Quote:
Originally Posted by Deschodt
Then later whoever has not cashed in their stock options to go fishing in the bahamas realizes Apu and Sanjay, while cheap, cannot quite do all that your local people did. Sure they are cheaper but you gotta redo a significant portion of the work due to a variety of factors (communication, time difference, misunderstandings, scope issues) or add more layers of quality control... Then once they got you after the first year, they raise their price too. So you go back and try to rebuild your IT department, by which time the good people are long gone and you are stuck with the deadwood... Lather, rinse, repeat....
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I work for a privately-held company, so making this quarter's/year's numbers good is not so much of a problem. (The owners have a much longer-term perspective.)
BUT...
I have had whole projects or large chunks of projects outsourced. We see the same thing. The joke is that it costs 2.5 as much to outsource something because the initial offshore work "costs" half us much, then it takes me twice as long to fix it. Our first-line managers are aware of the problem, but it gets sugar-coated as it moves up the chain. And that's not to say that externals don't do good work. We have two on our team that have been onsite for years in the past, are now both offshore, and have been on our team for 5 and 7 years respectively. They understand what our team does, the nature of the business and the work, and can do the work just fine.
When I first started, it was after a massive re-org when some VP decided that anyone could write code in any language for any system. They threw people together in random units to break up the "silos". Over then next five years, the old teams slowly re-coallesced.
My reservation is that no one cares about your business as much as you do. External developers are compensated on meeting deadlines, so they do. They then either hide or fail to recognize any problems with a system that can jeopardize a deadline because it will hurt their compensation and they don't have to service the system once it is developed. I, on the other hand, recognize that all requirements are incomplete at best, and that any problems with the system are going to lead to years of headaches if I don't fix them as soon as possible. I spend a lot of time looking for the holes in requirements and getting clarification, and also if something doesn't seem quite right, I don't ignore it and move on.