After 2 years of excuses, laziness, constant turnover (complete waste of training time when the guy/girl buggers off and leaves you with a new muppet), terrible or copied-from-Google code, never-ending bugs, headaches, baffling phone calls where no-one understood each other, emails that promised to “do the needful” but went ignored, applications that just didn’t work, MILLIONS of dollars, and much, much more……. we had enough, and told the Indian coding behemoth we’d had enough and brought our dev team back in house.
Saying that things go more smoothly is a massive understatement. Don’t know why we bothered. Oh yes, some spreadsheet said it would be cheaper.
When writing software the developer needs to be in constant communication with both the project manager and the author. Out-sourcing your coding just doesn’t work. In my experience a programmer often has a completely different take on how to solve a problem to most other people, they will often find the simplest and most efficient way of producing software, which while it sounds good is often not the best method.
Any well rounded developer knows that sometimes the specs given to them can be illogical or not well thought through by an author or project manager that doesn’t fully understand the coding process. This means that the full team building a particular piece of software need to be flexible to some degree and this cannot be acheived when outsourcing.
It doesn’t even have to be incomplete specs that will upset the process, clients love to change their minds, especially when they see a prototype of their software. Things I hear all to regularly are ‘can we move that to there’, ‘what if we swapped this round’ or the dreaded ‘Oh, actually I don’t need that bit any more…’
So on paper it may look like it is a lot cheaper to outsource, but in the long run the lack of communication, understanding and flexibility will have you wishing you had seen sense when that email from an asian coding beast offering you the chance to slash your development costs drops into your inbox.
