[Feedback] Cost Cutting / Funding Suggestions

have you ever worked with indian devs fresh from university ? my experience with indian devs: you pay nothing you get nothing. the good ones do get more or less the same as we do. if you do not shift the whole op, you gain nothing, but overhead

A large UK IT company I once worked for once started a new project that was slightly out of their usual business line. As such, the company did not allocate any QA capacity for this project but outsourced it to India. I was part of the project and here is a brief summary of my experience.

The Indian team were very thorough. They were excellent at following a detailed scrpt but never showed any initiative. They were also extremely inflexible and VERY slow. Yes they found a few issues for us to fix and provided a very detailed report in a pre-defined fixed form. Unfortunately none of those issues were new to us. By the time they sent the report, we, the development team, found them ourselves and fixed them. Since they only followed the script and never stepped out of the line, they never found any unusual bugs. We had to find those ourselves.

In short, it was a complete waste of time and money. Your experience may vary.

Please note that this is not about working with Indians. I worked with some Indian colleagues sitting in the same office. My experience in that scenario is absolutely positive. The above is purely about outsourcing. I have no doubt that it can work in some situations but you need to be very careful how you define it.

You can say that again, Sir pichlo. When ever I had to deal with outsourced piece of cake tasks, it was a complete nightmare, and you do not even have to go that far to hire in India, that's a mere prejudice. Already dealing with a company in a neighbouring country could mean busloads of req specs and objectives discussed for months not leading anywhere near specified or understood, eventually looking at the outcomings. Each time the findings were the same, we could have been a lot faster and cheaper, if we just had done it ourselves.

Have you accounted for the 1-3 years to get the developers sufficiently accustomed to the technology? I work with developers and testers in India, it is like pichlo said initiative is really rare. When you finally find someone that is skilled and can take initiative they usually move on within 2 years. And as lakutalo said, the overhead of communicating over any distance is not to be underestimated, I spent almost a year in meetings to haggle out the details on a feature that, honestly, was coded in about 3 months.

@pawel: Actually, I am a freelance developer from India and so do know this industry very well. You are right that you get what you pay. The $60,000 lower range mentioned by me, to hire fresh college graduates, IS actually the current starting salary nowadays (from top tier colleges). And so you would be able to hire good candidates with a lot of potential for that salary. And no, if you are from Europe or America, there is no way that your country men are getting the same "level" of salary as indian developers. For $4000 / month you can get a highly experienced (10+ years) developer who has graduated from a top tier indian college with excellent grades. The same developer would easily earn anywhere between $10,000 / month to $15,000 / month abroad (I know this for a fact from my friends and family, who are in this field of work, currently in US / Europe).