I worked for a large company that deliberately pursued that strategy. They paid less than a third for offshore programmers (either in Mumbai or Chennai), and they expected everything would have to be developed from scratch twice, so still significant savings on labor, even bigger if they happened to get it right the first time.
Oh my lord, no. Just no.
Like Rocky said to Bullwinkle when he said he'd pull a rabbit out of a hat, "That trick never works."
I work for a major US tech company. I'm a PM on a software dev project. This is a large project, which has features that generate a lot of revenue.
I was brought on late this summer to help lead the project because this is year 4 and attempt number 3 at getting the software developed and launched. Why did it fail twice before? Because it's openly said that the quality of the offshore devs was bottom of the barrel. Progress was slow, issues and hurdles were obfuscated and hidden until last minute before deadlines. Then, it was all politics, CYA, etc.
If they actually paid for good devs, this would have been done years ago AND would have cost them way less than it has by now. Yet, the lessons haven't been learned. I had to deal with another dev delay right before Thanksgiving, which was announced just as people were ready to leave for the holidays. As you imagine, this didn't go over well with the execs. Then, I spent all the working days between Thanksgiving and Xmas in these meetings filled with nothing but CYA, long speeches and little to nothing else. No real, actual, meaningful work was done.
I went on a site walk last week. I'm the only native English speaker and I have no idea what the other engineers were even saying, their accents are so thick. An Indian, a Russian, and a Chinese guy. Not exaggerating, I do not know what was discussed lol.
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u/NotAnAIOrAmI 1d ago
I worked for a large company that deliberately pursued that strategy. They paid less than a third for offshore programmers (either in Mumbai or Chennai), and they expected everything would have to be developed from scratch twice, so still significant savings on labor, even bigger if they happened to get it right the first time.
Oh my lord, no. Just no.
Like Rocky said to Bullwinkle when he said he'd pull a rabbit out of a hat, "That trick never works."