You perhaps never thought to consider the fact that perhaps your business colleagues contributed to the mess? Or did you take it for granted that since your business colleagues are American that they couldn’t possibly have messed up?

And even if your business colleagues did absolutely nothing to mess things up, you cannot quote their experience as THE definitive experience and extrapolate widely based on that.

If your implication that ALL Indians are screwups is right, then how do you explain this: a lot of big leading American firms have Indians working for them in key leadership roles. Many of these Indians were educated in India and only traveled overseas on work. Many of they people have played critical roles in developing the flagship products of these companies.

No wonder MICROSOFT corp which started hiring lots of Indian programmers for the past few years has their product quality going down. If APPLE corp starts to hire Indian programmers, then it will also lose its design competence.

THE REALITY-
OUTSOURCING TO EASTERN EUROPE, EAST ASIA IS MUCH MUCH BETTER THEN TO INDIA.

NEVER EVER OUTSOURCE TO INDIA.

Don’t get me wrong, I work in one of the Big IT companies in India, but now I am sick and tired of their hiring policies. Read on
Software companies in India are recruiting “Lamers” who don’t have any experience…, wait a minute, they don’t even know a thing about computer science. Don’t believe me? Let me give you an example, a person hired straight from college as a software developer by a Big Indian IT Company (A Really Big One.. They have got the BT project… you know..!), he has been chosen as a developer on java, he came crying to me asking he can’t figure out how to create an ODBC connection (in windows). Can you believe this? I explained him the process with screen-shots from modemhelp.net( cause I was running Linux on my system so..). More surprises, he couln’t differentiate Linux from windows (it was obvious, he had never ever seen a non-windows system in his life so far), so when he saw my terminal (I had Open-suse with default KDE running on my system with a terminal/console open), he asked me to show him how to create the ODBC connection from the control panel… what a Lamer! People selected for .Net have no idea about what an web-server is and what is IIS.

People are hired from non-IT background and sometimes non-computer background (students from civil, mechanical, or electronics engineering) on the basis of merit tests where they ask questions like in the banking jobs(??). This is done intentionally so that they can force these lamers to work for peanuts for almost 12 hours a day regularly. Most of the time, lamers are overworked and underpaid and they don’t have the skill to finish the job in an efficient manner. They are always frightened of losing their jobs and so they manage to finish their responsibility in every irresponsible way possible. You know what I mean, sorry, English is my second language!
Companies prefer these novice people over trained professionals because they can pay a lot less.

As far as IT and software is concerned, this is no easy job and definitely not for an average joe, we all know that. One has to be pretty strong technically to understand the specifications, leave out writing codes. We are at the edge of unparalalled complex business demand and increased complexity of software design getting more and more complex every day with standards like web2 and distributed architecture. Now how far do you think hires like these can go even with specialised training. They put an intense pressure on these employees forcing them to learn the technologies and they simply don’t have foundations to build on. It’s like pushing a business graduate to cram up Quantum Physics!

If you happen to visit any of the Indian IT firms, you will come to know about an amazingly bad work culture where people always find their excuses for an unfinished job. Some companies are run like pumping stations where you come, you sit, you roam around, you have your lunch, you chat with the lady sitting in the next cubicle or on the Internet, ok it’s 4:30 in the evening, let’s go home half an hour early. The word “proactive” is not a part of their dictionary.

Consequently, these Indian IT companies are losing quality of the service in the domestic market as well as in the international market. God only knows how they meet their deadlines even after hundreads of reviews of code and scary programming practices. Companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra are losing projects in india as well (they have got a very bad remarks from clients like SBI, Central Bank of India and many others and they are steadily losing projects even in Indian markets for hiring these lamers).

Some US companies have taken back their projects to US after finding out the truth about Indian IT Companies A lot of them have found out they can manage to achieve a productivity 2 to 6 times greater than what it was when outsourced to India!

Bottom line——-
DO NOT OUTSOURCE YOUR PROJECTS TO INDIA, ITS GOING TO COST YOU MORE IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY AND YOU WILL LOSE GOOD WILL OF YOUR CUSTOMERS. DO NOT FEED THESE LAMERS WHEN YOU HAVE AN EXCELLENT IT STAFF IN YOUR COUNTRY UNEMPLOYED!

Currently working on the outsourced projects in india i should say why this happens ” Unrealistic deadlines and speically the adhoc requirements that creep in during these deadlines”

Finally what it matters is if you have convidence/skilled people in your country to get all the necessary stuffs done on time why do you want outsource it to any other countries?????

1) Unclear requirement: - Whoever is outsourcing to India should have clear understanding of requirements If they don’t have then later on they may blame on the company who is doing their work. Many time it happen that person giving work knows only 20% of what actually s/he wants.

