[vlasky]

I am from Australia - a country with very high labour costs. Some years back, I trialed outsourcing programming tasks to developers based in India, only to consistently receive shockingly bad quality work. Over the years, I have also helped clients fix up shoddy work written by such developers.

I will never forgot the moment I encountered this MySQL query from hell that brought a customer-facing webapp to its knees:

    select oldurl, newurl, id, dateadd from  jos_sh404sef_urls where newurl <> ""  AND oldurl not like '%vmchk%' AND newurl not like '%format=feed%' AND newurl not like '%format=pdf%' AND newurl not like '%print=1%' AND oldurl not like '%__404__%' AND (  soundex(oldurl) = soundex('not_found') OR  oldurl like '%not%' OR  oldurl like '%found%') GROUP BY oldurl limit 500;

Other developers I have engaged from other places, especially ex-Soviet countries, were far more competent and seemed to care about a job well done.

In my view, the Indian government needs to encourage its industry and educational institutions to study the teachings of W. Edwards Deming to instill a culture of quality. Back in the 1950s, Japan was ridiculed for the quality of its manufactured goods and within a decade after embracing Deming's advice, they became known for their excellence. Perhaps India can also experience such a renaissance.

[re-thc]

> only to consistently receive shockingly bad quality work

Is this really a problem with India or the expectations of such outsourcing?

With outsourcing you look to reduce costs - so much for it to be worth the effort.

A quality developer - whether in India or a low cost of living country is likely able to get a remote job (even back before remote was huge) that pays more than what the outsourcing salary is. The 1s left to accept outsourcing or a local role are of lesser quality.

I see 3 tiers:

1. Those that can move abroad and have the ability to get hired for a better career do so

2. Those that don't want to move abroad or can't but have the ability already take up remote or very high paying jobs locally

3. Those that go with local firms and international outsourcing arms and accept the local pay (which is a LOT less)

[robtani]

Same experience here... SHOCKINGLY bad quality of code! Over the years, I often tried to offer mentorship to try to help them improve but I find that they either pretend like they're listening and don't really grasp/absorb any of it or they flat out don't care. I hate making broad generalizations but really feels like majority just rigged their way into this IT industry to make a quick buck and/or as a ticket to get out of India and they couldn't care less about the craft of doing tech work (let alone actual software engineering).

[bhu1st]

Were you doing code reviews or did you expect the Indian devs to take care of that too?

[RestlessMind]

US West Coast-er here. If I add a cycle of code reviews with someone in a timezone 12.5 hr away, our velocity will be slowwwww