Stop Offshoring
Google
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
 
I recently met someone whose company was considering offshoring, and she wanted opinions from people who have gone through the experience in order to learn the pros and cons. Of course, I was happy to talk to her about it.

I discovered that for those who haven't had to deal with offshoring (as it pertains to IT/software engineering) before, there are two big misconceptions.

  • They believe that offshore workers are as competent as American workers. That hasn't been close, in my experience. At best, the average offshore employee is half as productive as an American employee. This doesn't take into account that code written by offshore employees are buggier, resulting in additional debugging as well. Just because an Indian person calls himself/herself a Java engineer after taking a 6-month course doesn't mean I'd want that person anywhere near my code.
  • Offshoring seems to be cheaper. Yes, the hourly rate for an employee in India is less than that in the U.S., but when you consider that they aren't even half as productive, you're really not saving money. Costs also don't take into account the additional hours put in by American workers who have to manage offshore teams and clean up the buggy code they produce. Launch dates also tend to slip when offshore teams are involved, a very costly problem when time to market is so important.
I don't know what her company will decide to do, but I think I opened her eyes to some misconceptions she previously had.


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