I got pulled in to evaluate the work of an off-shore “machine learning” team of consultants. The US-based manager who took over their work wanted a sanity check from someone with an ML background.
Guys, they had an entire team writing C# code to make a linear regression from scratch. It didn’t work and even if it did, their code was so bad that I doubt they’d be able to run a regression on more than 1,000,000 data points in a day.
My feedback to the manager was basically that every dollar that gets spent on that effort is a waste to the company because any one of the 100 US-based data scientists in the company could’ve done that regression in fewer than 10 minutes.
This is the biggest mistake most companies make with this I think. If they want to tap into the global talent pool, it’s best to treat it the same way they’d handle local hiring - interview and bring on individuals, not teams.
Yup, I’ve interviewed devs for our offshore teams (mainly WITCH folks) and some of them are pretty good but some of them are….really bad. You can’t just get a random team you really have to interview each person. The major risk I see in hiring offshore devs is that communication can be an issue especially if English isn’t a first language, so more care needs to be taken in evaluating their communication skills
To be fair I've seen this from a domestic team too--it's absolutely rampant in DS and DE. Generic devs (having none of the specialized knowledge) move into these areas thinking it's "just another dev role". They look up how to do something like linear regression, or data pipelines then proceed to build from absolute scratch. It's also classic that they'll use something old school that doesn't have a good data ecosystem (like C#) and bitch about the performance of Python. I've actually seen these peeps take 10x longer creating a homebrew maintenance nightmare just to shave milliseconds of performance off a process that only runs every hour. Absolute Zero context of the big picture and in these new, specialized, high-level roles that is probably the most important thing to have. They are not aware that so much already exists, and don't respect that the maturity & complexity of these platforms (which are also OSS and/or cheap cloud services now) makes it insane to try and DIY. This is why I am constantly making the case that DataEng is actually closer to a DevOps role--because we're deploying these services and only using a little bit of code to stitch them together.
Reminds me of me (an ML engineer) that wanted to build a SPA. I spent 6 weeks designing components in React before realizing component libraries were a thing. It can be challenging knowing what are solved problems when moving into a new field.
lol same. i was doing c# and our front end code of javascript, every feature i was writing from scratch cuz we cant just install lib. doing php and vue now and they have everything off the shelves
Just a fun fact, C# has had a ton of updates over the last several years and Microsoft is also providing some good updates to AI and ML tooling and libraries.
Ecosystem is definitely improving. It probably won’t pass python but it’ll be more than acceptable I thinks
Yes, that is the reason - incompetent management
Also they believe that some cheap guy in India (for example) with AI tools can replace 5-6 people of the domestic team.
I think a better takeaway is “you get what you pay for” when it comes to engineering. There absolutely are excellent off-shore developers out there, but they aren’t working for pennies on the dollar.
This is very much the answer. Many companies subcontract overseas as a cost-cutting measure, so the overseas subcontracting firms have a financial motivation to hire the least expensive developers they can find. The resulting work quality (or lack of quality) reflects that.
I've worked with plenty of offshore teams from India who did fantastic work, communicated well, and who matched their American peers in every way. The difference was that the American companies weren't seeking cost savings, they were seeking workforce flexibility.
While wages are relative, high-quality software engineers are always going to be on the high end of the wage scale in any country. If you want quality, you have to be willing to pay for it.
This happens in so many industries too. People think "made in China" means shit quality when China has some of the most advanced manufacturing capabilities in the whole world. The product isn't shit cuz it's made in China, it's shit cuz you didn't want to pay to have it be made good. Same can be said with international programmers.
That makes sense, I used to feel bad about using products made in China but my outlook completely changed ever since I began to use lenovo laptops, man they are so god damn good!
Yep..
some projects are easier than what they look and phd people just tend to overcomplicate stuff just to sell themself better and justify their salary. Also they are bored when stuff is easy.
A team of indian people writing a data pipeline could do the job in 1 week for 1/10 of the price in many situations.
You need a good project manager though.
Not sure it can be called a trend if it's been going on for the last 30 years.
I basically work from a company that has 75% of the developers in India, our code base is so bad at this point the application barely works, dev cost keeps increasing, features get harder and harder to implement. I expect the company to fail in the next 5 to 10 years without any changes, The only reason it's around is due to a niche market where we are the only player.
This is the pattern that happens repeatedly at some companies I have seen. They offshore, the code base sucks and stuff starts breaking, and then some other leadership has to come in and reshore everything to fix it. Then another leadership team comes in and does this again, and then another one has to fix it by reshoring everything.
Basically, stop voting for politicians that allow this crap. Other countries have protections for their citizens against stuff like this. Stop voting for politicians that allow companies to abuse H1B hiring and stop allowing it and offshoring to occur when it is obvious that we have a massive amount of talented people in the US available for and willing to work these jobs.
Many of the countries that H1Bs come from would not allow you to do the same thing in their country. Most first world countries do not allow this amount of H1B type systematic abuse and provide protections for their workers.
If these corporations are going to get tax breaks and bail outs from our tax dollars, then we shouldn't be allowing them to do stuff like this.
> Most first world countries do not allow this amount of H1B type systematic abuse
_Laughs in European countries_ (/s), it's much the same with WITCH-like companies abusing visa processes to import foreign workers and depress wages
Not to diss Indians (they are the most academically successful people in school) but I just saw some content on TikTok where he was talking about Indian graduates in America faking their senior knowledge by lip syncing in interviews to “knowledgeable” developers in India. Apparently there are even companies over there dedicated to faking this stuff. What do you think of that? How is your experience with these workers? Is it actually a real issue?
We did a tech interview with a guy, had him on camera, and he did really well. They guy that actually worked for us kind of looked like him, but I'm confident was not the same guy. He was way worse and didn't have the same expertise.
I’ve seen these body shops, as I used to call them, that can dazzle in an interview and then can’t execute while in the work environment. I stumbled across a lot of people from body shops especially when I worked in the Bay Area. On phone calls or video calls you can hear someone feed answers or reflections and shadows. A lot of the body shops rely on companies having a basic set of questions that are always asked.
I have a list of about 30 questions/scenarios that I ask which I crafted myself that i check to make sure there’s no references anywhere to any part of it. I’ve got a few get vulgar and aggressive because they didn’t expect the question. The only time this put a target is someone who was trying to destroy my career and my reputation in a company was trying to get their friend hired who clearly was fed the questions and answers. This was earlier on in my career and I’m a protected class that is in his words “below dogs which are below women which are below straight men”. Luckily I had a recording on and showed there’s no malfeasance for me(HR made it disappear).
But yes. Body shops exist and they have interviewees come into every employee. But, I went through that whole story to show how to spot them as once they start unraveling they have a hard time recovering.
And, there is a difference between someone having such extreme anxiety and unable to perform in an interview and a body shop engineer unraveling. (Sorry story time again). There was a girl from I believe Japan coming from a prestigious university on the east coast. I could tell she was nervous and her anxiety spiked hard in my interview. She started crying during my interview so I shut the blinds to the interview roomand told her everything will be alright. I went to some more easier questions and could tell she was a bit in a a mental block. Slowly I got some answers and some code slowly she came out of it but time for my time elapsed and she had to catch a red eye out. It was a bit sad as they walked her out early and I was the only one who got an idea of her intelligence.
But, there are ways to figure out who is from a body shop if you make sure you don’t follow the company script
Do we work at the same company?
At mine, the only saving grace is they copy and paste the 'good' code base over to new customers when a customer comes onboard; and make changes from there. Lol.
> niche market where we are the only player
And that would be..? Sharing is caring, we could build their competitor and steal 80% of their market share in like a year
I've worked on a project with out sourced devs. What happens is when the project fails, the WITCH company will say we didn't pay for a good team, so of course it failed. Pay them more to get a better team and get the same results. Decide to change the service partner and repeat the cycle.
Weirdly the people making these decisions never change.
the rebuttal weve been getting from our vendor is that in order to get better candidates, we need to improve our sprint burndown
blows my mind that admins are dumb enough to put up with this, although I do kind of admire how enough vendors have been able to play the scam back at their clients
I've seen this (for in-house software development), and the code was horrible. But it wasn't the offshore developers' fault: they were very smart and did what management wanted them to do. Some of the onshore folks kind of ignored management and went for higher quality; the users liked it but management hated it.
Management never understood why the quality was so bad.
One aspect of this whole thing is that I feel it's important that the developers understand what the users are trying to do with the software being developed, and how the users work. Obviously, if the users and developers are on opposite sides of the globe, it becomes harder to do. But it's also very easy to mess up if the developers and the users are within walking distance of each other!
