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If you've done some outsourcing with offshore developers, how has your experience been and who were they? I've contracted some work on a website and used two companies: Tunga and Sloboda. Both experiences were exactly the same. They both start out great, finishing projects quickly and at a reasonable cost. Then as I requested more projects, they began to take their time, do lots of "refactoring" and often end up on the "pessimistic" side of their estimates. When pressed about what was taking so long the usualky answer was that I had asked them to do something they'd never done before and needed a week to research it while I was still being billed. One example was Stripe integration. I find it hard to believe that an established company full of programmers had no one on staff who had set up Stripe for a client before. Basically, it got worse and worse until I could get to a stopping point and stop working with them. I know experiences and projects vary wildly but I would like to hear about others' experience with outsourced web development. hummingbird hoedown fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 18:19
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i think you're looking for 'offshoring vs. onshoring' as opposed to 'foreign vs. non-foreign'...
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Aug 10, 2018 19:54
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Hummer Driving human being posted:I find it hard to believe that an established company full of programmers had no one on staff who had set up Stripe for a client before. I would guess that Stripe not being in Eastern Europe, Africa, or most of Asia, being a slight factor in knowledge. If you stuck to plain basic code with almost no third party integration you would be in a more productive spot.
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Aug 10, 2018 23:58
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Anyone notice how foreign developers are ruining our dev environment and corrupting our child processes?
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Aug 11, 2018 10:10
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Foreigners function interface.
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Aug 12, 2018 02:02
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Hummer Driving human being posted:When pressed about what was taking so long the usualky answer was that I had asked them to do something they'd never done before and needed a week to research it while I was still being billed. So you expect them to do the research on how to implement something into your project on their own time for free? You're the problem here, not them.
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Aug 13, 2018 06:59
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If they're still delivering a good product within the estimate (even if it's on the high side), I'd count that as a success. Learning a new API for integration is always billable, and it's often hard for a developer to estimate since they don't know the API... Now if they're billing 40 hours to learn Stripe and not implement anything, that's a different problem.
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Aug 20, 2018 01:53
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As someone who's never heard of stripe before (nor I would expect has any of my coworkers, but then I'm not a web developer), it does look fairly complex at a first glance. The basic functionality seems easy enough to implement, but if all the refunds, records, etc. need to be integrated, potentially with their own pages, I could see it taking a while.
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Aug 21, 2018 13:52
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Yeah, its not trivial. It likes to market itself as trivial, but if you want to do anything more complicated than the most basic of functionality (and you likely do), then youll be setting up endpoints and data models and the like.
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Aug 21, 2018 14:05
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You do realize there are about an infinite number of API's in use out there right? It isn't reasonable at all to ever say "I find it hard to believe that an established company full of programmers had no one on staff who had set up [literally any API] for a client before."
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Aug 21, 2018 17:24
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Portland Sucks posted:You do realize there are about an infinite number of API's in use out there right? It isn't reasonable at all to ever say "I find it hard to believe that an established company full of programmers had no one on staff who had set up [literally any API] for a client before." You beat me to it. And yes research is billable. Software development is 80% research anyway; it's a creative endeavor and every device or system you integrate with has guaranteed found an exciting and unique way to break from common conventions, leave out features you'd expect them to have, and otherwise function in a way you don't expect. This poo poo is almost never plug and play despite the fact that every single software product's Marketing Website Featuring Three Boxes tells you it is. A good developer is one that CAN learn whatever system or piece of tech a company wants to use (usually without actually consulting ahead of time with anybody who has to do the work), not one that already knows it. It costs because it's hard and most people can't do it at all.
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Aug 22, 2018 03:45
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OP, have you considered that the pattern is not that foreign developers are bad, but that you start out by giving them the low-hanging fruit, and with time what you give them is harder and harder to implement? We've had similar issues in house where we have a working prototype very early, but then with time elaborations that seem less and less significant take longer and longer. And yeah, the more specialized the problem, the more research is needed to do the later parts. That seems more likely to me than a company based in the Netherlands and contracting out to African developers and a company based in Ukraine both being bad in ways that do not have to do with the tasks you give them.
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Sep 8, 2018 19:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:OP, have you considered that the pattern is not that foreign developers are bad, but that you start out by giving them the low-hanging fruit, and with time what you give them is harder and harder to implement? We've had similar issues in house where we have a working prototype very early, but then with time elaborations that seem less and less significant take longer and longer. And yeah, the more specialized the problem, the more research is needed to do the later parts. Yeah, I think I started the thread out of frustration instead of thinking about it much. We've made so many mistakes in this process and it's been a great learning experience.
