10 Epic Fails when Outsourcing to India

Why Outsource to India?

1. Cost-effective services
The numero uno reason why global organizations outsource to India is because India offers cost-effective services. Outsourcing to India can help you save more than half of your operating costs! India has a large, educated, trained and technically skilled manpower and this number only keeps growing every year. Unlike the west, where technical talent is rare, India has a large pool of highly-skilled professionals. Having a large technically skilled manpower has enabled India to provide cost-effective services without compromising on quality. Outsourcing to India can help you save on your operating costs, while increasing your productivity, quality and efficiency.

2. High-quality services
Outsourcing companies in India use the latest in software, technology and infrastructure to provide global customers with high-quality outsourcing solutions. India has proved that it is technically superior when compared to other countries that provide outsourcing solutions. So, when you outsource your work to India, you can be assured that the best technology and software will be used for your services. India has the largest English-speaking audience after the U.S. India also has a highly educated manpower that is talented, educated, experienced, technically-skilled and computer literate. Outsource to India and be assured of high-quality services.
3. Time Zone Advantages
The time zone advantages between India and countries in the U.S and U.K has proved to be another important factor for companies outsourcing to India. Organizations who wish to provide their customer with 24x7x365 days customer support or helpdesk services can outsource to India.

4. India’s stable government
India has celebrated more than 60 years of democracy and has one of the world’s most stable governments. Building up the IT sector has been a top priority for the Indian government. India has a ministry of information technology that quickly approves the implementation of IT projects and streamlines regulatory processes. The Indian government has even released a bill termed as the “IT act 2000” India has been rated to have the most excellent investment potential in the coming years. The Indian government has given complete support to the IT and ITES industry in India. With ample support from the government, Indians have been able to build high-tech IT parks which have the best in technology and infrastructure. The Indian government has even permitted 100% foreign equity. India’s fast growing economy has been yet another reason why companies are outsourcing to India.

5. The Indian Advantage
Cost-effective services are one of the primary advantages that India offers, but it is not the only advantage of outsourcing to India. Companies outsourcing to India get access to professional and skilled outsourcing solutions within a fast turnaround time. By outsourcing to India, your organization can concentrate on core business activities and save on time, effort, manpower and infrastructure. More than 20 Indian software companies have achieved the prestigious SEI-CMM level. India also has the highest number of ISO-9000 software organizations. Outsource to India and give your organization a competitive advantage.

6. Global organizations’ most preferred choice
India has been the most preferred choice among global organizations when it comes to outsourcing. In the U.S alone, more than 80% have ranked India as their first choice, when outsourcing software and IT services. The U.S has also recognized India as an outsourcing superpower. The number of organizations outsourcing services to India has only been increasing over the years. This is reason enough to outsource to India.

Agree with both of you guys.
Will like at add this one too.Indian Outsourcing can be Categorised as Structured & Unstructured Outsourcing. The points which we are discussing are more relevant in the case of Unstrucutured. If you see other side of the table we are doing great in terms overcoming the shortcomings as we have best brains to be filled into each available position & in a way we have the best show runners.

If you try reading a blue print of an Outsourcing Company in India about the transition stage , or even the Operatioanl stage I think the models are unbeatable & no one can match them.

Most of the above has come to me as a part of personal experiences .

Hope you have points to add.

Cheers!

Sushant

Sagar,

That has to be the biggest load of copy and pasted crap I’ve ever had the unpleasant opportunity to lay my eyes on.

Allow me to destroy all your points.

1. At face-value, the costs turn out much less. That fact is completely negated when it you realize how much time it takes Indians to get ANYTHING done. Days turn to weeks and weeks turn to months. I had a team of 12 Indians take 2 months to write me a simple bash script.

2. Quality? BWAHAHAHAHA. Not only did the program not even work, it looked like a 12 year old coded it. My favorite excuse for the terrible coding from them was, “Well, as long as it works right?” Yeah, it’s fine that the program hemorrhages memory and moves slower than molasses in an igloo but as long as it works right? How can I have my guys support the product when they can’t even decipher the garbage the product was coded in? How can they even know what it does when it comes with ZERO documentation?

3. The Time Zone issue is one of the worst issues. I’ve met very few Indians who can think outside the box and need absolutely everything spelled out for them. If I don’t explain EVERYTHING to the meticulously, I’ll wake up the next morning finding a mail from the team saying, “We couldn’t do X because Y didn’t know how to run the script.” PROTIP: chmod +x. About 2 seconds on google could tell you the same thing.

4. You can’t even drink the water in India. What do you think the caste system of the government does?

5. Professional and Skilled. More like lazy and Google. If I don’t see them browsing facebook or some other crap online, I see them on Google trying to figure out how to give access on our PRODUCTION boxes to each other.

6. Global Organizations’ policies are dictated by the CFO; who of course knows absolutely nothing about the internal workings of the organization. If I had my way in the hiring process, I’d deport every single one of your H1 Visa drones and pick up 1/3 of the workforce from US colleges as interns and get twice the work done in half the time and pay them half what I pay any Indian.

TL;DR I’ve have 14 Teams of Indians in the past 9 years. One word always comes to mind

Useless.

Excellent article. I am with an Indian outsourcing company. Have been running it for 8 years and I have to say, what Christophe says is very true and seems like he has learnt the hard way, like I have.

Nicely said lol India.
Bang on the money on all points.

You can argue outsourcing all day long. However, I seen it attempted at 3 companies that I have worked for and it has failed in each case. Bottom line: Reality always wins, and any argument made will not change that reality. Also, it wise to keep jobs in your own country if you want to have future economic growth.

I think people do not realize how much extra work it is to try to coordinate efforts with people that do not have industry experience you owe companies goals. I give them a credit for their efforts but it simply does not work well in MOST cases, period. Been there, done that….fail!

Outsourcing can work! But, yeah, it has to be very limited in scope as the user above points out. The cost will keep going up and up and up. You have to do just a few small projects for it to work with clear goals (BA requirements done in USA), and fixed costs.

Also, some of the credit card info was stolen oversea’s and it was a major image deal for our company. It’s hard to stop the theifs oversea’s as they have different laws, thank good no medical records were compromised “yet” but if that happens and we can not prosecute over there were sunk.

I say it can work but it’s totally not worth the reward. It can save a few bucks, make your CIO look like he/she saved the world for a short while but it’s a game that never really gets you any further than had you just stuck with your own team locally.

