Top 3 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Outsourcing IT Jobs

March 16, 2008 – 3:17 pm

One of the main reasons we (the USA) hire off-shore developers is to save money, but how much money is really being saved though? Where are we actually saving? Is it in the budget, the time, amount human resources, or office space?

Over the past three years, I have officially off-shored some projects in hopes to save just that; money. I sent one small and one large project to India. I worked on two small applications with a team in Croatia. And currently, I work on various projects with contractors and teams in Germany.

Here are the top three reasons I hire in-house developers first and off-shore developers second.

Distance

Regardless of the collaborative software you use, the conference calls, the Skype meetings; distance is the number one issue with outsourcing web development. The timezones make the communication so much more difficult. Distance also lends it’s self to chaos. When things go wrong, they really go wrong. You can’t exactly gather everyone up in the conference room and triage the situation.

Level of “Big Picture” Experience

The actual work ethic and drive have never been an issue. The speedy return on data input or changes has always been good, but it’s the level of experience that I find the most problematic.

Many times, the project simply does not have good documentation, is not compliant, does not meet standards, and is surrounded by deprecated code which drives me crazy, ah, but thats not all. It’s like I say in the header, not much “big picture” experience. Sure I have met amazing developers from Denmark, Scotland, Chile, etc., but those people are rare. Very rare. The majority of the off-shore teams I have worked with simply don’t have the savoir faire when it comes to building a web application. This is crucial from day one. Starting out on the wrong foot simply eats the time and money up. What does this application really do, what does it mean, will other developers be able to read my code, am I refactoring my code, am I optimizing my DB for traffic, etc., etc. This is the big picture.

Language and Culture

Whenever you have a team or a contractor document or write code that is not in their native language, you could end up spending hours and days cleaning up the mess. I have had applications sent back to me littered with spelling errors. Not only in the code comments, but in the DB and in the functions. QA also seems to be a lot more thorough when you are working with an in-house team. When everyone is working inside the same office culture, it physically puts everyone on the same page. Less chance of error.

…

In conclusion, my goal is not to pit one country against another or to say all developers from these areas are bad, my goal is to illustrate the issues with off-shore development rather than in-house development. While many intermediate developers might be paid 50K - 80K/year which is a stark contrast to paying only 5K for an entire application to be written, you have to think of all the time spent managing a project, stressing over it, putting it into QA, bug smashing and describing the MRD or PRD over and over and over again. 5K can turn into 20K real fast and that still doesn’t mean you have an application you can roll out. Besides, sometimes it’s just not worth the gray hairs.

I recommend hiring locally first, then making a case for hiring or outsourcing your development.