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Sep 19, 2018 16:07
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We recently cut ties with our offshore development (Pakastan) and hired a bunch of in-house development to replace them. While it was always easy to slag off their developers as bad after some thought I feel that was mostly unfair, some of the developers were actually pretty talented and you could see this in the various ingenious hacks they came up with to, but the problem was the use of hacks in the first place. The culture with this company was 'get the job done by the timeline no matter what' , its a culture that seems very prevalent with these outsourcing companies and it just leads to unmanageable technical debt.
Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Sep 20, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 10:38
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Yes cheap companies do work poorly.
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Sep 20, 2018 11:53
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Shy posted:Yes cheap companies do work poorly. You can have it done fast, cheap, or well. Pick two.
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Sep 20, 2018 14:07
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This thread is so "Developer" I can imagine Steve Ballmer shouting it
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Sep 25, 2018 16:30
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we paid an offshore team to write a some financial software that involved taking in various data feeds from large banks. The system worked great until one day it didnt so we called up and they told us that the guy drowned and and was a bad employee because he had been doing the work manually never wrote the software. We still work with them, the backend is a nightmare of hacks but it works as long as no body else on the team drowns.
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Sep 30, 2018 20:59
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Dirty Beluga posted:we paid an offshore team to write a some financial software that involved taking in various data feeds from large banks. The system worked great until one day it didnt so we called up and they told us that the guy drowned and and was a bad employee because he had been doing the work manually never wrote the software. Are there not regulations about financial software that prevent outsourcing it to randoms?
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Oct 3, 2018 20:42
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If anything it is easier, although I'm going through one gigantic background check with FBI checks for one firm. Cannot work for the Fed but you can still work on a project that someone else takes to them.
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Oct 3, 2018 21:19
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Crazy that people don't just fall off trees with the exact set of skills that a boss might need.
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Nov 16, 2018 00:15
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wooger posted:Are there not regulations about financial software that prevent outsourcing it to randoms? lol, no
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Nov 16, 2018 16:06
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wooger posted:Are there not regulations about financial software that prevent outsourcing it to randoms? It's better the less you know to be honest, and it doesn't end at just outsourcing the software.
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Nov 18, 2018 09:47
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wooger posted:Are there not regulations about financial software that prevent outsourcing it to randoms? the more important the software is, the shittier the quality. the world's strongest and most well-paid software engineers write javascript that puts ads on web pages. strong engineers that work for the love of software work on video games. medical billing / EMR software probably has the worst engineering on the planet.
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Nov 18, 2018 14:07
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I took over a decent-sized WordPress website once that ran a custom theme developed by a team in India and it was a complete nightmare to deal with and I ended up rewriting large parts of the templates and custom plugins to make customization through the admin UI possible beyond basic new posts. Using completely custom meta box scripting that made it difficult to change post type boxes without messing up others instead of like Advanced Custom Fields for example. I don't blame the developers though the PM process was basically nonexistent and the guy in charge was like a former TV reporter with no software project experience and our org hired a local agency to do it that outsourced the work and I don't think it was clear from the beginning that the development would not be done in-house at that agency. Basically my org dropped like 70k for a poo poo WordPress site that me and another guy had to unfuck as best we could to do anything at all. The only problem that came up as a result of offshoring specifically was time zone differences made it hard to schedule calls. So this was more an exercise in bad PM and lack of clear business requirements rather than "outsourcing bad." ^^fintech software gives medical a run for the "worst" money. E.g. the standard platforms in the mortgage industry have some of the worst UI and UX ive ever seen. I feel really bad for the people who have to use it daily. my bony fealty fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 02:19
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Not being specific to the OP's situation, but if you hire offshore for cheaper and it isn't in the west, you get what you pay for. It was common knowledge in my old firm that "senior software engineer" in our Indian office was not the same as "senior software engineer" in the London office. When you pay less you should always expect less.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:24
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my bony fealty posted:
Is this a case of "we'll just use what we've always used because it would be too hard to switch to something better"? I'd think there'd be huge money in making a program that giant, cash rich organizations would want to pay for.
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Dec 10, 2018 05:30
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Hummer Driving human being posted:Is this a case of "we'll just use what we've always used because it would be too hard to switch to something better"? Exactly. What they have works well enough and probably has decades of obscure custom business logic baked in. The real cost isn't in the sticker price of some new platform, but in figuring out all that ancient logic and reliably getting it into the new system (whose customization features have probably been oversold).
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Jan 16, 2019 06:29
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They make me want to kill myself. Sometimes that feeling diminishes, but rarely.
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Feb 28, 2019 23:50
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My experience with foreign developers is that when you have a development group that is held at a distance, doesn't have input in planning, and doesn't have the authority to make substantive changes (when necessary) they will produce bad things.
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Mar 18, 2019 06:37
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Dirty Beluga posted:we paid an offshore team to write a some financial software that involved taking in various data feeds from large banks. The system worked great until one day it didnt so we called up and they told us that the guy drowned and and was a bad employee because he had been doing the work manually never wrote the software. What the gently caress, how do you even get into this situation? Youre paying them to write software and no one onshore could get off their rear end to take a peek at the code? Offshoring with zero oversight is a hopelessly bad idea. Not because offshore developers are bad, but because zero oversight is bad. Add in the overhead of language/cultural differences and youre toast.
