[throwaway43]

Indian developers are not over-rated. Infact noone outsources India because they think they think that Indian coders are geniuses.

They know that Indian developers are mediocre but management believes that mediocre is "good enough" at half the price , and guess what , it might hurt your ego , but in many cases mediocre developers + long working hours can solve most problems that typical devs encounter. You just need a good dev overseeing the efforts if the project is complex.

[DamnYuppie]

Often what they leave behind is nearly unmanageable code that cost's 2x as much to maintain and support.

[Lawtonfogle]

Doesn't matter. Manager has saved costs on the project and looks good for it. They move on while a new manager handles the support/maintenance issues and the higher ups just become convinced that support/maintenance just happens to cost a whole lot of money.

[throwaway43]

Then you need to review the code once in a while and also put some code quality related clauses in the contract.

If you do that you'll find that outsourcing to India is actually not such a bad idea and guess what , we're cheap :D.

[Lawtonfogle]

Contracted code quality becomes a standard to be gamed. They'll have plenty of comments, but how many add useful information? It may pass a lint, but the architecture will look horrible. The database may be normalized, but the people and accounts will both own money, but there will be no way to link people straight to accounts.

[DamnYuppie]

I have done both. The devil is in the details, they can meet some guidelines but wiggle out of others. As stated it becomes a game. As such it is imperative that you spend a lot of time coming up with the metrics you will use to determine quality. Be VERY wary of anything that has lines of code in it

Overall it has been my experience that you pay multiple offshore resources to get the output of 1 onshore resource. If you bring them from offshore to onshore their productivity does go up some. The caveat to that is they do have really good QA teams and I wouldn't hesitate to leverage them in that role.

[ebiester]

Have you yet figured out a metric that encapsulates code quality? Any metric you name, I can find a way to game it.

The only way I can see is to thinly slice the system enough and to require business peer review and daily demos on all slices to correct bad systems earlier. This also means you need a top engineer devoted to babysitting on behalf of the organization, and a good enough engineer to handle the code reviews can probably do the job better than a team of remote mediocre engineers.

[smrtinsert]

No problem, just double your outsourcing team!

[ProAm]

Half the price per hour but takes twice as long.... You can pay me now or you can pay me later...

[abhishm]

amen