Sunday, January 18, 2009

More on Offshoring and Its Perils

As my reader(s) know(s) [Hi Brian!], I'm way behind on my "interesting idea for a blog post" list, so I may be pumping a lot of relatively short posts out to try and get back up to the current set of items.

Anyway, I saw this post about offshoring, written by a developer in India, and I felt it worthy of mentioning, as it rings true - contractors never feel as close to project as full-time employees do, and the more remote the home office, the less involved even the employees feel. (look for the letter from the guy from London)

Adding to this is that nowadays, most of the Indian developers are available through the big consulting houses, so you get even less identification with the project, and more opportunities for corporate shenanigans that derail projects.

Of course, there is always the option of hiring directly, but that runs into the problem of scale.  In the US, a job posting might get 100 resumes; 50 can be dumped right away for totally wrong qualifications, 25 for inadequate skills, 15 weeded out in the phone interviews/standardized tests, and the final 10 interviewd face-to-face and the best picked.  However, in India, that same job posting might bring in 1000 candidates, and unless you have 10X the interview staff, you cannot get it winnowed down to the best 10 people - you might get it down to 100, interview 50, and hope for the best.






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