Wise move is to pass on trying to cut corners eventually you will get stung HARD.

Outsourcing was a great concept in it’s day. I think many companies tried it and it failed. These guys that defend it are not from the US and have self invested interest in their own job and countries. I would think it’s fair to say that sending jobs overseas did not work and has cost our beautiful countries 10’s of Millions. Your sending future dollars of your kids overseas as well, think about it Americans.

Whey have plenty of people in this country that are smart enough to fill these jobs. If you are struggling filling the jobs reach out to recruiters, I have not seen one job that did not have multiple qualified US Citizens of all races.

It’s time to take our country back and outsourcing days were fun but they really have not worked out.

Outsourcing was a concept idea when there was a shortage of skilled workers. But many studies have proved you do not save money using this concept in most cases, in fact it cost you more when you look at total cost of outsourcing.

There are plenty of skilled workers that can do the job, if your company can not find good IT folks please email me and we can talk. I have been able to fulfill every opening provided to me in the United States.

Thanks,
Lisa Walters

As a fact, there are more studies on market that reveal something very true. A client sped more money for a software developed in India and then comes in west for a proper code and program, than if he came from the first time in west for hist soft.

I’ve used Indian outsourcers several times. Or rather been forced to use due to a CFO who can’t tell one developer from the other and only looks at hourly rates. If one developer charge $30 per hour and the other one charge $120 then the $30 must be four times as valuable. After all, they are both developers, right? I can’t even think about how much code we’ve had to throw out and start developing over again, because it didn’t work and nobody could figure out how it was supposed to work so we could fix it. Big waste of precious money.

I now work with a mid-size outsourcer in Eastern Europe that is just great. They are not too big (around 250 people, about the same size as us) so they value us as a customer. The quality and professionalism is exactly the same as locally, if not even better. They have a sense of urgency and when they say yes, they attach the same meaning to that yes as we do.

Correction to previous: “There are some people that don’t want to visit India, but they will NOT succeed well with their teams.”

I wish I had read this article earlier. I was so impressed at the low rates Indian developers were offering, I decided to hire them for a couple projects, however, I have ran into nothing but trouble with them. They do not meet any of the deadlines they are given, they are non-responsive, and full of excuses (not very good ones either). The most frustrating part was they would turn in work that was full of bugs and errors. I don’t think they ever tested anything they coded. Projects that should have taken 3 months end up taking three times longer for them to complete. I would provide very detailed requirement documents, and list each requirement in a detailed fashion. I would provide all kind of guidance to them too. I found out later that they never read the requirement documents and just assigned it to various developers on their team. They just coded what they thought I wanted based on conversations we had, not the official requirement documents they agreed. Maybe I just had a bad experience, but I think there are a lot of Indian programmers offering services when they really shouldn’t be.

I have to admit when I was working for corporate bank several years ago I was an advocate for outsourcing IT work to India, but having to work with my Indian coworkers in the private sector and city sector these past several years; I would advise against outsourcing work to India. There seems to be too many issues regarding Indian work habits and social habits that I have observed through my job and through my daily interactions outside the job. Some of the Indians at my job are hard working and intelligent workers; the majority of them we can do without. Many of my Indian coworkers lack: english writing and speaking skills, time management skills, work proficiency, and manners. The worst part about it, they live here; but are from mother land. Living in NYC, I interact with a diverse group of people from many cultural backgrounds. As far as social etiquette goes; I feel Indians are one of the most lacking in many of day to day social skills. I think there are a lot of Indians from abroad and U.S born that need to brush up on: job skills and american social skills. I think the Indian culture is very ancient, complex, impractical, and chaotic which then transcends into the workplace and out of the work place. That’s just my 2 cents.

Suffering with Code Quality is given as it has no place in process.. process only says add more bodies.. as that is the only way we can bill 🙂

May be it is the time we move into Services 2.0 Business Model .. which may change Business Attitude at either sides.. and hence respective professional changes would come in..

Regards,
Raja Nagendra Kumar,
C.T.O
– Code Quality Re-Engineering expertise of 18 million lines of Java Code

Very true article. After having experienced many projects in excess of spending more than $50k + / year…a small fraction of our spend, it seems that over the past 2-3 years communication is far worse when dealing with most firms from India. “Yes” as we all agree, means everything other than what we in the USA know yes to be.

The results a good person will get with or without an Indian Developer/USA or wherever….what everone must realize is that the path to get the results is far more important than the results, and this is where there is a significant difference with outsourcing to India— after MANY YEARS of hoping it would get better, it has not, and has gotten worse!

1. Do as you promise and as agreed.
2. Answer Questions first, then ask if you have any?
3. Do not tell….please this is an Indian train wreck of outsourced companies….listen and understand, do not tell
4. Keep deadlines and commitments, do not justify your unprofessional thoughts & behaviors!
5. Say Thank You & I am sorry….but not too often!
6. Other will treat you the same!
7. Do not tell others to be patient when you are 3 days late with a deliverable!
8. Do not expect to get paid for work not delivered as agreed.
9. Expect to get a bonus for a nice experience and path to results!
10. Most of this you really should have learned by the age of 5 in all countries, businesses and families!

Thanks

My 2 experiences so far have both been negative with Indian associates.
@ people saying you have to pick them carefully, well you can’t be 100% certain that you’re making the right choice when you ve never met the guy in person, but what i personally looked for was a guy with good ratings from previous jobs and experience relative to the specific job I was posting (Freelance Jobs).

And even though I did that both indian associates turned out to do a very basic and sloppy job. One of them didn’t even give me a functional website (just a static design with minimum features). He completed the 30% of the features I gave him at the start of the job and when I asked for a refund of the downpayment I made after 2 months of not seeing results he refused finding various excuses to justify the fact that he couldn’t handle the project from the beggining.

The main problem is that in order to get jobs they will tell you anything you wanna hear beforehands even though they can’t do it.

And @ indian posters who tried to justify this mess, even mocking all the other posters here and saying that they are jealous of them: I am not American. I still faced the same problems.

Face the reality and if you feel offended try to change people’s minds with your individual work. Offer people a positive experience and try to discourage any colleagues you have from being sloppy, because they are hurting YOU. Mocking Americans and making excuses will not help you.

As for the article I think its 100% right. If you have a small project and you can afford the gamble then by all means go for it. If you have a large project though finding the exception will be hard and I think its just not worth the risk right now.