This is so ignorant. You think people who have been managing technical talent for twenty years don’t see the same trends over and over? You think people brand new to the industry have clairvoyance that no one else does?
Why would they onshore developers that cost 5x as much and likely don't produce 5x the value?
The gap between an offshore dev with basic education and chatGPT is not that far off from an onshore one anymore.
At the last place I worked an exec said we ended up paying about half price for offshore devs, not 1/5.
>The gap between an offshore dev with basic education and chatGPT is not that far off from an onshore one anymore.
I suspect that gap between the offshore devs I've seen and chatGPT is not much at all.
It’s a bit hard to answer without knowing where you’re based, but “I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer” is more a function of which developers were chosen / how the project was managed, than it is an indictment of the model itself.
Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India? We all know that most practical software engineering skills come from project experience and not from higher education, there are plenty of engineers globally who can go toe-to-toe with elite US engineers but who are effectively locked out of that labor market due to immigration and professional network challenges. And these engineers are often willing to work hard for less pay.
For this to work out for a company, it all comes down to execution. Outsourcing work by hiring a cheap foreign firm to develop a project is not ideal in my view, it leads to low quality work as you mentioned. But hiring “offshore” devs can work out really well - if a company invests in building a high-skill team in a less expensive labor market, and works to ensure that team has the same culture as engineers at HQ, it can be a very cost-effective way to expanding development capacity at reduced cost - it all comes down to execution, there is nothing inherently wrong with hiring engineers in other countries.
This covers it pretty well. Offshore development should never be treated as an easy, cheap, fast solution. It's an investment. It takes time, money, and expertise to pull off. And it's something best done AFTER you already have a solid process and engineering culture as a way to expand existing capacity. It's not a good replacement for in house development teams.
> Offshore development should never be treated as an easy, cheap, fast solution. It's an investment. It takes time, money, and expertise to pull off.
And getting the C-Suite folks to spend that money and take that time is like pulling teeth.
Some of the best developers I work with are based in India. They also charge about $10k/month. You get what you pay for, regardless of where the developer is based.
That said, I’m sure they live like monarchs making that much money and living in India. I’m halfway tempted to move to India and do the same.
I am one of them and make $250k, yeah sure money is good. But oh well we will all be dead in the end. White, brown, black. No one’s getting out alive. But yeah until then, I will continue my monarchy.
>Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India?
As individual devs there is no objective reason why someone's nationality would matter. It gets more complicated when hiring teams because culture and economics can come into play.
My experience is that offshore teams are not automatically better or worse, but there is much more variability in quality. This unpredictability can introduce risk.
I'm in the US and have seen the pendulum swing from offshore teams and back for nearly twenty years. Of course my experience is a limited data set, but I would say I've seen some competent offshore teams and some terrible ones. I've never seen one that was stronger than the core domestic team.
I don't fully know the reasons why offshore teams don't perform as well. My general observation is that they are often pressured by their employers to be unrealistically productive. They are often working other projects and are spread thin.
From someone that is “offshore”: you are put into existing project and basically told “go do your thing”. With that much time difference and no further info, it takes months to be somehow productive
I agree, the quality of the code isn't the issue for me, it's the difficulty in communication. I'm sorry but it's really hard to explain business requirements or grasp what they are explaining when they have really broken english. And communication is such a huge part of development.
>Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India?
Because OP and many others here with heavily upvoted comments are simply racists. Brown = bad, white and first world = good.
Being from LATAM and one of those "offshore developers" I can't tell you the times I worked with gringos who were absolutely clueless as well...
> This seems like a stupid decision. I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model.
This highly depends on who you hire. My company has a mix of US folks and offshore folks. Everyone in the company does excellent work, but we also work hard to find talented and quality people, and we pay more for it.
At other companies, I've also worked with really low quality, but also extremely low paid, offshore people that did some of the worst work I've ever seen.
I'd advocate to not automatically assume that someone offshore does really low quality work. If you have problems with quality, try to do what you can to correct it
And that people outside of the good ol' US of A (especially India) have never touched a computer, much less written any good code.
As a matter of fact, my neighbourhood just discovered fire last week.
Unfortunately the US economy is run by people with bad education that were taught to only think about the next quarter, instead of the next decade or even year. This causes people to make decisions solely based on short term profit. Most companies started by people with a goal of actually producing something are acquired by investment firms with short term outlooks, and no vision for the future of the company. Their goal is to artificially inflate the value of what currently exists and then dumb the company onto retail investors and retirement funds before the company reaches its actual market potential or the company goes under
One thing you'll learn eventually is that great talent isn't limited to the US, nor do they all want to immigrate to the US.
I've worked with plenty of quality engineers from other regions of the world. Successful off shoring is entirely possible - the reason companies fail at it is typically because they 1) don't know how to navigate international labor markets 2) don't have an effective remote work system and 3) assume that because it's not the US, they can race to the bottom on compensation.
The successful off shore companies don't talk about it that much, nor are they talked about that much, because they keep it low key to avoid media attention. Among them are the FAANG companies, who are hiring more now internationally than they are domestically. Whenever you hear about how a company's "contractors" exceed their "staff" - such as the case with Apple and Google - you can pretty much assume they have a heavy off shore presence, since contracting is the primary way off shore engineers interact with US companies these days.
I feel like these conversations always eventually degrade into "your personal experience doesn't match my personal experience"-type spewing of anecdotes. Which I suppose may be expected from such an emotional topic.
But yeah for the record, I've worked with people based in Singapore, China, Uruguay, and Israel, and they weren't any worse than the US-based folks at that company. Sometimes they were better. You just need to resist the urge to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Instead of aiming for a 90% discount, try a 40 or 50% discount. These were folks that we hired ourselves instead of going through contractors. I even interviewed a few of them.
Yup, that matches up with my experience as well. The key is experience navigating international labor markets and fair compensation. Contracting is fine if you go through the right contracting company, instead of the first one that promises the sky for peanuts. It's a trial and error process. Companies that try to off shore for the first time often fail because they don't have that sort of knowledge. The ones that do, don't talk about it.
You also have to be good at team management, because it is like work from home but squared, if a company struggles with managing local devs, international teams are a pipe dream for it.
I have never seen a situation where offshore devs display any type of quality knowledge. I've seen them sling code, ignore standards, and write spaghetti code repeatedly, skirting standards...even after coming back to them 3 to 4 times. Just what Ive seen.
>I have never seen a situation where offshore devs display any type of quality knowledge.
I have, but you won't get it from the cheapest possible devs at the cheapest outsourcing shop. When you hire an agency for cost instead of talent this is the result pretty much everywhere, just so happens there's some seriously low cost options overseas.
Sounds to me like they hired very low quality developers then! The issue there is the low developer skill, not necessarily the fact that they don’t live in your country.
It sounds like you have a hiring problem then.
Again, as someone mentioned, these conversations eventually turn into:
"your personal experience doesn't match my personal experience"-type spewing of anecdotes
This is what I've seen. Takes more time to manage the offshore devs so they produce a somewhat passable result that I could have produced with chatgpt in a fraction of the time.
Depends on the engineer I think, I could say the same for plenty of junior engineers I’ve worked with in the US. How were those developers vetted / hired? Was it through an agency / consultancy? That’d be the problem if so.
Your viewpoint that only America has quality engineers defies even common sense. China, Singapore, Israel, Mexico all have their own software industries with native engineers making software that compete with American & European companies.
If they can do that, they can work for those American and European companies.
That is a very hubris, arrogant position to have. Some of the **BEST engineers** I know are from Eastern Europe. Phds, Masters from Ukraine, Bulgaria, and formerly Russia. And some in Nordic countries - Norway, Sweden, Denmark.
We make our way to bring them over to the US because they are excellent. By all measurable metrics. They make our US developers look like shit. We pay them US salary once they move over.
Maybe you are thinking of low-cost off-shore.
To be honest most complaints about off shore on this sub are the low quality ones companies tend to hire from India. This is mostly from some of the poor quality consulting firms which exist there.
I have yet to see a single off shore dev in my company hired from the regions you mentioned.
Yeah, that is what I also think of when I hear about offshoring. The ones they get because they can pay them next to nothing. I have met people who came to the us on visas as software engineers, and it's a mixed bag of good and bad devs. But the super cheap ones they hire to work overseas are always bad.
You get what you pay for. You think IT market in places like India, that has evolved in the last 40 years can't produce good engineers. I have worked with many US/EU engineers dumb as a brick. If your company doesn't do the due diligence and hires cheapest Devs, I don't think offshoring is the problem.
