[drewying]

For every outsourcing success story it seems there are two horror stories. I know at my prior employer we hired a development team in India for a year and it was a complete disaster. Not only was the work shoddy and buggy, we ended up paying more than what we would have had we just hired a good local developer. They ended up charging us 300k for the year. We were supposed to get a 25 developer team for that 300k but the work they turned out could have been easily done by two decent experienced State-side engineer and done a lot better too. I had to spend 6 months rewriting large chunks of their code, it was just terrible.

From my experience it seems really hard to get good talent overseas. And if you do find good talent, they usually want almost as much a good local talent.

[memracom]

In our company we had a team of Moscow developers. It did not work out because the person who was supposed to manage them was not doing that. We took the work in house. But this is not an outsourcing sob story. To do the work, we had added developers to our Vancouver team, and hired a second developer in Seattle. At the same time we added people in Virginia and added a second developer in Portsmouth England. This is one team of developers in 4 cities. At the same time we added a separate team in Spain, and yet another separate team of 40 people in Thailand.

It works, because we have good managers who pay attention to making it work. Good managers who are not looking for shortcuts and who encourage all developers in the company to be self-driven professionals who provide value to the business.

This is how to make remote teams work. Sofware craftsmanship etc.