Outsourcing to India is not bad, it is ABHORRENT. Every time I get an India IT person assigned to help me with issues, I know it is doomed. They would just suggest “patch” solutions instead of getting to the root of the issue. If not, they would keep dragging and delaying the issue hoping that it would go away on its own. With the operations team, it’s worse. They will never voice out any problems until the magnitude becomes so huge that they can no longer sweep things under the carpet; then they expect YOU to solve it for them since they have no freaking idea what to do about it. Sloth, refusal to take ownership of problems, incapacity to think etc., the attitude problems are abundant. Unless the management only wants cost reduction strategies with no concerns over the quality of work, feel free to outsource to India.

Note: Technical skills can be imparted, attitude can’t.

I’ve been in IT for over 22 years and I’ve seen my share of Indian offshoring disasters. I actually made alot of money in the early 2000’s fixing failed projects that had to be quietly repatriated. This made me realize that there are probably thousands of these disasters hidden at major companies simpley because exposing them would cause too many managers’ heads to roll.

My experience has shown me that offshoring to India is akin to putting your IT budget money in a big bonfire. The same goes to hiring those cheap H1B workers to fill the gap of the so called “IT labor shortage”. I’ve rarely seen such mind-boggling incomptence. It’s too bad, because overall, they all seem like nice enough people personally. But I’d advise against letting any of them near your code if you indeed care for your project to succeed.

What no one has really mentioned is that if you sign on with a vendor, have a foreign company (non-approved) look at “any part of the code”, you are in violation of breaking intellectual property right laws in many cases.

We learned this lesson the hard way, consult with an intellectual property lawyer regarding your vendor software. If all the software is owned by your company, you should get company approval before letting unknown people overseas look at confidential data. I heard of companies getting huge fines when their clients found out there SSN numbers went to people whom they never even met.

Best case, you may save a little money, if everything goes “perfect” but it never does, they come back and back with poor communications and questions, then your open the door for lawsuits IMHO.

Any manager that thinks this is the way to go, should do their homework on intellectual property right rules for any and all software to be accessed. There are probably a few cases where sending the job overseas make sense but they are the 1% times.

I will delve into another prospective which western world is not realizing, Read

amzn.to/1oTuFNJ

Think of it in terms; Culture and person go hand in hand and few people are going to shout at me but that doesn’t make me wrong since I am telling is what I have seen, observed and experienced. This also explains a different context as related to work ethics in outsourcing.

Go to any major corporation in America, in IT field there are only South Indians, that means people from only two state of India, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are controlling IT sector, these people only hire people from their village and community and that is why Americans are being discriminated in America, Europeans in Europe and even other communities in India, please understand the words nepotism and caste system. People from these two states control entire IT industry and they never allow anybody else to get the job, they go out of way to make life of other person difficult. Why H1Bs have taken away all jobs in USA, you hardly see an America in any corporation, reason is an Italian like mafia is being operated where others are not allowed, now people who understand the system knows that Andhra Pradesh (call them Telugu) people started inventing fake resumes in IT, CV is 100% ex-aggregated, there is one trick or another and they talk slowly because brain needs to think one lie after another, Tamil Nadu people (which are referred as Tamils) are usually hyper egoistic people and there style of management is just using threat. In a way US corporations have devalued what ever progress was made in social sciences or HR field in last 200 yrs, CEOs don’t understand the ground reality, they outsource and in reality there is no cost saving either but by that the time results are quantified CEO has taken golden parachute and retired, whether system is working or not is not the problem. This trend continues. Indian companies like TCS (read Tamil consulting services), Wipro (can’t finish the project, I saw 5 of them in major fortune corporations getting shelved and Wipro staff getting fired), Cognizant (opening office in New Jersey doesn’t make company American when entire work force is Indian) promote boot licking and regional favoritism as explained by me. Indians simply can’t innovate because culture doesn’t support it and how long this cheap labor phenomenon based on lies can continue I don’t know.

Then Indians can’t work with others expect only Indians, after all other people are aware about rights, I was a Program Manager in a largest Insurance company in USA, only 1 white person was in whole group (as one can count Americans on fingers these days, they all have been virtually displaced by Indians due to this culture I explained), when a new Indian joined he fired the white guy on next day, I had argument with this Indian manager that why you are removing only 1 last person in group because he has guts and thinking brain to argue, (Indian like “yes sir and yes madam people”); to hell with you and your slave promotion atmosphere and I resigned and joined another company in USA next day, I hear stories from Indians in India and usually when delivery comes, they start coughing, the girls get periods, my mother is sick is another excuse, I am ill and lot of time I had to fix code, a new excuse is I can’t hear on phone since line is bad, I am getting divorce due to martial problems, there is heavy rain, internet or system not working, VPN was not working etc etc. Testers claim they tested but when we go to admin section of tool , we understand nothing was tested, it is all lie and lie, and those who are going to shout at me, please I am talking about all your favorite Indian outsourcing companies and I have seen both sides of coin including IT sales as well.

I don’t know for how long this will continue, thanks to greed of US CEOs who just know one thing in name of cost saving and improving efficiency (blah, blah….), outsource everything and lay off people locally.

There is rampant L1 abuse (intra-company transfer visa abuse done by Indians), H1B abuse and now US government is proposing rule to provide Employment authorization document (EAD) to wives of H1B using which they can work anywhere, so Americans who are working even at McDonald also need to run, such is the unruliness and lobby of Indians now, sometimes I feel bad since no management technique works with Indians, it is all lie after another life. Management was invented by Americans but they don’t know how to counter this trend, neither in America, nor in UK or Europe.

Below is the proposed rule link which is open for public comments and again my fellow Indians are bullying their way to get this rule passed, there are lot of sobbing stories asking Obama administration to pass this rule, only few Americans are commenting against it, afterall who can match 1 billion and two hundred twenty million people.

http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=USCIS-2010-0017-0001

I really don’t get it, Americans and Europeans don’t understand or what is the problem ? First thing is American CEOs need to put few Americans or even people from other part of India or Russia etc in teams, this culture monopoly needs to be broken

And you white guys, how about you stop outsourcing and go for your ultra genius people. Because I am amazed how Indians built a rocket at 1/100 of the price and it succeeded.

Seriously, what about the other side? What if I say your details about project is not verbose and lacking. Your in depth communication is lacking?White people are known for that, but to other white people you will treat them inherently different to a non-white person.