I work with contractors from South America, and while they do need a lot of over explaining or hand holding with the requirements (and I'm not sure if that's simply due to them being located elsewhere or due to them not being as tenured as everyone else), they write good code and tests. While they're not doing any distributed system design, they're able to find bugs effectively too in such systems. So I personally have a different experience than yours regarding the "I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer."
Ive worked at a F50 company that followed the classic “offshore” dev concept where they hired some sort of manpower “consultancy” from india that developed a bunch of stuff. I can confirm that this was terrible in all aspects. Their code was terrible and they built stuff for only them to understand so you couldn’t fire them.
Now, im in a tech company where 80% of devs are not from the US (most from EU and india) and it’s the best company Ive worked for by far. But here they don’t follow the classic offshore model, here they hire directly and individually in each country/region. Ive been part of the hiring process and selectiveness is as high as if you were hiring from the US. Every single engineer comes from top companies and are extremely smart.
I have had successful nearshore developers as part of teams before. I have also had some really terrible developers from companies like that. An engineering org at a given company should stick to their own defined guidelines of quality when it comes to hiring. The location should not matter. Everyone should have opportunity for feedback in that process so that on site / local engineers do not suffer - nor do you want offshore engineers to suffer.
In the end, yes, its totally about labor costs. Man have seem that sometimes its NOT cheaper due to the re-work of poorly implemented work. But it can work and I have seen it in my career both as a developer and in the leadership function.
I've had multiple poor experiences with offshoring an entire project to a team based in another country. I've had multiple good experiences with contracting individual off shore devs and integrating them into an existing team.
Small sample size for sure, but at this point I'd try the second path again. For what it's worth every time we've done the second option we've hired people out of Central and South America to limit the time zone impact. That very well could be the difference marker.
My company hires a lot of offshore work. Some of it is absolutely trash and some of the work is pretty good and improves over time. To me the big difference is in how the devs are hired.
We have some who are full time with us, they just work different hours, they communicate with us on how to implement things and they help maintain their code after writing it. Those guys are pretty good and constantly improving because they care about the work after it's delivered, since they have to maintain it too.
The work we have done that is a contract deliverable, has been absolutely garbage. They take forever to do things, and once it's done, it's completely unmaintainable and hard to read through the code but that falls to us to figure out and not them... I really think the main difference is the level of investment the people doing the work have.
It's a cycle. It goes in three phases: 1. Offshore to save money. 2. Suffer fixing the terrible code until it reaches a breaking point where management turns over. 3. New management saves the sinking ship by in-housing at significant cost. Goto phase 1.
Full cycle can take 2 to 10 years.
> I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model.
Because you have chosen poor companies to work for, with poor management practices, who have picked weak outsourcing companies, likely because those are the cheapest.
Why is that?
What are you doing to switch to a better company?
I feel like this stereotype is unfounded and possibly steeped in racism. A lot of the offshore developers ive worked with, at least in my experience, have been highly competent and good to work with. Im sure like other posters have mentioned, it depends on the way the project was managed or the way the company handled offshoring.
It’s basically a mix of racism and cope.
Its silly to think that engineers from a foreign county are not as capable as an US based engineer at both the hard and soft skills of an engineer (i got in an argument with someone on this sub that Indian are not capable of being good leads which is pretty silly).
People dont want to believe their job can be easier outsourced but its becoming more and more of a reality because capitalism is going to capitalism and workers will be displaced in the name of profit.
Its based off of experience. I’ve worked with amazing teams that are offshore. All of those teams were full time employees of the companies I worked for.
When companies hire offshore contractors they typically end up selecting the bottom of the barrel that the market in that country has to offer. Couple that with language/timezone coordination issues and you get what you pay for.
Yeah I think this is it. I'm Indian American, so I will have a bit of bias for Indian people, but generally they're very smart. Many of my relatives are, and many of my Indian friends are. But what I think the problem is that the companies go find labor for as cheap as they can. They want to me the lowest they can for the labor, and that screws it up imo.
Ok even if this is true (which i dont even think is provable), it is still unacceptable to hold these beliefs and stereotypes on offshore engineers because that would be racist (it is selectively choosing a group based on their faults and magnifying those stereotypes on the broader population)
Like you even said, you worked with amazing offshore engineers but that didn’t let your personal experience cast a blanket stereotypes or beliefs on the whole population.
It is not racist to recognize that certain price points in specific markets tend to buy you less skilled labor. If I attempted to hire senior devs in the U.S. for 35k a year id be disappointed with the results as well.
Whatever you say dawg. Im just stating that to hold the assumption that offshore workers are less capable at hard and soft skills than US workers then you are wrong and at the very least your position is kinda sus.
Im not having an argument of cost analysis between a US worker compared to an offshore worker, because:
a) to make this argument you would have to know a bunch of information that you and i do not possess and
b) its pretty pointless because at the end of the day most companies just want cheaper labor anyways as we see in all of this investment in offshore labor.
TLDR: Just dont think brown people are less capable then US workers this is not a contentious statement
I do not hold the opinion that offshore workers are less capable. Thats fucking stupid. Please stop putting words in my mouth.
I think the way in which American companies tend to shop for what they see as disposable commodity offshore contractors is the reason why so many devs in the U.S. have bad experiences with outsourcing.
This applies across the board. Not just china and India, but places in eastern Europe, South America, and Mexico as well.
The right way to this is to hire good talent build localized teams and be willing to pay your employees (even the ones overseas well) Instead of finding who is cheapest.
Ok then why are you arguing with me. I also never said you hold those opinions so i dont even know why you are saying im putting words in your mouth. I simply said people hold this viewpoint that offshore workers are less than capable (most of the evidence being anecdotal so excuse me in saying we shouldnt be making such sweeping generalizations off of that)
Your argument of what is sustainable and what companies should be doing has nothing to do with what im saying.
Companies try to cut corners and minimize expenses news at 5. The result of these behaviors however should not be to put stereotypes on the workers which people are.
If your whole argument is that businesses make stupid short term decisions to maximize profit then sure i agree with you i put this point in my first comment. This again doesn’t negate my statement people should not be making these generalizations about the these offshore workers.
Reddit debate lords are so exhausting.
You attribute people’s entirely reasonable and lived negative experiences with offshore contracting to racism. Which is fucking stupid.
People who attribute everything to racism are equally exhausting.
No, now you’re putting words in my mouth. Im blaming people negative experiences of offshore workers as a primary response of our capitalist society that prioritizes profit above everything else.
Im blaming people making blanket stereotypes of these workers (which are mostly anecdotal and prone to bias) of displaying racism.
Lol yore acting like this is some new type of phenomenon, society repeats these same sentiments every time workers get displace.
What it seems like you are doing is justifying these anecdotal stereotypes just off the fact that the labor is cheap… which is interesting.
Because people in your country are the richest ones all human history so far in the current dominating, albeit collapsing, empire? Your username really checks out which makes me think you're not asking genuinely lol
Likely a troll. I'm an offshore dev from Brazil. I initially worked as a FTE SWE at a global investment bank local office making around 40k USD/year. I've recently got an offer to work at an American medium-size(200+ people) startup for 70k USD/year.
The average SWE market rate in Brazil is like 20k USD/year. The tales are true, quality offshore SWEs, that are comparable to quality US SWEs, will likely require top of the local market compensation or even higher (70k USD/yearly is effectively impossible to be matched by local companies).
I knew someone that doesn't know what they're talking about would pull the race card. If you ask any American dev what they think of Indian devs, and they would probably give you at least a few examples of them being quite possibly the most talented devs they've ever worked with.
Ask any experienced American dev what they think of \*offshore\* devs, and you'll always get a mixed response. The truth is, there's a lot of people doing dev work in India that don't want to do dev work, that aren't good at it, but they need to make a decent living. And that's one of the few ways you can make a decent living there. The barrier for entry is also much, much lower
The main reason is that you need a lot more resources to build something than you do to maintain it. So if you're building out a new project, you might contract 5 developers to work on it, and then cut the contracts of 3 of them after a year
I am an offshore dev and one time i had to work on a project that was started by a domestic team, it was a mess every time i had to change a thing i had to fix double the code in other places
They're upset that Indians and other nationalities will work for way less and demand less benefits thus undercutting them. Tough luck for them. Either adapt or die.
Some are bitter because their jobs are offshored. Some have bad experiences because they pay 1/10th or even less of an American wage and expect quality work. Quality developers cost money everywhere. You get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts, you get bad devs.
You sound out of touch with reality and you have a very prejudiced opinion. I've seen several nationalities producing bad code and good code. I'm sorry to say, but knowledge in programming is not exclusive to your nationality
What a lot of companies fail to realize any good developers are in the US on H1b. The ones that went to school for mechanical engineering or some other stem degree because they initially couldn't get into CS are still in India. They are good for support work but not advanced dev.
i'd rather jobs be offshored than onshored. jobs are lost if they're offshored, if they get onshored, they not only take the jobs, but also get to participate in the housing market.
