Disadvantages of Indian Outsourcing
We provide this article for the Indian developers and development companies that call and email us persistently. Here is the long explanation as to why we do not and will not outsource work to India.
It is a myth that Indian Outsourcing is cheaper or better.
Firstly, an excerpt from a client email.
"I was aware from the beginning that I was working with East Indians but I actually thought that was a good thing. I know they are supposed to be very good programmers. I didn't realize that the work would be outsourced to people who couldn't speak or write English. When the website was initially submitted to me there were many grammatical and spelling errors and I almost felt bad about listing them all. However, it doesn't look very good for a website to have errors like that and when I went to the developers site they obviously cared enough about their own site not to have any there. If you look at their site they appear to be very knowledgeable and professional. I was led to believe that my site would be custom built for me but when I actually received the first draft it was very apparent that the shopping cart was a (very) cheap template with very few of the features mentioned on the developers site. I would imagine that the changes they made to it were just pieced in. Wouldn't it make more sense to just have a good template with all of the promised features instead of starting with a bad one and adding from there? As bad as it sounds, I will be very cautious about dealing with east Indians in the future. I was treated poorly and I suspect it may have been because I am a woman. He actually yelled at me on the phone one day. Looking back I can't believe I let it go as long as I did."
The reason why we have used this email is because it highlights some myths about Indian outsourcing and certain common traits that we have experienced, having observed first hand companies that were disadvantaged because they chose to outsource development to India,
Myths
- Outsourcing to India is cheaper. This is not necessarily true. We have seen Indian programming with no structural integrity or proper checks as to what can be deleted in a system. Communication problems and cultural differences hinder development. It is difficult enough to translate technical and programming concepts to clients without having to provide clear instructions to Indian programmers who do not have the same grasp of English. Misunderstanding happen, projects evolve but not necessarily in the right direction. The true cost of poor development may vary from a financial loss to a system that spells disaster for a company because when the system collapses, so too does the data inside that system.
- Indian programmers are better. Though there must be some excellent Indian programmers, the vast majority are hired to churn out code. We have a term for it, it is called spaghetti programming because it works by looping round and round but should anything go wrong, it is difficult to fix. Whether Indian programmers are better is very difficult to judge because there are a lot of average programmers of all nationalities.
Disadvantages of outsourcing to India
- Licensing and copyright issues. We have no idea whether or not outsourced projects may be copied and sold again to one of our client's competitors. This leads to serious issues with regards to licensing and copyright.
- Time lost managing project. Any financial gain must be weighed against the time spent having to manage the project from half way across the world. Communicating to the client and then having to translate requirements to the Indian programmer and back and forth.
- Political instability - It is a fact that India is not as politically stable as Australia. Assassinations can lead to street unrest that can shut businesses down for days.
- Lack of quality control. Outsourcing a project requires a great deal of trust because the quality of programming may be come back badly written. If we outsource to India, we cannot guarantee the quality of programming.
- Customer service. Pushy sales perople are always a sign that something is not quite right. If in presales, Indian developers call and email persistently, refuse to accept 'no' for an answer and continue to speak about how great their company and developers are, then what happens in the middle of a project, when something needs to be fixed, will they listen then?
Finally
We are not all that concerned about making lots of money by outsourcing projects to India. We are not motivated by money. We are passionate about what we do and we want to do it well. We have listed the disadvantages of outsourcing to India and we hope that all those Indian development companies that read this article, will finally respect our right to that opinion and refrain from calling or emailing us and trying to convince us otherwise. : )