Why am I saying this, – I have a white teacher and he does not understand algorithms (he’s supposed to be teaching that only), but hey he’s a whitey so it’s okay, it’s perfectly fine.

White wash, white wash everywhere.

Dear Indians, let us not forget our contribution to our science, it is everything – the fundamentals of mathematics to surgery to yoga which these white people always gave de-merit too.

Do not reply to these articles, it is ingrained Ina White man to look at other non-white races as inferior and will go at any cost to do so.

I could give proof and I can see it here in university.

For example, we had to build a website. I am an Indian and my website was far beyond any white persons could. And here’s another problem, the white teacher himself did not understand some mechanics of web design and he’s like I will deduct your marks if you don’t this size width here, Etta

But hey, it was auto-resizing itself, he did not understand that, so I taught him that it is an auto resizing property and is not a flaw. He got angry and gave the medium mark.

There was another white persons website it was shitty, and it got the full marks.
Indians, you don’t know whites. They are the most cunning, destructive race ever seen to makind just stealing ideas and making them over self sufficient than needed. You have no idea how much they stole from Vedic scripts.

Wake up Indians, do you see white people saying their coders are bad? nEVER, they are good at this and this is what you must understand.Do not give yourselves to whites.

Honestly speaking it is not only for India. Anywhere you outsource there could be lots of disadvantages. This article explains why and how. I can see very patriotic comments but this article adheres the concepts of quality and the cost. Always cheaper labour has down turn impact on the industry.

I can confidently tell you from LOTS of experience that India software developers are almost always terrible. We have hired probably 100 developers from India over the past 2 years, and we kept seeing the same things.

1. Absolutely no common sense
2. Zero ownership
3. Terrible at following any kind of directions
4. No sense or urgency
5. No idea how to write even average quality code
6. At least 40% were caught falsifying time sheets (and fired)
7. Give time estimates that are 4 to 10 times higher than a decent developer would need
8. Excuses excuses excuses.

You will almost certainly save no money hiring Indian programmers. You will not get the job done right. This is not a communication issue. India is a corrupt, backwards country for a reason. It is full of Indians.

Now contrast that woth developers from Eastern Europe. In many cases their English skills are worse than developers from India. But that means nothing. A Ukrainian will take more time to understand what you need done, but once he or she gets past the language barrier, they get it, own it, and do it right. The Indian gets the English quicker, understands almost nothing, and then screws the entire thing up.

Bottom line: you can’t afford cheap programmers from India. Nobody can.

For more information Google the 2010 Commonwealth Games for an indication of how India manages an international sporting event. They are the same with software.

Hi All

I am an Indian programmer in US for the past 15 years. Since last 10 years there has been a huge influx of Indian programmers bringing their skills in light. I have experienced bad US programmers as well. So I would not categorize them. Yahoo Google and Microsoft some of the major software companies have the best Indian programmers. The whole outsourcing model is flawed and both the parties are taking advantage exactly like Indian politicians. Our company laid off the best QA and BA people and offshored it to India. I don’t think the company cared. Poor BA and Poor QA results in Poor Programming. One of the other things is introduction of Agile in all areas even where it is not needed. Constant pressure does not deliver results. Basically a company executive recognizes himself as successful or competent if he uses all the buzz words. That’s one of the reasons the product delivery gets affected. So all the players in this are to be blamed , not just Indian programmers.

I’m working for and with indian people since 3 months ago and is a authentic nightmare!!!

Wow Sagar and his “excuses”, I’m truly a believer now of the mere fact that Indians can make excuses whenever they want. I have worked with Indians in the past here in the UK and trust me, they’re not better off even onshore. Talk about off-shoring that’s a whole new ballgame, despite only a 6-7 hour timezone difference. However, professional they try to act, they always end up losing us money. I tried my hand at almost 5 different software companies there (who we made very rich), but it turns out they just were not worth it.

Agree with the article and most of the comment, but then depends on where the customer of the company is located, especially working with scrum/agile methodology and being daily in contact with him.

I’ve seen brit german and scandi companies trying the “indian way”, it turned out that it’s far better for em to outsource in countries like Poland and Ukraine where the time zone is not an issue and the resources are even more skilled.

I’m Indian, have worked for and managed Indians, Americans, Italians,Hong Kong citizens. I’ve worked in software development, software testing, editorial, dub work, etc.
Here’s what I can say definitively to any typical Canadian, U.S. or european or South American company about to outsource:
1. Don’t do it, we don’t have enough land left for any more software campuses, any more spectrum, any more money for the bribes to help build your infrastructure. ( Just kidding – or maybe not : ) )
2. The average size of a first-world classroom is 15-20 kids, maybe? The average size of an Indian classroom in a private, upper-class, English-speaking school is 40. Lower-income govt schooling and “public” city schools are around 60 in a classroom.
Have you ever tried initiative/independent thinking in that sort of environment? It’ll get you physically whacked (which happens often in the same classrooms.) So will saying No.

3. Because of our history, we have a spoken-English, urban-based secular class system that overlaps the (older and largely parallel) Hindu caste system that will always, always, always end up echoed in our work and office hierarchy. More egalitarian societies from the west either don’t recognize this or then want to disrespect/ignore it/change it from 9-6 pm. Not going to happen. European firms/ people struggle less with this.

4. The coders you’re getting for what you want to pay come from lower-middle class to middle- middle class India. They don’t speak English at home, they think in their regional mother tongue, they are deeply culturally conservative. Most are gentle or inert chauvinists.
If they’re below 25 and male, they’re facing arranged matrimony in a year or so, parenthood in another year, and general imprisonment and misery in a cultural hell of their own society’s choosing by 30. Not their own choice. These are not happy, free, or forward-thinking men, they’re harrowed, devalued, faceless people realizing their country doesn’t give a sh*t about the individual and your company career scope is about as high as they’re going to get. So why care.
5. If there’s a woman coder in your team, she is probably so fed up with the gropes and the jibes and the stares and the stink – ’cause man do they stink – not something you have to put up with on Skype – that she is going to hit matrimony and baby-making by 28 and hopefully get the hell out of the public male toilet that is the coding room. Promote her and she just might get raped leaving the office very late without any supported travel infrastructure for a commute 3 times longer than it has to be.
6. Coding languages are often derived from the syntax of English and other anglophone derivatives. Bad English = wobbly coding.
7. The Indians with fluent English don’t need your money, thanks. (See point 4) Hence the revolving door.
8. A coder from a country of extreme heat, bad and degrading infrastructure, overpopulation, aggressive stratification, and deep hatred of itself, which all Indians have whether they admit it or no, is never going to worry about the same quality standards that you do.