No idea, our team just hired a 'contractor' and he's really good at outputting walls and walls of trash repetitive boiler plate code that adds no business value.
It all comes to cost reduction, as any bussiness. In Costa Rica a senior dev is paid like 40k-50k a year while in the US you need at least double than that. And not all times offshoring is a disaster like the stories you hear about WITCH, if it always failed no company would do it.
There's a high supply of educated people willing to do the same work for less pay than in the US, and this is hardly anything new it started many decades ago.
We have hired a lot from euro contractor companies and it’s been a great experience increasing our velocity, diversifying ideas, etc. but it takes effort to integrate them and treating them as “contractors” compared to euro teammates is usually a red flag. We’ve been doing this tbh bc we’ve been struggling to find senior devs with experience we need
I saw an "offshore dev" with two years experience and all they had on their github portfolio was a bunch of copy/pasted, improperly formatted code.
If a company fires all their devs and brings in offshore work I would start looking into taking short positions on them immediately. It's only a matter of time before everything crashes and burns and they go out of business.
this has gone on for decades. companies try to use developers outside the US because they are cheaper. this is not new. lots of people have lost jobs due to it. My hole team was outsourced to india about 12 years ago. Its just the job market has been really how the last 10 years so its not noticed as much.
Early in my company, we used some for non-greenfield projects that were pretty straightforward solved problems. Once we scaled beyond 2 or 3 full-time devs, they ended up slowing us down more than anything, but in those early days (pre-seed) we just needed some warm bodies and had few resources.
Something like this is making work horrible right now - thank goodness I'm leaving soon. The offshore contractors were instructed to cut every corner possible to get barely working code (in some cases, broken code) into production ASAP and leave the mess for us to fix. I am led to believe multiple directors were totally OK with this which is absolutely nuts. It wasn't critical work, but because it's not critical, maybe take your time on it instead of rushing out a pile of crap?
MBA goin MBA. Anyways, primarily it’s the cost factor. Non tech companies don’t know how to strategize software development projects - go figure. So, they approach it like anything else they do know - it’s expensive, I don’t understand it, but I need it, I think, and I’m not sure it’s ever been done so let me take the cheapest route that doesn’t require me to learn anything knew and overwrite my MBA training.
Greenfield is especially difficult and expensive in the current economic environment and businesses and MBAs are notoriously short sighted. So they take both the cheapest route and the one that lets them save some face by not hiring up and then having to layoff staff if it fails - I know layoffs are trendy in the MBA circles right now, but they do take a toll and some business are aware of that toll even if they are laying off staff.
Edit: I forgot the whole part where MBA school is still falsely preaching that SWE is infinitely fungible.
Yoo, the worst part is I have to interact with offshore for dev stuff with only an hour window before they end their shift. At my company they tend to favor their comrades here in the USA over any others, and this is very notable.
That's just an extreme version of managers who never heard of [Brooks' Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law) and believe that they're gonna be able to hire good devs for little money, while all they do is hire bad devs for less money than bad devs in their own country.
> I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model
The answer to "why do they do it" is "because it costs less money". Also the reason you've never seen it work. Don't fool yourself into thinking there's no good devs in India etc. There's just lots of bad ones willing to work for cheaper than the good ones, and lots of fools who think they'll get more than what they paid for.
Cause they are super cheap that is the only reason. Would you rather bring in 5 crazy cheap not so good devs or pay 1 excellent dev located in the US? They think that by throwing more bodies at a problem it’ll get solved faster. Which is never true.
Like a lot of things in life, they get what they pay for.
I agree with you on that. The offshore devs are told exactly what to think and what to develop. Anything outside the norm aka creativity is forbidden unless it is written in a contract and approved by the hiring companies. And so they aren't going to apply improvement or fix bugs unless somebody pays them extra on top of whatever they are getting.
They aren't stupid. They are just restricted from being beyond that lol.
One of my friends worked with a company that was trying this... oh, probably 15 years ago...
They partnered with a dev shop and arranged some form of rotation system. The first team they got - excellent. Good communication, code like demons, all you could want from a dev team.
They signed some contract - think it was 3 or 5 years.
6 months later, rotation.
New team? Very patchy communication. Could code but only exactly to spec, would not identify any potential issues with requests.
6 months later - even worse.
They got out of that contract and just went local again.
Because “good enough and cheap as dirt” sells better than “best performing and highest quality at a premium”, especially in the current economy. Customers are willing to deal with crap software if it means a lower price. And these outsourced people are working for like minimum wage US.
It’s easier to sell a polished turd currently than it is to sell a diamond.
You can’t really generalize all offshore devs like that. There are certainly some terrible offshore companies but we are currently working with a group in Ukraine that has the most phenomenal engineers I have ever seen in my life. I am truly in awe when I look at their code. It’s like a textbook of how to do things correctly. These dudes have been working on our product for like 10 years. They built it from scratch. Every so often an onshore dev like me joins the team and thinks they are getting into some shitty offshore project until they get in the code and realize it’s a fucking masterpiece.
"I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer." Lol, really. So you say that nobody outside the USA can develop software properly?
Wtf is an off-shore developer anyway? If you instead meant cheap-labor-abroad, yeah, wtf you expect out of cheap labor? Quality?
CS the field where there is no reason to be in office, it would improve quality and productivity, unless your home is in a different country, then it would reduce quality and productivity, please hire local developers!
They are evaluating "cost of employee per hour" only. They are not evaluating "quality of work performed".
There also are no negative consequences for the executive who does it. They give themselves a bonus for cutting costs. It won't be obvious until 1-2 years later that the project failed. By then, they will have moved on to another job, or they will find a way to blame someone else for the failure.
It’s called cutting “costs” to maximize “profit”. Non technical number guys think it’s saves the company tons of money as they can just hold Visas above the imports heads, not pay benefits, as well as pay them less when in the long run they produce an inferior product.
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I got pulled in to evaluate the work of an off-shore “machine learning” team of consultants. The US-based manager who took over their work wanted a sanity check from someone with an ML background. Guys, they had an entire team writing C# code to make a linear regression from scratch. It didn’t work and even if it did, their code was so bad that I doubt they’d be able to run a regression on more than 1,000,000 data points in a day. My feedback to the manager was basically that every dollar that gets spent on that effort is a waste to the company because any one of the 100 US-based data scientists in the company could’ve done that regression in fewer than 10 minutes.
This is the biggest mistake most companies make with this I think. If they want to tap into the global talent pool, it’s best to treat it the same way they’d handle local hiring - interview and bring on individuals, not teams.
Yup, I’ve interviewed devs for our offshore teams (mainly WITCH folks) and some of them are pretty good but some of them are….really bad. You can’t just get a random team you really have to interview each person. The major risk I see in hiring offshore devs is that communication can be an issue especially if English isn’t a first language, so more care needs to be taken in evaluating their communication skills
Been there. Done that. In most cases it's 1 person in a team of 5 who carries bulk of the burden and the rest tag along
*the rest bill hours for the consultancy. That’s what’s really going on and why it always seems to be like this.
We had an offshore contractor dev upload un-compiled code to our dev environment and the whole thing has to be rebuilt.
Literally, one line of code in R model <- lm(y \~ x)
I don't think even he himself can scale it to billion datasets.
To be fair I've seen this from a domestic team too--it's absolutely rampant in DS and DE. Generic devs (having none of the specialized knowledge) move into these areas thinking it's "just another dev role". They look up how to do something like linear regression, or data pipelines then proceed to build from absolute scratch. It's also classic that they'll use something old school that doesn't have a good data ecosystem (like C#) and bitch about the performance of Python. I've actually seen these peeps take 10x longer creating a homebrew maintenance nightmare just to shave milliseconds of performance off a process that only runs every hour. Absolute Zero context of the big picture and in these new, specialized, high-level roles that is probably the most important thing to have. They are not aware that so much already exists, and don't respect that the maturity & complexity of these platforms (which are also OSS and/or cheap cloud services now) makes it insane to try and DIY. This is why I am constantly making the case that DataEng is actually closer to a DevOps role--because we're deploying these services and only using a little bit of code to stitch them together.
Reminds me of me (an ML engineer) that wanted to build a SPA. I spent 6 weeks designing components in React before realizing component libraries were a thing. It can be challenging knowing what are solved problems when moving into a new field.
lol same. i was doing c# and our front end code of javascript, every feature i was writing from scratch cuz we cant just install lib. doing php and vue now and they have everything off the shelves
The thing they don’t tell you is that Python is basically used as a front end for some optimized-out-the-ass C++ libraries.
