The picture above looks so nice doesn’t it? The sun is shining and the water is inviting. It looks like where we want to be. And it might be.
Or perhaps not.
It looks great from here, but what’s under that water?
You never know until you get in, and therein lies the risk.
Offshoring seems like a great idea. Developers in other countries – India, Brazil, Philippines, Ecuador, Poland – are less expensive than U.S. developers. There’s no debating that. We have a much higher cost of living than many other countries, and need to get paid a certain amount to live. So for managers focused on the bottom line, offshoring can look very tempting. Aha! they think to themselves. I can get three developers for the price of one, and get three times the work done at once!
I kid you not. I’ve heard the arguments, and sat on my hands. I’ve sure you’ve heard these arguments too.
Don’t get me wrong, while I may piss someone off by saying so, the U.S. does not hold the market on smart people. I work with great developers from all over the globe. In fact, part of our internal product development is done by an offshore team. For us it works great. But I’m starting to run into companies that it hasn’t worked out so well. And here’s why.
If you’re going to work with an offshore team you had better be ready for the increase in communication that’s required. In addition, what is that team doing for you? How familiar are they with your business domain? If you’re building a product for the U.S. market, do they understand it enough to offer suggestions and not simply code what they are told to code?
And don’t get me started on how I’m seeing Agile sold to business people who are unfamiliar with software development and are trying to hit (sometimes unrealistic) budgets. I’m going to schedule a webinar for January to ensure that how Scrum works and what’s required to make it work is spelled out in business speak for those in the business community. There is a lot of misinformation out there and it pisses me off.
But I digress and am getting long.
So, the lesson here is that if you are going to offshore, and as a U.S.-based business I would hope that you choose us or another U.S. company if you too are a U.S. company, then do your homework before diving in, and put solid contracts and metrics in place. Then measure, measure, measure. If you’re doing most of the job then the savings might not actually be there. And remember, you don’t know what might be lurking under those calm, blue waters.
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