What they will worry about is
1. Individual getting ahead. (Ahead = 1.More money quickly 2. More power or the delusion of power 3. More social pride)
2. Someone in their same community/ ethnic language group working in the same team.
3. Moving into real estate of their own so they can get away from uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, fathers (never their mothers because she’s the cook) who frequently live all under the same roof. If you think New York real estate is high, try buying in India.
4. Insurance and subsidized health care for all the relatives mentioned above because then they’ll get off their backs – older people are frequently very unfit, sedentary for various reasons, used to domestic servants, and entitled in a way you have to study at airports ( re the traveling Indian “aunty” and her wheelchair.)
5. A discounted chauffeur, (I am NOT kidding. Please try commuting like a regular Indian in a regular city like Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Pune) in rush hour and you will understand why the frequently barely-literate, frequently un or fake licensed. Most of you travel to India and stay in the hotels or guest houses or serviced apartments close to work. Most of your sub-paid coders will donate an organ (and some have because that’s what it may take) to be able to live close to work.

If all this is too much information, try Africa for cheaper rates. Let me know how that goes, k?

Namaste.

If there’s so much trouble, then why outsource?
Get it done in your own backyard mate! Save your time, money and frustration.

wow
Christophe,

this is true feeling you written here and You have great penetration in indian culture.

1 So many excuses : correct I india is a land of holidays and land of excuses and also Developer give priorities to their family values much but no the job which is their bread and butter.
2 Fake Degrees : Absolutely correct and developer have engineering degree in computer Science but can not read emails and can’t understand requirements
3 Very minima Attention to Errors and deadlines.

So I am also crying and Running a Software developing a software development company.
What happened with me
I hired team and so many issues started getting
1 unskilled and liar developers so missing deadlines and i was completing 20 developers work daily and then sending to clients
2 leaves , so much on leaves , those developer can’t solve the problem they are on leave
3 spent $100,000 and On a place where my wife is about to divorce me and sold my property to save the business and have nothing now
So what was solution

I took it very seriously and stopped working on profit and stated finding solution
First step I took I completely wiped out the team , which was not solution
I did a new recruitment and hired high salaried and experienced developers and result I failed again .
I again though it what is exact issue and again wiped out team and shut down every thing and sit for 3 month at home and collected money again restarted with a new process .

While sitting home i watched move “wolf of wall streets”

And I came to know 3 layer system of developers

1 Crazy for money
2 Stable developers they don;t want much and want stable life with salaries on time and sincere but can not do much fast , but always come with solutions and takes time
3 Crap developer Whom I have to push every day form next level and then they could have do something , need more money without doing any thing and every day they need pressusre
So Next recruitment I done purely based on phycology.
and marked them in those 3 level . As i was again a startup for new team so I found the first layer of developer for starting my company i needed them first and when it will work will develop second layer of developers .
Result :

I got success and those people i checked only do they have energy and crazy for money , what was their past life in schools and colleges and I could predict their skills . I started in this July 2015 experimentally and This is working .

Developers whose energy level is down can not do the changing works and for first phase they were not needed.

any way those problems discussed by Christophe are for freelancer and individual developers and some clients work direct with freelancers and they get those setbacks.
I would suggest work with companies even though they are small but they are responsible for deliveries.

Thank You
Raju

If outsourcing to India was fail, many outsourcing services providers would have not been this successful as they are now. Many organisations in US do trust Indian service providers and outsource the work. And Indian firms have satisfied them, they have showcased talent in the form of work.

Notice all the comments defending indian our sourcing come from India.
Indian companies don’t care about quality, take three times as long and in the long run cost exponentially more as a result.

The solution to this problem is Behavior Driven Development. When you start out by creating an automated acceptance test, the programmer knows EXACTLY what is expected. The cultural differences fade away and you are left with $7/hr programmers doing $30/hr work. You guys are complaining about cultural differences, but it’s YOUR PROBLEM, not theirs. Biz stakeholders: It’s not an illusion, there is massive money to be saved here. Hire a real developer, stop getting racists excuses.

Outsourcing based on Time and People hours is the root of all outsourcing evils..

Focus on Weekly Budget and let Provider decide his best results for the budgets.. then expect Quality to go up automatically..

Evil is in Business Model.. T&M, encouraging greed either side and hence we have more managers than technical people to defend non-sense at one end, prove that it is non-sense at other end.. while both sides are working officially on creating non-sense only.. through T&M

Frustrated clients.. reach us.. we have are a System with 13 years, with 100% success rate through our weekly deliveries to budget approach..

Everything mentioned in this article is entirely correct, and I share to everyone that had a negative experience in outsourcing to India. My first experience with outsourcing in India was in 2007 when I had my first website developed.

I hired a local web developer company, and because they had been so busy, they outsource to India in the hope that the would be able to meet their deadlines. The result was a disaster. They have to redo the whole work and the local company I hired refunded me the last payment because they were not able to deliver my website on time.

In 2008, I had my second website developed by the same local company who is reliable and works with integrity. They had lots of happy customers so they were fully booked. The only problem I encounter later on was that I have to wait longer for some small revisions on my website. I had another friend who had a two-man band web developing company and was not very busy so I transferred the maintenance to them so they can do the small projects as well. All was good until the main developer left and was replaced by two Indian programmers. The previous programmer quoted me the little job on one of the pages of my site and I gave my confirmation to go ahead. Not knowing that he left the company and someone had taken over. Not only that the job was not done properly, but also affected the functionality of other pages. The problem went on for months and because it was very frustrating for me and the visitors, in the end, I closed down my website in 2011.

In 2012, I started my outsourcing business and I partnered with an American company based in the Philippines. They deliver quality were good, fast and efficient. But with so much competition in hiring a skilled programmer, they have to turn down my project because they don’t have the right programmer that can handle my project. I turned to Elance and guessed what? I hired a company from India.. I took my time looking and reading their portfolio and comment about their job.