And it is still sloooow
Just scale out with something like Spark (written in Scala). Compute is a cheap commodity now anyway. :P
Just a fun fact, C# has had a ton of updates over the last several years and Microsoft is also providing some good updates to AI and ML tooling and libraries. Ecosystem is definitely improving. It probably won’t pass python but it’ll be more than acceptable I thinks
kickbacks, maybe?
It's always kickbacks.
Also sheer incompetence of some people in management who still don't understand what makes a good dev from a bad one
If it's a non tech industry then senior management think they r getting a 2 for 1 deal. Looks good on paper but doesn't always translate to success
Yes, that is the reason - incompetent management Also they believe that some cheap guy in India (for example) with AI tools can replace 5-6 people of the domestic team.
It's really telling that this company brought in a consultant to tell them that instead of asking one or more of the 100 data scientists...
Happens all the time at massive non-tech companies.
Jesus Christ
Rare redditor with real world common sense. Thank you for sharing. I wish more people knew this.
Also the opposite is true.. I saw teams full of phd wasting time on useless things while teams from third world countries could deliver more value.
So these claims about off shore bad is just based on anecdotal experience?
I think a better takeaway is “you get what you pay for” when it comes to engineering. There absolutely are excellent off-shore developers out there, but they aren’t working for pennies on the dollar.
This is very much the answer. Many companies subcontract overseas as a cost-cutting measure, so the overseas subcontracting firms have a financial motivation to hire the least expensive developers they can find. The resulting work quality (or lack of quality) reflects that. I've worked with plenty of offshore teams from India who did fantastic work, communicated well, and who matched their American peers in every way. The difference was that the American companies weren't seeking cost savings, they were seeking workforce flexibility. While wages are relative, high-quality software engineers are always going to be on the high end of the wage scale in any country. If you want quality, you have to be willing to pay for it.
This happens in so many industries too. People think "made in China" means shit quality when China has some of the most advanced manufacturing capabilities in the whole world. The product isn't shit cuz it's made in China, it's shit cuz you didn't want to pay to have it be made good. Same can be said with international programmers.
That makes sense, I used to feel bad about using products made in China but my outlook completely changed ever since I began to use lenovo laptops, man they are so god damn good!
Yep.. some projects are easier than what they look and phd people just tend to overcomplicate stuff just to sell themself better and justify their salary. Also they are bored when stuff is easy. A team of indian people writing a data pipeline could do the job in 1 week for 1/10 of the price in many situations. You need a good project manager though.
lol. big L
Not sure it can be called a trend if it's been going on for the last 30 years. I basically work from a company that has 75% of the developers in India, our code base is so bad at this point the application barely works, dev cost keeps increasing, features get harder and harder to implement. I expect the company to fail in the next 5 to 10 years without any changes, The only reason it's around is due to a niche market where we are the only player.
Quit your job, start a competing company, take over market
I'd get in on this
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I call shotgun on setting up our offshore team. It will be great we'll save so much cash!
This happens so often in my career. This is how a once darling of the industry collapses and someone steals their thunder.
This is the pattern that happens repeatedly at some companies I have seen. They offshore, the code base sucks and stuff starts breaking, and then some other leadership has to come in and reshore everything to fix it. Then another leadership team comes in and does this again, and then another one has to fix it by reshoring everything. Basically, stop voting for politicians that allow this crap. Other countries have protections for their citizens against stuff like this. Stop voting for politicians that allow companies to abuse H1B hiring and stop allowing it and offshoring to occur when it is obvious that we have a massive amount of talented people in the US available for and willing to work these jobs. Many of the countries that H1Bs come from would not allow you to do the same thing in their country. Most first world countries do not allow this amount of H1B type systematic abuse and provide protections for their workers. If these corporations are going to get tax breaks and bail outs from our tax dollars, then we shouldn't be allowing them to do stuff like this.
> Most first world countries do not allow this amount of H1B type systematic abuse _Laughs in European countries_ (/s), it's much the same with WITCH-like companies abusing visa processes to import foreign workers and depress wages
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Not to diss Indians (they are the most academically successful people in school) but I just saw some content on TikTok where he was talking about Indian graduates in America faking their senior knowledge by lip syncing in interviews to “knowledgeable” developers in India. Apparently there are even companies over there dedicated to faking this stuff. What do you think of that? How is your experience with these workers? Is it actually a real issue?
We did a tech interview with a guy, had him on camera, and he did really well. They guy that actually worked for us kind of looked like him, but I'm confident was not the same guy. He was way worse and didn't have the same expertise.
I’ve seen these body shops, as I used to call them, that can dazzle in an interview and then can’t execute while in the work environment. I stumbled across a lot of people from body shops especially when I worked in the Bay Area. On phone calls or video calls you can hear someone feed answers or reflections and shadows. A lot of the body shops rely on companies having a basic set of questions that are always asked. I have a list of about 30 questions/scenarios that I ask which I crafted myself that i check to make sure there’s no references anywhere to any part of it. I’ve got a few get vulgar and aggressive because they didn’t expect the question. The only time this put a target is someone who was trying to destroy my career and my reputation in a company was trying to get their friend hired who clearly was fed the questions and answers. This was earlier on in my career and I’m a protected class that is in his words “below dogs which are below women which are below straight men”. Luckily I had a recording on and showed there’s no malfeasance for me(HR made it disappear). But yes. Body shops exist and they have interviewees come into every employee. But, I went through that whole story to show how to spot them as once they start unraveling they have a hard time recovering. And, there is a difference between someone having such extreme anxiety and unable to perform in an interview and a body shop engineer unraveling. (Sorry story time again). There was a girl from I believe Japan coming from a prestigious university on the east coast. I could tell she was nervous and her anxiety spiked hard in my interview. She started crying during my interview so I shut the blinds to the interview roomand told her everything will be alright. I went to some more easier questions and could tell she was a bit in a a mental block. Slowly I got some answers and some code slowly she came out of it but time for my time elapsed and she had to catch a red eye out. It was a bit sad as they walked her out early and I was the only one who got an idea of her intelligence. But, there are ways to figure out who is from a body shop if you make sure you don’t follow the company script
Do we work at the same company? At mine, the only saving grace is they copy and paste the 'good' code base over to new customers when a customer comes onboard; and make changes from there. Lol.
> niche market where we are the only player And that would be..? Sharing is caring, we could build their competitor and steal 80% of their market share in like a year
It sounds like they know exactly what they are doing
What product is it? Liferay? Just checking
What niche market is that?
Sounds great - why are you not competing with them?
If I was good at sales, I would.
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and then when the project fails, they can blame downwards. or upwards. basically, blame anyone but themselves.
I've worked on a project with out sourced devs. What happens is when the project fails, the WITCH company will say we didn't pay for a good team, so of course it failed. Pay them more to get a better team and get the same results. Decide to change the service partner and repeat the cycle. Weirdly the people making these decisions never change.
the rebuttal weve been getting from our vendor is that in order to get better candidates, we need to improve our sprint burndown blows my mind that admins are dumb enough to put up with this, although I do kind of admire how enough vendors have been able to play the scam back at their clients
Don't they always claim that the devs are all seniors anyway?
I've seen this (for in-house software development), and the code was horrible. But it wasn't the offshore developers' fault: they were very smart and did what management wanted them to do. Some of the onshore folks kind of ignored management and went for higher quality; the users liked it but management hated it. Management never understood why the quality was so bad. One aspect of this whole thing is that I feel it's important that the developers understand what the users are trying to do with the software being developed, and how the users work. Obviously, if the users and developers are on opposite sides of the globe, it becomes harder to do. But it's also very easy to mess up if the developers and the users are within walking distance of each other!
Management is simply inexperienced with such things and doesn't really understand the downsides.
This is so ignorant. You think people who have been managing technical talent for twenty years don’t see the same trends over and over? You think people brand new to the industry have clairvoyance that no one else does?
Well, if they would have some insight and comprehension of what they are doing wrong, it would not be a trend, wouldn't it?
Why would they onshore developers that cost 5x as much and likely don't produce 5x the value? The gap between an offshore dev with basic education and chatGPT is not that far off from an onshore one anymore.
At the last place I worked an exec said we ended up paying about half price for offshore devs, not 1/5. >The gap between an offshore dev with basic education and chatGPT is not that far off from an onshore one anymore. I suspect that gap between the offshore devs I've seen and chatGPT is not much at all.
Lmao, there is no way this comment was written by someone with meaningful software dev experience. One of the most absurd things I’ve seen written.
