ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/14/2044245&mode=thread&tid=156
Public Terminal Log in 55 Create a new account Related Links 56 More on Programming 57 Also by Cliff Ask Slashdot 58 Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life 59 User Interface and Carpal Tunnel - Tech Solutions? Change The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. If you screw up, even as little as twice a week, you lose a week of development, and sometimes more. Background: I've invested five years involved in the management and growth an Indian engineering team, and spent one year working for an engineering company based in Bangalore. I'd like to share some real experience and raw numbers for educational purposes. The burdened rate for your average full time US software developer currently runs around $30-$50 an hour. Note that Bangalore is perhaps one of the more expensive markets for developers, certainly more so than Chennai and in Hyderabad (see below for regional discussion). From a cost accounting perspective this makes loads of sense. At this point many laugh and point out that there is then no way one could hope to understand these people, but that's an oversimplification. I've yet to have an experience where I've been unable to understand what an Indian Engineer is telling me. Where this becomes an issue is where communicated expectations and requirements are sloppily conveyed verbally or through informal channels, such as Email. This audience of any should know to manage requirements well, but I've seen this mismanaged repeatedly. Working in India is often like working at the end of a 10K mile whip. Most people forget that hallway conversations don't make it to your remote office. One more point on requirements: make sure your specifications include a definition of UI, preferably developed in the market where the product will be used, and look into using a string table to manage your strings, which helps greatly in your localization efforts. I actually make these recommendations regardless of where the SW team is located. Since when have traditional SW developers created winning interfaces? If an Indian engineer has been toiling to get into SW development since they were 13 years old, how would they gain the experience to know what UI is intuitive? This is actually a huge issue, but in summary, nail your requirements and you come close to nailing this whole "they speak the same language" deal. The work day typically begins at 9-10 am, and continues till 7-8 pm. Lunches are at noon or 1, and there is a coffee time taken at 3 or so. A phone call will nail close to every issue, far more so than an Email. Finally, know your regions and how to take advantage of them. The "High Tech Triangle" is getting pretty sophisticated and therefore expensive, relative to other developers in other areas in India. Step outside this triangle and find some fat development deals, such as Profluent (not the one in San Jose), who is located outside this region and therefore hit even harder for business than those within, but my getting access to Profluent came through a strong personal relationship I have there. Bottom line: process exists to negate risk, so evaluate the risks, then staff and define processes as appropriate. If I were to do it all over again, and I am, I'd invest in a project manager whose not afraid of 36 hour flights and 2 am calls, and I'd work with a smaller development shop before I'd work with a large one, for reasons I'll not enumerate here. I'd like to end by sharing why I continue to chose native Indian developers for personal start-up ventures involving my investments: the developers I know there exceed the technical sophistication of domestic US resources. Too many American engineers smugly avoid cramming on diverse topics, a skill learned in the high-stress schools that weed our slackers. If I want good engineering work I call my friends in India. You could always hire a Canadian team - you'd get someone in your own basic timezone that speaks (more or less) the same language - and works for 63% of the money (last check of the currency value). My employer first began contracting work to India about 10 years ago. Here are a few of our learnings: + make sure your design documents are very detailed: if you want a data structure built a certain way then write it out; Use IM from your home PC to stay in touch during the evenings. Set up a daily phone call with key team members and talk everything through + if you can afford to bring a couple of the remote team to North America for a few weeks, bring them over at the start of the project so that you can spend some time with them and get them started on their work while you can supervise them. This isn't because you don't trust them or they are incompetent, it's just a fact of life that colocated teams function better + plan project execution so that the application compiles, links, and runs from Day One. This is an area where Microsoft has it right: nightly compiles of the whole project that can be tested each day will ensure that the remote team is building the application the way you are expecting. Fred Smoothie (Score:2) Wednesday May 15, @02:39PM 197 1 reply beneath your current threshold. If there's that much more money in Bangladesh, though, then people there can afford to go to the hospital, and that many people are no longer dying in the streets. Moving jobs around doesn't destroy wealth -- it simply redistributes it. What globalism does is help make the market more even -- smooths out the particularly rich areas (as labor will be imported from elsewhere) and the particularly poor ones (as they'll be able to export labor cheaply). The net result, then, is that the standard of living everywhere will move closer to average -- without the use of government wealth redistribution (which I find repugnant) but merely market forces. The point I mean to be getting to, however, is that people won't starve -- they'll just have to work for less. Countries without minimum wage laws will do much better, of course (they'll be able to export the labor of folks willing to work for less than the minimum wage elsewhere, whereas those in countries with minimum wage laws will be unable to find work at all in fields where the going market price is below the mandated minimum wage) but that's a problem with government interference, not globalism in general. The main reason I can see people being homeless and starving due to such smoothing is artificial price floors -- minimum wage laws (allowing foreign competition to result in unemployment rather than merely lower pay), building regulations (raising the minimum price of housing and forcing people to be homeless rather than merely poorly housed), that variety of thing. Those problems can all be fixed -- and the net result will be less starvation. I also say this as a fellow with a sister who'll be halfway around the world in a few months who may not come back -- I hope that she can always find work able to cover food and rent wherever she goes; You claim to be a "capitalist", but what you want is not a free market but a market rigged with tariffs and restrictions and taxes to benefit yourself alone. It's a short-sighted thing to want -- it may benefit you immediately, but the infrastructure set up to profit you immediately may bite you in the ass later; You mistake capitalism, a means of efficient resource distribution via fair competition, with unadultered greed; Trimming the fat implies that everyone who was laid off was useless. Thank God this financial crisis came along so we could get rid of those chunks of lard clogging the arteries of efficiency. Plus, the people who remain feel good about themselves, because they were the "lean" not the "fat". If minimum wage had followed the meteoric rise of the CEO/Exec salary from the early 80s at the same rate, min wage would be 25$. Ever wonder why downsizing/timming the fat, etc, etc seems to be much more common these days? Well, the overhead for paying management is much higher, and as usual, the middle to lower tier pays for it by being subjected to trivilizing and belittling buzzwords designed to protect people from having to swallow the 'reality' pill.
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