I prefer to hire company than freelancers thinking that company have values and they want long term business so they would look after their customer. They told me they can deliver the project in 3 weeks but at the end of the month they barely touch the project. And the quality was terrible. I gave them an extension and to fix the problem but because there was no improvement after a couple of days, I cancelled the project. It was a total waste of time.

I have a couple of developers in the Philippines and a three man band company in Bangladesh. These guys are trustworthy and quick to respond to my questions. They don’t take jobs that they cannot handle and they go over my list with them and ask lots of questions.

Early last year, I was approach by the web developing in India through LinkedIn. I promised never to partner with any Indian company so I ignored them but one of them kept sending me an email about their company, their work and what they can do. Going to their website, reading their company values and all that they do according to their website looks good and they employ about 50 people.

After speaking to the sales person who passes me to speak to the CEO of the company, I broke my promise to myself and in May 2015, I gave them one of my projects. The project was quoted for four weeks that turn into months and many months. The project manager kept on promising that it will be delivered next week… but then within that week I seldom hear from her and she don’t reply to my emails.

And it is true that they don’t listen and read any instructions I sent to them. Because if they do, I don’t need to email they same thing four times and talked about it on Skype four times. Dealing with this company is time-consuming and very tiring. That next week delivery never end.

Unfortunately, the project manager passed away in a tragic accident in October. The CEO of the company promised to handle the project and will have it done very soon. That soon had been few months now and the problem, they never returned my call and didn’t answer my email. So I turned to the other partner of the company. He promised to look at it and promised to follow up on it and confirm that the project will be delivered in the first week of February. I asked these guys to let me help, to tell me if they cannot do it but they never say anything.

That first week of Feb is over and they never respond to all of my messages and emails. I am talking to a brick wall. The biggest problem is that the client is now impatient and threatening to sue. Does anyone of you have a word of advice into this?

To those of you who says why outsource in India? All I can say is why offer a service that you cannot deliver? Why hustle people by contacting people like me and make promises when you obviously don’t have the integrity? You don’t know how to keep your word.

Why outsource? Because of the low cost? Not exactly. Talking to these people is time-consuming. They have no sense of urgency and don’t give a damn and to me, that is money wasted added to the cost. Why outsource to India? So that your fellow countrymen will have a job. I help an orphanage in Tamil Nadu and so even with the bad experience, I was hoping that maybe I can help more by giving you business.

I gave the outsourcing in India another try because I have few Indian friends here in Australia. If I will be working with this kind of people, I would rather hire locally and have peace of mind and guaranteed service. I save my energy and my emotion and that is priceless.

Pro Tip –
Never ever outsource to south India. We had absolutely no success with out contractors in Chennai and Bangalore.

We got rid of them a few years ago and got people from a firm in Bangladesh to replace them. We gradually moved to employ more people from Calcutta and Gurgaon, instantly the tables turned , delivery dates were met and the English communication problem virtually disappeared.

We understood from our onsite partners that India as a country just cant be grouped as a whole and they have huge cultural differences between themselves. It seems the east and northern parts of the country fare a lot better than the others in terms of English Communication skills and average problem solving skills.

Hope this advice helps.

I have just finished a 2 month project with india. It has been pure hell. They have screwed everything up. I have since gone to philippines and they got it right first time.

NEVER AGAIN

I’ve managed (been forced to) Indian outsourced labour for near 10 years. All the previous posts say it all. But I’ll add one perspective that I haven’t seen in the previous posts. I liken the Indian resources to a train running down a track. If I lay the track carefully (that is define exactly everything they are to do, script the whole process, turn it all into a defined procedure etc), then they will chug down the track quite well without problems and predictably. However, once they come to a junction in the track, a decision required that I have not scripted, they simply stop ….while telling you that all is well and things are progressing.

It is a cultural thing, and others have writing much above about this. In my wording, they are a culture that lacks intuition. When presented with a new problem, they simply can’t solve it. They don’t have that ‘sense’ of the problem, nor the motivation to solve it. They just want the answer given to them. They can’t see the interactions of abstract concepts and derive a new path. A complete lack of intuition.

Now I know a thing or two about software programming. I’ve programmed Defence projects. Software programming requires an enormous degree of intuition. The ability to ‘see’ the abstract frameworks, their patterns, their inter-relatedness. The ability to weigh these to make sound architectural and implementation decisions in the code – from the level of the single line of that code, to the function, to the class, the framework, the architecture, the project and the client’s guiding requirements. The western intuitive programmer write a line of code with all these guiding him/her. A complex dance, of intuition and technical skill.

The Indian programmer lacks all of this. They programme at the line of the code level – often by goggling the syntax and copy / paste. They have no sense of that line of code in its hierarchy as just noted. They have no sense of that line of code in its function, or class or abstractions. They don’t have that enormous degree of discipline, intuition and organisation that places that line of code in all its hierarchal context, principles and frameworks – and also considering its testability and maintainability.

After years of conference calls with India. I must conclude that they think very differently to westerners. This is not a judgment but a culture thing. Us westerners have a more ‘linear’ thinking. We see the problem and by intuition see the linear set of actions to fix it; the path if you like. We ‘straighten’ a problem out, structure it and pick it off. The Indians don’t think this way. I don’t grasp how they think, but it is not a linear structure as we westerners do. Perhaps a cursory look at a photo of their roads, cars and people going every and any which way, without apparent ‘linear’ structure and order. This in a loose way is representative of their though patterns. After all, it is their thought patterns that lead them to behave that way on a road. Now this is not a judgment, but an observation. Their thinking is stochastic, creating a weighting of connections between things in a different way to us. Given the same data, they will conclude very different things, for very different reasons of varying different levels of importance to how we in the west do. They don’t ‘straighten’ a problem out in the way we westerns do. Their conclusions (if they make them in the way we think) are all in there together everything connected in a big 3D mesh, – like a soup – everything mixed with everything, no abstraction, disassociation, prioritisation and weighting in the sense of how a westerner may do it.

The western mind will create a linear hierarchy, the Indian mind will create a soup. All great things, and all to be celebrated in this wonderful diverse world of ours. And none of greater value as a human than any other. After all there is no ‘right’ way to think is there? And so I don’t judge.

But when it comes to software – yes I do judge. With a western programmer, you get an intuitive linear, structured hierarchical outcome. Because software is intrinsically linear, and hierarchical.

With an Indian programmer, you get soup! …..curried soup to be exact. And I do like Indian curry !