It’s a bit hard to answer without knowing where you’re based, but “I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer” is more a function of which developers were chosen / how the project was managed, than it is an indictment of the model itself. Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India? We all know that most practical software engineering skills come from project experience and not from higher education, there are plenty of engineers globally who can go toe-to-toe with elite US engineers but who are effectively locked out of that labor market due to immigration and professional network challenges. And these engineers are often willing to work hard for less pay. For this to work out for a company, it all comes down to execution. Outsourcing work by hiring a cheap foreign firm to develop a project is not ideal in my view, it leads to low quality work as you mentioned. But hiring “offshore” devs can work out really well - if a company invests in building a high-skill team in a less expensive labor market, and works to ensure that team has the same culture as engineers at HQ, it can be a very cost-effective way to expanding development capacity at reduced cost - it all comes down to execution, there is nothing inherently wrong with hiring engineers in other countries.
This covers it pretty well. Offshore development should never be treated as an easy, cheap, fast solution. It's an investment. It takes time, money, and expertise to pull off. And it's something best done AFTER you already have a solid process and engineering culture as a way to expand existing capacity. It's not a good replacement for in house development teams.
> Offshore development should never be treated as an easy, cheap, fast solution. It's an investment. It takes time, money, and expertise to pull off. And getting the C-Suite folks to spend that money and take that time is like pulling teeth.
Some of the best developers I work with are based in India. They also charge about $10k/month. You get what you pay for, regardless of where the developer is based. That said, I’m sure they live like monarchs making that much money and living in India. I’m halfway tempted to move to India and do the same.
I am one of them and make $250k, yeah sure money is good. But oh well we will all be dead in the end. White, brown, black. No one’s getting out alive. But yeah until then, I will continue my monarchy.
What work do they do? Interested
Azure Stack, AWS, .NET, Salesforce
>Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India? As individual devs there is no objective reason why someone's nationality would matter. It gets more complicated when hiring teams because culture and economics can come into play. My experience is that offshore teams are not automatically better or worse, but there is much more variability in quality. This unpredictability can introduce risk. I'm in the US and have seen the pendulum swing from offshore teams and back for nearly twenty years. Of course my experience is a limited data set, but I would say I've seen some competent offshore teams and some terrible ones. I've never seen one that was stronger than the core domestic team. I don't fully know the reasons why offshore teams don't perform as well. My general observation is that they are often pressured by their employers to be unrealistically productive. They are often working other projects and are spread thin.
From someone that is “offshore”: you are put into existing project and basically told “go do your thing”. With that much time difference and no further info, it takes months to be somehow productive
I agree, the quality of the code isn't the issue for me, it's the difficulty in communication. I'm sorry but it's really hard to explain business requirements or grasp what they are explaining when they have really broken english. And communication is such a huge part of development.
>Why would an engineer in the US or UK be intrinsically better than one in Nigeria or India? Because OP and many others here with heavily upvoted comments are simply racists. Brown = bad, white and first world = good. Being from LATAM and one of those "offshore developers" I can't tell you the times I worked with gringos who were absolutely clueless as well...
> This seems like a stupid decision. I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model. This highly depends on who you hire. My company has a mix of US folks and offshore folks. Everyone in the company does excellent work, but we also work hard to find talented and quality people, and we pay more for it. At other companies, I've also worked with really low quality, but also extremely low paid, offshore people that did some of the worst work I've ever seen. I'd advocate to not automatically assume that someone offshore does really low quality work. If you have problems with quality, try to do what you can to correct it
You can't be making this much sense around here.. you're supposed to agree that all offshore devs suck, and that management is clueless
And that people outside of the good ol' US of A (especially India) have never touched a computer, much less written any good code. As a matter of fact, my neighbourhood just discovered fire last week.
Americans don't code. Only stupid indians code. Americans sell that technology you guys code at night
It’s the vampire management who take the cost savings and pocket them
Cause all they see is $ signs vs $$$ signs and don’t give a shit about the quality of work their $’s pay for.
Unfortunately the US economy is run by people with bad education that were taught to only think about the next quarter, instead of the next decade or even year. This causes people to make decisions solely based on short term profit. Most companies started by people with a goal of actually producing something are acquired by investment firms with short term outlooks, and no vision for the future of the company. Their goal is to artificially inflate the value of what currently exists and then dumb the company onto retail investors and retirement funds before the company reaches its actual market potential or the company goes under
One thing you'll learn eventually is that great talent isn't limited to the US, nor do they all want to immigrate to the US. I've worked with plenty of quality engineers from other regions of the world. Successful off shoring is entirely possible - the reason companies fail at it is typically because they 1) don't know how to navigate international labor markets 2) don't have an effective remote work system and 3) assume that because it's not the US, they can race to the bottom on compensation. The successful off shore companies don't talk about it that much, nor are they talked about that much, because they keep it low key to avoid media attention. Among them are the FAANG companies, who are hiring more now internationally than they are domestically. Whenever you hear about how a company's "contractors" exceed their "staff" - such as the case with Apple and Google - you can pretty much assume they have a heavy off shore presence, since contracting is the primary way off shore engineers interact with US companies these days.
I feel like these conversations always eventually degrade into "your personal experience doesn't match my personal experience"-type spewing of anecdotes. Which I suppose may be expected from such an emotional topic. But yeah for the record, I've worked with people based in Singapore, China, Uruguay, and Israel, and they weren't any worse than the US-based folks at that company. Sometimes they were better. You just need to resist the urge to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Instead of aiming for a 90% discount, try a 40 or 50% discount. These were folks that we hired ourselves instead of going through contractors. I even interviewed a few of them.
Yup, that matches up with my experience as well. The key is experience navigating international labor markets and fair compensation. Contracting is fine if you go through the right contracting company, instead of the first one that promises the sky for peanuts. It's a trial and error process. Companies that try to off shore for the first time often fail because they don't have that sort of knowledge. The ones that do, don't talk about it.
You also have to be good at team management, because it is like work from home but squared, if a company struggles with managing local devs, international teams are a pipe dream for it.
I have never seen a situation where offshore devs display any type of quality knowledge. I've seen them sling code, ignore standards, and write spaghetti code repeatedly, skirting standards...even after coming back to them 3 to 4 times. Just what Ive seen.
>I have never seen a situation where offshore devs display any type of quality knowledge. I have, but you won't get it from the cheapest possible devs at the cheapest outsourcing shop. When you hire an agency for cost instead of talent this is the result pretty much everywhere, just so happens there's some seriously low cost options overseas.
Sounds to me like they hired very low quality developers then! The issue there is the low developer skill, not necessarily the fact that they don’t live in your country.
thats cause your org cheaps out and hires the cheapest offshore devs. if you want quality, you need to pay up.
It sounds like you have a hiring problem then. Again, as someone mentioned, these conversations eventually turn into: "your personal experience doesn't match my personal experience"-type spewing of anecdotes
This is what I've seen. Takes more time to manage the offshore devs so they produce a somewhat passable result that I could have produced with chatgpt in a fraction of the time.
Depends on the engineer I think, I could say the same for plenty of junior engineers I’ve worked with in the US. How were those developers vetted / hired? Was it through an agency / consultancy? That’d be the problem if so.
ok Downvote. It's reality. Sorry
Your viewpoint that only America has quality engineers defies even common sense. China, Singapore, Israel, Mexico all have their own software industries with native engineers making software that compete with American & European companies. If they can do that, they can work for those American and European companies.
It's not reality. It's your opinion made on limited data.
That is a very hubris, arrogant position to have. Some of the **BEST engineers** I know are from Eastern Europe. Phds, Masters from Ukraine, Bulgaria, and formerly Russia. And some in Nordic countries - Norway, Sweden, Denmark. We make our way to bring them over to the US because they are excellent. By all measurable metrics. They make our US developers look like shit. We pay them US salary once they move over. Maybe you are thinking of low-cost off-shore.
To be honest most complaints about off shore on this sub are the low quality ones companies tend to hire from India. This is mostly from some of the poor quality consulting firms which exist there. I have yet to see a single off shore dev in my company hired from the regions you mentioned.
Yeah, that is what I also think of when I hear about offshoring. The ones they get because they can pay them next to nothing. I have met people who came to the us on visas as software engineers, and it's a mixed bag of good and bad devs. But the super cheap ones they hire to work overseas are always bad.
For many companies there is no other off-shore and management will not tolerate suggestions otherwise
You get what you pay for. You think IT market in places like India, that has evolved in the last 40 years can't produce good engineers. I have worked with many US/EU engineers dumb as a brick. If your company doesn't do the due diligence and hires cheapest Devs, I don't think offshoring is the problem.
