a shot.
If developers are working offshore (not in-house India office like Amazon or Uber) it means your company doesn't care much about this piece of software for business. If that's not the case, you need to prove your company that hiring people at your office will provide more business value, if this cannot be justified it will be as it is. It's all about $$$$ in the end.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!
You mean bananas? 😉
My company hired a bunch of Indian consultant for DS and ML projects. The offshore people simply don’t have enough education and background for these ML projects, but my manager thinks that he can save some money and still get the work done. As a DS with PhD, I don’t see how it would work out, but it is not up to me. It’s been pretty bad experience working with them so far as they barely know how to code and they don’t know how to work independently.
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How much do you pay them? Also it shows how much your company values this software work.
They are paid comparable to the work they produce
^They perform comparable to the pay