Got a phone call from a Filipino guy I worked with. He was sobbing. As a 45 years old skilled migrant, he has worked in software development for many years. He is now settled in Adelaide with his two children. They go to church every Sunday. He has been bullied and belittle by his Indian manager and last week, the Indian manager found an excuse to demote him to do the work of a graduate. He is now looking for a new job and asked me to be his referee.

Indians are systematically taking over the IT industry like ant colonies. First they send in the Brahmin caste (the vegetarians) to gain the trust of the white executives by their passive temperament. Then the other castes come, along with the Silkhs. Then they bully other minorities, give preferential treatments to other Indians while keeping in pretence of submissiveness and politeness to the white executives.

In my 30+ years of experience working in the I.T. field, outsourcing to India will decimate your project budget. While the cost appears to be less, it will actually become much more due to delay after delay. I truly believe it is built into the Indian Business Model. On the other hand, working with Indians that have come to this country (USA or Canada) to work is an entirely different matter. Local Indians are hard workers and very appreciative of having the opportunity to live and work here. I have no problem what-so-ever hiring an Indian to work locally and have done so, but to outsource to India is simply not cost effective.

Personally, I haven’t dealt with Indian programming teams. Being a Linux Systems Administrator, this isn’t surprising.

Obviously I have dealt with their Linux teams. Roughly the same. The first team wasn’t so bad. I’d taken the time to mentor some on a large client, and positive results came. However, they wouldn’t try anything really new, because their own management would shoot it down. Additionally, anyone who was outside my direct sphere was impossible to deal with. The account setup team took three months to get me access to all the devices I was supposed to manage. There was a long list of excuses, promises and outright silence. It was setting up accounts. Anyone competent would have scripted it and turned it into a 15 minute job. The overall network was a mess. Device patches were years out of date. Everything was extremely manual and so on and so forth. I was glad to escape that one.

Now, overall, that wasn’t too bad. Then I came into contact with the Indian team we used for another client.

Now, I’d been asked to build a server. Simple thing. Just a straight OS install and hand it over to them, they’d do the rest. At the time, I wasn’t really sure why I was needed, but hey.

So that gets done. As an urgent thing.

Then ignored.

We ask them why nothing had been done. Needed to be registered to update servers. Ok. They had the details, but not the command (the easily-googleable one liner to register a device to the Redhat network)

I supply them with that, then nothing.

We ask them why nothing has been done. The storage had briefly disconnected. It hadn’t occurred to them to powercycle these completely unconfigured servers that were not being used for any business need whatsoever.

Ok, that’s done (BTW, the root passwords I’d supplied and asked to be changed immediately still hadn’t been changed)

Time goes on, still nothing. I’m dragged back in because a minor network configuration change was needed. Fix that up for them.

Time goes on again (I should mention these weren’t my main clients. Just people my own company put me onto every now and then) then we get a message saying /boot is too small. It wasn’t, but increasing the size wasn’t a bad idea. Again, don’t see why it needed me, but whatever.

Then once that’s increased, the final straw was that while they were apparently perfectly capable of connecting and seeing that the /boot partition was too small, they asked for screenshot proof that it had been increased before they considered looking at it again. Just nothing but delay, excuse, delay, excuse.

I also need to be clear that while I’m obviously not going to say what company I work for, it was not a small – or even medium sized – one by any stretch of the imagination.

As a side note: I previously worked for another place. Left it. A year later the company was taken over and the network team outsourced. Probably saved the parent company about £500k per year. Which, when you’re dealing with about £100m per year is very easy to lose.

The first major disaster happened a few months later. That saved money was lost for decades to come.

i am not Indian nor white, my comment is based on observation, nothing more.

I have been working with brilliant developers/testers from india, and sometimes horrible ones, like people from anywhere, i don’t have an issue working with indians at all. But when things come to offshoring, it’s a different story.

I wouldn’t call indian workers unethical or blame it on their culture, but the outsourcing companies i have been dealing with are definitely unethical and encouraging bad culture. They are all big names in their fields, the way they do business is just shocking!

The disaster happens right on the beginning, the vendors fail to provide quality candidates. the resumes all look good, the candidates all can talk, but when it come to simple coding test, even the “experienced” coders got stuck. they would put down a line start with for loop statement and sit there nervously for next 10min make absolutely no progress. Is it too difficult? once i gave the test to my tester (who also happen to be an indian), he solve it in 30min without any hint nor guidance, and he is a tester!

If i complaint about the quality of the candidates, the vendors sure will offer me someone better, however, once I happily engage them onboard, they either “resign” before project starts, get reassigned to a different project 2 mths after projects started, or they look so different to whom i interviewed I start wondering they may not be the same people. I always insist have VC on for interviewing. Once I agreed to audio only because vendor claim the VC is broken. I can hear the candidates recite the question, silent for mins, whispering, then came back with right answer. awfully suspicious!

Like the article points out, india is facing technical bubble, i believe the vendors have trouble finding quality candidates themselves. They are saving the best to get clients “hooked”, after that, they give you the bottom of their barrel, they don’t care about your delivery, longer the project takes, more money for them, so why would they?

We have also tried the strategy, no outcome no pay. This time management told me not to bother with interview, so we end up with a team, the technical lead doesn’t even know how to setup internet proxy. The team spend 3 weeks investigate on an issue, we eventually find out they have been looking at the wrong code repository, the code of totally unrelated product (hey we were instructed to hand over the clear instruction in black and white and walk away from it), for 3 weeks non of them realize that.

At last we still have to assign someone to help the offshore team. They can afford not to be paid, but we cannot afford blue screen.

I feel sorry for the offshore workers, I can see they try to do a good job but really struggle with it. I also feel sorry for my team who been struggling baby sitting them. Simple tasks drag on week after week, eventually my team has to take over and rewrite everything from scratch. No matter how hard we try, the output from them are simply unusable. Not to mention myself working double shift and public holiday to understand what’s missing, is it spec? it’s requirement? It’s extremely painful experience for both parties.

I blame the vendors, they are blood sucking leaches, they assign incompetent candidates and leave them hanging. I also blame the upper management who decide to outsource to “save money”. Trust me, no money is saved, the cost skyrocketed, the offshore team worked for months chew on our budget and nothing came out, and the onshore team waste valuable time baby sitting rather than being productive. and why should we pay to babysit? shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The upper management shamelessly announced outsource is the right approach to save money, if it doesn’t work, it’s team leads fault that we couldn’t make it work. easy for them to say. I would like to see how they can take a team of 12 school kids to send someone to the moon. When project fails, we bring talent back onshore, CxO walk away with huge paycheck, new CxO came, few months later he got this brilliant idea of offshoring, history repeats again. I guess that’s how the leaches survive.