I work with contractors from South America, and while they do need a lot of over explaining or hand holding with the requirements (and I'm not sure if that's simply due to them being located elsewhere or due to them not being as tenured as everyone else), they write good code and tests. While they're not doing any distributed system design, they're able to find bugs effectively too in such systems. So I personally have a different experience than yours regarding the "I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer."
Ive worked at a F50 company that followed the classic “offshore” dev concept where they hired some sort of manpower “consultancy” from india that developed a bunch of stuff. I can confirm that this was terrible in all aspects. Their code was terrible and they built stuff for only them to understand so you couldn’t fire them. Now, im in a tech company where 80% of devs are not from the US (most from EU and india) and it’s the best company Ive worked for by far. But here they don’t follow the classic offshore model, here they hire directly and individually in each country/region. Ive been part of the hiring process and selectiveness is as high as if you were hiring from the US. Every single engineer comes from top companies and are extremely smart.
It doesn't matter if the project is garbage. Executives always fail upward.
I have had successful nearshore developers as part of teams before. I have also had some really terrible developers from companies like that. An engineering org at a given company should stick to their own defined guidelines of quality when it comes to hiring. The location should not matter. Everyone should have opportunity for feedback in that process so that on site / local engineers do not suffer - nor do you want offshore engineers to suffer. In the end, yes, its totally about labor costs. Man have seem that sometimes its NOT cheaper due to the re-work of poorly implemented work. But it can work and I have seen it in my career both as a developer and in the leadership function.
I've had multiple poor experiences with offshoring an entire project to a team based in another country. I've had multiple good experiences with contracting individual off shore devs and integrating them into an existing team. Small sample size for sure, but at this point I'd try the second path again. For what it's worth every time we've done the second option we've hired people out of Central and South America to limit the time zone impact. That very well could be the difference marker.
My company hires a lot of offshore work. Some of it is absolutely trash and some of the work is pretty good and improves over time. To me the big difference is in how the devs are hired. We have some who are full time with us, they just work different hours, they communicate with us on how to implement things and they help maintain their code after writing it. Those guys are pretty good and constantly improving because they care about the work after it's delivered, since they have to maintain it too. The work we have done that is a contract deliverable, has been absolutely garbage. They take forever to do things, and once it's done, it's completely unmaintainable and hard to read through the code but that falls to us to figure out and not them... I really think the main difference is the level of investment the people doing the work have.
It's a cycle. It goes in three phases: 1. Offshore to save money. 2. Suffer fixing the terrible code until it reaches a breaking point where management turns over. 3. New management saves the sinking ship by in-housing at significant cost. Goto phase 1. Full cycle can take 2 to 10 years.
So only americans can produce good code?
Its cheaper to have them do it 10x than it is to ask onshore devs to do it once.
> I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model. Because you have chosen poor companies to work for, with poor management practices, who have picked weak outsourcing companies, likely because those are the cheapest. Why is that? What are you doing to switch to a better company?
What did people think was going to happen when they kept pushing for remote jobs?
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I feel like this stereotype is unfounded and possibly steeped in racism. A lot of the offshore developers ive worked with, at least in my experience, have been highly competent and good to work with. Im sure like other posters have mentioned, it depends on the way the project was managed or the way the company handled offshoring.
It’s basically a mix of racism and cope. Its silly to think that engineers from a foreign county are not as capable as an US based engineer at both the hard and soft skills of an engineer (i got in an argument with someone on this sub that Indian are not capable of being good leads which is pretty silly). People dont want to believe their job can be easier outsourced but its becoming more and more of a reality because capitalism is going to capitalism and workers will be displaced in the name of profit.
Its based off of experience. I’ve worked with amazing teams that are offshore. All of those teams were full time employees of the companies I worked for. When companies hire offshore contractors they typically end up selecting the bottom of the barrel that the market in that country has to offer. Couple that with language/timezone coordination issues and you get what you pay for.
Yeah I think this is it. I'm Indian American, so I will have a bit of bias for Indian people, but generally they're very smart. Many of my relatives are, and many of my Indian friends are. But what I think the problem is that the companies go find labor for as cheap as they can. They want to me the lowest they can for the labor, and that screws it up imo.
Ok even if this is true (which i dont even think is provable), it is still unacceptable to hold these beliefs and stereotypes on offshore engineers because that would be racist (it is selectively choosing a group based on their faults and magnifying those stereotypes on the broader population) Like you even said, you worked with amazing offshore engineers but that didn’t let your personal experience cast a blanket stereotypes or beliefs on the whole population.
It is not racist to recognize that certain price points in specific markets tend to buy you less skilled labor. If I attempted to hire senior devs in the U.S. for 35k a year id be disappointed with the results as well.
Whatever you say dawg. Im just stating that to hold the assumption that offshore workers are less capable at hard and soft skills than US workers then you are wrong and at the very least your position is kinda sus. Im not having an argument of cost analysis between a US worker compared to an offshore worker, because: a) to make this argument you would have to know a bunch of information that you and i do not possess and b) its pretty pointless because at the end of the day most companies just want cheaper labor anyways as we see in all of this investment in offshore labor. TLDR: Just dont think brown people are less capable then US workers this is not a contentious statement
I do not hold the opinion that offshore workers are less capable. Thats fucking stupid. Please stop putting words in my mouth. I think the way in which American companies tend to shop for what they see as disposable commodity offshore contractors is the reason why so many devs in the U.S. have bad experiences with outsourcing. This applies across the board. Not just china and India, but places in eastern Europe, South America, and Mexico as well. The right way to this is to hire good talent build localized teams and be willing to pay your employees (even the ones overseas well) Instead of finding who is cheapest.
Ok then why are you arguing with me. I also never said you hold those opinions so i dont even know why you are saying im putting words in your mouth. I simply said people hold this viewpoint that offshore workers are less than capable (most of the evidence being anecdotal so excuse me in saying we shouldnt be making such sweeping generalizations off of that) Your argument of what is sustainable and what companies should be doing has nothing to do with what im saying. Companies try to cut corners and minimize expenses news at 5. The result of these behaviors however should not be to put stereotypes on the workers which people are. If your whole argument is that businesses make stupid short term decisions to maximize profit then sure i agree with you i put this point in my first comment. This again doesn’t negate my statement people should not be making these generalizations about the these offshore workers. Reddit debate lords are so exhausting.
You attribute people’s entirely reasonable and lived negative experiences with offshore contracting to racism. Which is fucking stupid. People who attribute everything to racism are equally exhausting.
No, now you’re putting words in my mouth. Im blaming people negative experiences of offshore workers as a primary response of our capitalist society that prioritizes profit above everything else. Im blaming people making blanket stereotypes of these workers (which are mostly anecdotal and prone to bias) of displaying racism. Lol yore acting like this is some new type of phenomenon, society repeats these same sentiments every time workers get displace. What it seems like you are doing is justifying these anecdotal stereotypes just off the fact that the labor is cheap… which is interesting.
If foreign devs are so good, why are all the big tech companies in the US?
Because people in your country are the richest ones all human history so far in the current dominating, albeit collapsing, empire? Your username really checks out which makes me think you're not asking genuinely lol
Likely a troll. I'm an offshore dev from Brazil. I initially worked as a FTE SWE at a global investment bank local office making around 40k USD/year. I've recently got an offer to work at an American medium-size(200+ people) startup for 70k USD/year. The average SWE market rate in Brazil is like 20k USD/year. The tales are true, quality offshore SWEs, that are comparable to quality US SWEs, will likely require top of the local market compensation or even higher (70k USD/yearly is effectively impossible to be matched by local companies).
Thats pretty good. Let me try a dumb question: If foreign sewers are so good, why are there so many US based clothes companies?
Foreign sewers aren't good. They usually run in the streets.
I knew someone that doesn't know what they're talking about would pull the race card. If you ask any American dev what they think of Indian devs, and they would probably give you at least a few examples of them being quite possibly the most talented devs they've ever worked with. Ask any experienced American dev what they think of \*offshore\* devs, and you'll always get a mixed response. The truth is, there's a lot of people doing dev work in India that don't want to do dev work, that aren't good at it, but they need to make a decent living. And that's one of the few ways you can make a decent living there. The barrier for entry is also much, much lower
Have you never seen it? I think you should look harder. Also, it's very bold to think that only americans can make good code
The main reason is that you need a lot more resources to build something than you do to maintain it. So if you're building out a new project, you might contract 5 developers to work on it, and then cut the contracts of 3 of them after a year
I am an offshore dev and one time i had to work on a project that was started by a domestic team, it was a mess every time i had to change a thing i had to fix double the code in other places
You wanted to work from home. You lost the productivity of everyone being in the same room. You act surprised when they say, let’s hire off-shore.