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Mar 22, 2019 19:29
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Lumpy posted:You can have it done fast, finished, or as specified. Pick one. ftfy
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Apr 19, 2019 04:31
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Foreign developers are bad because they give the sorts of people who hire foreign developers exactly what they want in the parameters that they want them, no questions asked. The people who hire them will never, ever interrogate their own role in the lovely software that was produced, though, they'll just decide to be racist instead.
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Apr 20, 2019 07:53
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We've used offshore devs for a few projects. They tend to work to spec, no more, no less, and won't tell you when you ask them to do something stupid. They'll just do it. They will write horribly unmaintainable code which I assume is partly because they don't care about somebody else's codebase, partly because that means the next time they modify the software it will take longer and you'll have to pay them more money. My direct experience has been that they have all been highly knowledgable individuals, but when you just hand them a spec and let them get on with it everything goes to poo poo. I blame my company for this, not the offshore teams. Also they cost about 1/3 of an onshore dev but take about 3 times longer to do anything, so we generally used them for easy scaling rather than anything else. Until that one time some executive had the bright idea to buy an offshore company. We have since sold them.
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Apr 25, 2019 17:35
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DONT THREAD ON ME posted:My experience with foreign developers is that when you have a development group that is held at a distance, doesn't have input in planning, and doesn't have the authority to make substantive changes (when necessary) they will produce bad things. This 10,000%. Every time I hear about people casually being racist against Indians work product if you dig deeper you find out they are just dropping poo poo with no context over the wall. Also part of it is, like any model that is outsourcing (onshore or offshore) the first deliverable will use their best and then they switch over to newer people who may not know as much and move the best people to focus on initial sale
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Apr 27, 2019 20:27
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We worked with a team of Serbian developers but we integrated them into the regular IT teams. So the team would partially be local, partially offshore. This is still not ideal because all your team communication now needs to go through Skype and whatnot, but it was okay. In the end we stopped doing it because it's nigh-on impossible to do things like mentor junior developers if they're remote. Additionally, there is a lot of informal discussion between developers and business people that they would miss out on. Still, we went to Serbia for a week every year and for someone who only knew Serbia as "weren't they the bad guys in that war", they're wonderful people who have excellent food and craft beers. Visiting the Exit Festival wasn't too shabby either 
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Apr 30, 2019 08:50
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Vomik posted:This 10,000%. Every time I hear about people casually being racist against Indians work product if you dig deeper you find out they are just dropping poo poo with no context over the wall. Two great points, the second one is especially a factor for any outsourced stuff. I worked as a subcontractor for a firm that does a lot o e-commerce things here in Sweden and they literally have a super team full of very talented people to deliver fast and once the first contract is fulfilled they rotate in a bunch of mediocre maintenance people and milk the client. A thing Ive noticed with outsourced developers or testers is a very Cover Your rear end attitude, being very risk averse and paranoid. They also seem to prefer have a way of working that minimizes communication, and argue that some change will cause them to bother us to much where I think the problem is that they dont bother us enough! And there is also the whole you get what you pay for thing. Even if you probably can get top tier developers for a lot less in poorer countries the top tier developers arent going to be working at the outsourcing firms imho, theyll emigrate or work at local companies whose whole gimmick isnt just were cheap.
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Apr 3, 2021 16:26
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I've but anecdotes for both sides of the coin. Offshore development tends to be cheap and lovely, with my anecdote being a company that contracted such a firm for a company-wide intranet portal. It technically worked, but I'd venture to guess that some network drives and just CCing the entire company would have been a better alternative for intra-company communication and document storage. I think that sacked it after 2 years. The cost was somewhere in the realm of several hundred thousand dollars for 14 months of work that they got rid of in about as much time. The actual total cost was probably north of $2m if you consider organizational costs and lost time/wages etc. On the flipside, I know a company that contracted a few US engineers for north of $6,000 / engineer / week. They apparently kicked rear end and I think that most of those engineers eventually got hired into the company as staff/principles later. You get what you pay for as it turns out.
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Apr 4, 2021 03:30
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Vomik posted:This 10,000%. Every time I hear about people casually being racist against Indians work product if you dig deeper you find out they are just dropping poo poo with no context over the wall. You could say that when people are invested in what they are producing, they produce better things........ It is part of the reason why I only program for myself these days.
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Apr 4, 2021 21:04
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Agencies vary in quality regardless of where they are based/distributed. I've had really good experiences using offshore dev teams to build very specific things. It's no different to hiring an onshore agency to do something or other.
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Apr 6, 2021 13:21
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