Sick and tired of having tiptoe and be careful about being ‘insensitive’ to cultural differences.
The fact of the matter is that I can and my peers can produce code that is correct, maintainable and of high standard. Code that can execute in process for years without significant error. This is normal and is what we work towards.

The daily reality is that unbudgeted time is spent ‘fixing’ the complete and utter garbage that is spewed out by outsourcing. That is a massive overhead and spend that by far outweighs a properly managed project.

It is not worth it. The cultural quirks discussed are a definate stain on already shitty situation – if you want and value truth and quality then go local. Your local development teams are probably worth the investment. If you are set on Indian coders then get LOCAL Indian coders who have absorbed the value of being creative, honest and proactive instead of the usual misdirection, time wasting, rote ‘learning’ and copy/paste. Of course then you need to pay accordingly.
Otherwise you are burning your money in a fools gambit.

Oh no… did I end up saying you get what you pay for?

Two words – British Airways… oops. Welcome to the future of IT outsourcing – 10 times the people, 10% of the ability.

I have just one thing to say:

Ever wonder why Comcast has the worst customer service out of all ISP’s in the world?

Outsourced to India, that’s why.

Whateve Indians say is 99% lies. Its due to culture. They simply quote cheap rates and promise developers they dont have. I nowdays simply bypass all businesses owned or run by indians. Same applies to Pakistan. Russia Belarussia Poland there yes you may save a bit.

What you are, decides what you get. If you are the useless and hopeless candidate, you hire the same team, not only in India, anywhere in the world.

Don’t forget that the worlds best companies have their development centres with the best candidates here in India. Then whey the outsourcing scene is different because there is a saying, you get monkeys for peanuts not the best developers of India.

So, please don’t stereotype the entire nation for your foolish decisions. Thanks

maybe 1 year ago i would have agreed with most of those here that say the majority of these comments are racist, closed-minded and unfair. however after having worked for 2 indian companies (not consecutively i might add), i can with certainty say i really REALLY miss:

-honesty
-hygiene (embarrassingly,…even the women)
-space (ie, not standing in my face to talk to me)
-knowledge of an ‘inside voice’
-class
-colleagues who were willing to learn (ie, figure it out together or themselves, not use google or mibuso)
-civility
-management who understand staff development
-the ‘lessons learnt’ attitude
-integrity
-colleagues who knew to keep their hands and snakey fingers to themselves (btw I’m a dude…and some of these touching me indecently were fathers ffs)
-self-awareness and self-reflection
-productivity (ie, not ‘working’ till 10pm and having nothing to show for it)
-respect of standards (ISO etc) {AFTER beguiling yet another customer into signing}
-people who knew that open and loud gossip and slander of colleagues or customers are not meant as tools for bonding
-people who knew that being devout doesn’t just mean dressing up like santa claus or wearing a smurf hat or whatever, but..like…behaving like you mean devotion to your beliefs (note, I know religious ppl in the west are a**holes too)
-people who knew to close their mouths when they chew or not slurp like livestock when drinking (again….even the women)
-an emphasis on quality and best practises attitude (ie, my price is low therefore you WILL sign…take me dammit!!)

oh…and my favourite one….BEING PAID ON TIME….i REALLY miss this

this….is my short list. as much as i can say that management in the west can work their staff hard, or have high expectations, i liked that both were a 2 way street as a standard

it’s been real, it’s been a learning curve, and i can honestly say i’d rather get shot in the face than have to repeat any of it again. good thing is, i learnt how to get a flexible neck from watching the indian version of ‘yes’

I was on the phone to a guy in India with the job title “UNIX System Administrator”. There was a minor config snafu that needed a quick edit, so I says “Anup, start vi and …”

Silence.
Eventually he goes “what’s vi?”.
This is a UNIX Syadmin, by the way.

So that’s me at 10pm on a Saturday night in Canada giving an hour long tutorial on how to use the most pervasive text editor ever seen in the IT industry. To a “UNIX sysadmin”. Never again.

Indian Excuse Example: My Indian associate told me once on “Monday” that he will be sick on Friday. I asked: “Are you getting sick right now [on Monday]?” He said: “No.” I asked: “how do you know then you will get sick on Friday?” No response and then he said: “I have to go to a party on Friday.” I said, you just lost your trust in 30 seconds which you built in 6 months working with me. I asked him: “why did you lie to me?” He said: “this is the way things work in India with Indian managers.” Lesson learned: That associate never lied to me until he worked with me.

Sadly, I have to agree on all points spoken by “lol India”.
Working with an off-shore company (In my case, Mumbai), has been nothing but disappointing and depressing.

As some mention, the lacking ability to be thinking out of the box and actually solving problems are just two points that has become evident.

I have no doubts that those people are qualified, I just still have to figure out the “how, what, when and where” they are.

While thinking about that, it seems (to me) that outsourcing is about “Business doing IT”. For so long “Business” has lacked support from us (“IT”), and now they have been misled into believing that can get better from elsewhere.

I totally agree with the article!

Incredible. Here I am sitting sleepless as my Indian team swore to have finished my React project + mobile by Nov. 5th, tomorrow. Today, I still have 3 screenshots of an elusive mobile app and they have not yet covered 50% of the remaining modules, yet are “confident that they’ll have everything ready on or before Nov. 5th”… I’ve lost time, sleep, money and now probably my business I was to launch at tomorrow’s annual fair.

My current feelings are to press a button. Someone gives me the freaking codes already!

One of India’s problem as a society is Public Defecation. That’s the sort of society that we are taking about. Don’t expect too much from individuals from that sort of society.

I worked in IT in the US and a big percentage of my coworkers are from India. I learned not to ever join a team where more than 50% of the members are from the Indian culture. I learned that they will bring their third-world, dishonest, mediocre culture into the team and projects will be highly damaged because of this.

I agree with all the points in this article. I experienced it myself. In the case of IT, Indian developers are apt to maintain mature systems, but not to engage in greenfield projects.

I guess that there is an Elite of them but I haven’t had the chance to meet them yet.