Ben’s post made me think about something I’ve been meaning to write about. I recently left a company (who shall remain nameless to protect me from lawsuits… if you remember the name keep it to yourself) that was trying to do offshoring because someone at a much higher level than CIO had read all the hype that it was cheaper, and was demanding that IT prove that they were cost effective by investigating and hiring a company for offshore work. I would tell you the name of the offshore company (and they are one of the better ones I’m told), but lawsuits… remember??
Before I proceed to tell you how it worked out. I want you to know that I have known many Indian programmers in the states and all them have been really good at what they do (read they work hard and were extremely competent… and the ones I’ve known were way better than the average US-born programmer). So don’t accuse me of bigotry!
So back to the story… The nameless company had tried 4 times on 4 different projects. They first quoted it in house and then got the offshore company to quote it. The offshore company usually would take an extra month or so to do the project with a price of $50k less than doing the project internal. So that sounds like a good deal! Except one thing… when we got the project we were expected to pay immediately (which we did); after close scrutiny the project was never fully completed by my standards (there were always critical features missing as well as horrible bugs… not to mention that it rarely was coded to anything close tothe corporate standard); the offshore company was gone. So we would have to fix the project so it could go live; the amount of time to do this usually equalled the original time estimate given for the project if it had been done internally.
I wonder if other companies are having the same kind of luck, and if they are why are they doing it?. It seems to me that having to pay twice the amount is not getting something cheaper… it smells fishy to me.