| Assuming you aren't trolling: No, absolutely not. My experience, at two companies, is that what you save in development costs, you quickly pay for (and then some) in management overhead, and low code quality. Some of the code we got was simply not salvageable. (And of course, it consumed time on our side to review the code, reach this conclusion, and document the suckage.) If outsourcing has any chance of working it is for rigorously specified requirements. If there is any wiggle room, or even if you expect common sense to apply to fill in the gaps, you will be disappointed. Why is the reality so bad? - You have little choice about the actual developers you work with. Would you hire your own development team by phoning up a headhunter, asking for a half dozen developers, and then taking whatever the guy sends over? Of course not. Why should this work any better from an outsource agency? - Any marginally competent developer at an outsource firm gets moved into management quickly. (At least in the companies we worked with.) - Distance sucks. Do you really want to schedule meetings with 10-13 hour time differences? Deal with any required travel to and from India? Really? Outsourcing is a clueless executive's idea of how to get software written. It was a new business trend in the early 2000s, (so long ago that I wonder whether you're trolling), and it was weird: I kept challenging the decision to outsource, and the rationale kept changing. Basically, it was a trend, so the executive making the decision wanted to do it, reasons be damned. |
At one point, we also had a division of our company set-up in India, and when staffed carefully, they became remote members of the team (just like other remote workers). The only downside to this arrangement was that it was hard to keep qualified employees as (at the time), you could change jobs twice a year for a 20% bump each time.