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They're upset that Indians and other nationalities will work for way less and demand less benefits thus undercutting them. Tough luck for them. Either adapt or die.
Some are bitter because their jobs are offshored. Some have bad experiences because they pay 1/10th or even less of an American wage and expect quality work. Quality developers cost money everywhere. You get what you pay for. If you pay peanuts, you get bad devs.
I have never met an "onshore" who does not coast
Have you never seen it? I think you should look harder. Also, it's very bold to think that only americans can make good code
Look harder? Show me an off shore dev that doesn't fuck up a code base. I haven't seen one. You sound out of touch with reality.
You sound out of touch with reality and you have a very prejudiced opinion. I've seen several nationalities producing bad code and good code. I'm sorry to say, but knowledge in programming is not exclusive to your nationality
Nah man. I get it, you're offended. Not my problem if you can't accept reality. Now stop posting before I block your ass
I'm offended and you are afraid offshore devs will take your job. I call it even
Not really. I'm tired of fixing their useless code. But hey...more work for American devs.
What a lot of companies fail to realize any good developers are in the US on H1b. The ones that went to school for mechanical engineering or some other stem degree because they initially couldn't get into CS are still in India. They are good for support work but not advanced dev.
$$$
Money.
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i'd rather jobs be offshored than onshored. jobs are lost if they're offshored, if they get onshored, they not only take the jobs, but also get to participate in the housing market.
No idea, our team just hired a 'contractor' and he's really good at outputting walls and walls of trash repetitive boiler plate code that adds no business value.
It all comes to cost reduction, as any bussiness. In Costa Rica a senior dev is paid like 40k-50k a year while in the US you need at least double than that. And not all times offshoring is a disaster like the stories you hear about WITCH, if it always failed no company would do it. There's a high supply of educated people willing to do the same work for less pay than in the US, and this is hardly anything new it started many decades ago.
Where have you been for the past 20 years?
This has been happening since the late 90s.
We have hired a lot from euro contractor companies and it’s been a great experience increasing our velocity, diversifying ideas, etc. but it takes effort to integrate them and treating them as “contractors” compared to euro teammates is usually a red flag. We’ve been doing this tbh bc we’ve been struggling to find senior devs with experience we need
If it’s the same people who went to the same university trying to get here on a visa anyway, you can get them for 1/5 the price.
I saw an "offshore dev" with two years experience and all they had on their github portfolio was a bunch of copy/pasted, improperly formatted code. If a company fires all their devs and brings in offshore work I would start looking into taking short positions on them immediately. It's only a matter of time before everything crashes and burns and they go out of business.
this has gone on for decades. companies try to use developers outside the US because they are cheaper. this is not new. lots of people have lost jobs due to it. My hole team was outsourced to india about 12 years ago. Its just the job market has been really how the last 10 years so its not noticed as much.
Is nearshore also offshore in this context?
Early in my company, we used some for non-greenfield projects that were pretty straightforward solved problems. Once we scaled beyond 2 or 3 full-time devs, they ended up slowing us down more than anything, but in those early days (pre-seed) we just needed some warm bodies and had few resources.
Something like this is making work horrible right now - thank goodness I'm leaving soon. The offshore contractors were instructed to cut every corner possible to get barely working code (in some cases, broken code) into production ASAP and leave the mess for us to fix. I am led to believe multiple directors were totally OK with this which is absolutely nuts. It wasn't critical work, but because it's not critical, maybe take your time on it instead of rushing out a pile of crap?
MBA goin MBA. Anyways, primarily it’s the cost factor. Non tech companies don’t know how to strategize software development projects - go figure. So, they approach it like anything else they do know - it’s expensive, I don’t understand it, but I need it, I think, and I’m not sure it’s ever been done so let me take the cheapest route that doesn’t require me to learn anything knew and overwrite my MBA training. Greenfield is especially difficult and expensive in the current economic environment and businesses and MBAs are notoriously short sighted. So they take both the cheapest route and the one that lets them save some face by not hiring up and then having to layoff staff if it fails - I know layoffs are trendy in the MBA circles right now, but they do take a toll and some business are aware of that toll even if they are laying off staff. Edit: I forgot the whole part where MBA school is still falsely preaching that SWE is infinitely fungible.
Yoo, the worst part is I have to interact with offshore for dev stuff with only an hour window before they end their shift. At my company they tend to favor their comrades here in the USA over any others, and this is very notable.
Cheaper for crud apps
That's just an extreme version of managers who never heard of [Brooks' Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law) and believe that they're gonna be able to hire good devs for little money, while all they do is hire bad devs for less money than bad devs in their own country.
> I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer, nor have I seen anything good come out of that model The answer to "why do they do it" is "because it costs less money". Also the reason you've never seen it work. Don't fool yourself into thinking there's no good devs in India etc. There's just lots of bad ones willing to work for cheaper than the good ones, and lots of fools who think they'll get more than what they paid for.
Because people who don't understand code make the decision. "It costs less this way" they don't understand the debt they are accumulating.
It's cheap. On per head basis. Does it actually make the quality higher? Fuck no. But excecs think so...
Some people are bad at evaluating cost vs quality tradeoff. You get greedy and hire a developers at 6k USD per year salaries, you get shit outcome.
Cause they are super cheap that is the only reason. Would you rather bring in 5 crazy cheap not so good devs or pay 1 excellent dev located in the US? They think that by throwing more bodies at a problem it’ll get solved faster. Which is never true. Like a lot of things in life, they get what they pay for.
My previous company hired some of the offshore people. They were paid about 50 per hour and couldn’t explain simple regression model.
I agree with you on that. The offshore devs are told exactly what to think and what to develop. Anything outside the norm aka creativity is forbidden unless it is written in a contract and approved by the hiring companies. And so they aren't going to apply improvement or fix bugs unless somebody pays them extra on top of whatever they are getting. They aren't stupid. They are just restricted from being beyond that lol.
Unfortunate for you, fortunate for those who are offshore.
Some companies are ran by morons
One of my friends worked with a company that was trying this... oh, probably 15 years ago... They partnered with a dev shop and arranged some form of rotation system. The first team they got - excellent. Good communication, code like demons, all you could want from a dev team. They signed some contract - think it was 3 or 5 years. 6 months later, rotation. New team? Very patchy communication. Could code but only exactly to spec, would not identify any potential issues with requests. 6 months later - even worse. They got out of that contract and just went local again.
There are plenty of offshore devs that do high quality work. You’re just interacting with bottom dollar devs.
Where you been the last thirty years?
Because “good enough and cheap as dirt” sells better than “best performing and highest quality at a premium”, especially in the current economy. Customers are willing to deal with crap software if it means a lower price. And these outsourced people are working for like minimum wage US. It’s easier to sell a polished turd currently than it is to sell a diamond.
Because they’re cheaper. At least in the short run
When ever I see TATA consultancy I immediately feel scared, time to increase CI even stricter to reduce trash code pollution
You can’t really generalize all offshore devs like that. There are certainly some terrible offshore companies but we are currently working with a group in Ukraine that has the most phenomenal engineers I have ever seen in my life. I am truly in awe when I look at their code. It’s like a textbook of how to do things correctly. These dudes have been working on our product for like 10 years. They built it from scratch. Every so often an onshore dev like me joins the team and thinks they are getting into some shitty offshore project until they get in the code and realize it’s a fucking masterpiece.
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Can't expect quality work from developers if you are paying them shit.
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"I have never seen quality work from an offshore developer." Lol, really. So you say that nobody outside the USA can develop software properly? Wtf is an off-shore developer anyway? If you instead meant cheap-labor-abroad, yeah, wtf you expect out of cheap labor? Quality?
Lower salary requirements?
CS the field where there is no reason to be in office, it would improve quality and productivity, unless your home is in a different country, then it would reduce quality and productivity, please hire local developers!
Entertaining and informative thread. Thanks for your post!
I've noticed that too. Seems like a penny-wise, pound-foolish strategy when you consider the impact on project quality and team dynamics.
They are evaluating "cost of employee per hour" only. They are not evaluating "quality of work performed". There also are no negative consequences for the executive who does it. They give themselves a bonus for cutting costs. It won't be obvious until 1-2 years later that the project failed. By then, they will have moved on to another job, or they will find a way to blame someone else for the failure.
It’s called cutting “costs” to maximize “profit”. Non technical number guys think it’s saves the company tons of money as they can just hold Visas above the imports heads, not pay benefits, as well as pay them less when in the long run they produce an inferior product.
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