2) Hiring People: You have to be very careful when you are hiring people. For that you can make your recruitment team responsible to fill the space with right person and right attitude.

3) Unrealistic deadline - which create problem in terms of productivity. See chat application can be developed in a day or it may take more than a year so when you demand you should know that How many features you need and in how much time.

Indian really work from heart and they normally leave company just because of the top management who are giving wrong commitment to their CEO and pressurized team for the unrealistic delivery.

4) Retaining Resources - India is growing like anything and in such a competitive market retaining resources is a big challenge. HOW do you do that? Well as per me you can show them some long term plan in terms of work as well as in term of finance. Still India many people like to go abroad so visit to foreign country for a month at least would work for you.

Employee (Real developers) are getting lower salary compare to the market standard. Management should make sure of whoever are working on the project they are happy with what they are getting OR that has to be competitive otherwise you may loose them.

5) Hire Manager: Always hire working manager than a talkative manager. :)

People outsource work to India just because of

1) Cost effective Resources
2) Highly talented and Multi skilled people
3) Productive
4) Reliable
5) Socialize - Keep good balance between their professional and personal life which is missing everywhere apart from India.

Finally never blindly outsource to India (OR anywhere) always go through proper channel and participate into all the phases of your outsource work and you will get success for sure.

Am I just generalizing? Maybe I just had a bad experience with all the Americans I’ve dealt with? Ah, forget it. It sounds much better if I brand all Americans as dumb. I shall recommend to all involved in the emerging startup wave in India to not outsource to the US.

We integrate a module supplied by an American company developing in America. Enhancement requests for even a small but critical fault takes up to a month with all dry run data made available to them.

Releases are unreliable and need to go through two weeks of testing before release to any customer. And last time we needed a feature to log a certain statistics for engineering runs, they added it as a feature which cant ever be disabled and will just keep on logging data endlessly to a massive file, no questions asked. Took some time to figure that out because this was effectively beyond our imagination.

All this on a high speed setup just entering the market with close deadlines and against a well established player…. Great!!!

The company is profoundly grateful to us for saving their business because their clients were starting to walk away because of the mess their internal development team was making. We have been able to fix most of these issues from India.

That doesn’t go to prove that all American programming teams are disorganized and unproductive.. and neither does it go to prove that all Indian software development outfits do a good job.

But at the same time, I just wanted to indicate that Americans can screw up too. And also that not all Indians are screw ups like some would like to believe.

I said “essentially homeless”, and I stick to it, at the time my replacement was sitting in India, lying to the employer, that he was in the states. He had no home in the USA, and would be living in a rented hotel room, paid for by his outsourcing company, until he made a paycheck.

In my book, this is homeless, shipped to a foreign country, and provided for by a outsourcing company. My point is this kind of US employee replacement is short sighted and unfair to everyone involved.

Once this developer realizes that the USA isn’t quite as cheap as living in India.

I have seen this happen so many times, I developed a friendship with one poor guy, back in 98, promised the world by some contracting firm, shipped here, had to stay in a apartment with 5 other guys, was getting $20 an hour, but had to pay for his part of the room, food, couldn’t afford a car, repaying bi-weekly for training, certificates, travel to US, working on a Green card sponsored by the contracting firm. Guy was frantically e-mailing and FTPing code to and from his friends in India, because he was so inexperienced.

My point is, management, doesn’t want to use common sense, they only hear cheap. And it doesn’t matter who gets hurt, they just have some unknown face to blame when it all goes bad. Not a good way to treat people regardless of where they are from.

Don

Instead, this article presents 2 examples where technical work is not recognized as being closer to a art or craft than a skill.

To illustrate by way of analogy: Anyone with basic cooking skills can prepare a meal, but only someone with talent can cook a fine meal. It’s all in the details. Anyone can put paint on paper, but only someone with a solid understanding and good taste can paint the next Picasso (or recognize it, for that matter).

The marketers, in this case, claimed they had the know-how to build a website. This is probably somewhat true in the most basic sense, but doesn’t speak to the quality or elegance of the final execution.

The same is often true with outsourced or old-school “professional” “experienced” “enterprise” developers (i.e. CS grads from pre-2001). Sure, they have the skills to build a website, but only using ASP, table-based layouts, etc. Just like in this article, the final product doesn’t meets today’s standards, at least according to those of us who see the subtley, and recognize elegant, artfully coded websites.

In other words: web dev/sys admin experience isn’t a skill you either possess or don’t. Those days are over. It’s not that black and white, anymore. Instead, it’s about being able to see the art in code (or lack thereof), and making good choices about which Coding Artists you contract with and which Coding Connoisseurs (the marketers, in this case) you hire.