[HN Gopher] Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing (2016)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing (2016)
        
       Author : throwaway3157
       Score  : 107 points
       Date   : 2020-02-24 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.troyhunt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.troyhunt.com)
        
       | gentleman11 wrote:
       | Lets assume that the situation changes over the next 15 years and
       | these outsourcing places get really legitimately good at making
       | software.
       | 
       | What can we, the highly paid locals, can do to justify our high
       | salaries at that hypothetical future point?
       | 
       | (playing starcraft taught me a tremendous amount of respect for
       | East Asian creativity and work ethic)
        
         | inertiatic wrote:
         | Most of the tech behemoths already have offices around the
         | world.
         | 
         | Maybe these offices are just following the great standards set
         | by the people working at the HQ.
         | 
         | Even then, there are a bunch of companies that have their
         | engineering based in other countries.
         | 
         | I personally worked for a few companies that are major player
         | in their fields (although not unicorns) that have offices here
         | in the Greece.
         | 
         | Most of these companies have one thing in common, the
         | leadership, everyone at the C level, work and live in the US.
         | In fact, the companies I worked for had HQs in the SV.
         | 
         | I don't think SV has a significantly better talent pool. My
         | anecdote is that my local team has had more than a couple
         | laughs looking at code written by our SV-based colleagues.
         | 
         | But I think that building your business there certainly gives
         | you a huge advantage.
         | 
         | Your engineering doesn't need to be there.
        
           | bilbo0s wrote:
           | > _Your engineering doesn 't need to be there._
           | 
           | and I'm fair certain engineering won't be there in the
           | future. Probably not even in the US. Just the research-y type
           | stuff might stay here longer to be close to the universities.
           | But assuming the market is left to its own development,
           | ginormous US based engineering teams will likely go the way
           | of the Dodo bird in the future.
        
             | inertiatic wrote:
             | I don't know if I can make an informed prediction, but even
             | if I could I don't think I would be that extreme.
             | 
             | I would expect salaries to fall but I wouldn't expect
             | software development to move entirely. It should make sense
             | for a lot of companies to pay a premium to keep their
             | workforce closer to their leadership.
        
         | user5994461 wrote:
         | What do you mean by highly paid locals? With the exception of
         | the Silicon Valley or NYC bubble, developers in big cities in
         | developed countries are approaching US and European salaries
         | and they are increasing quickly.
         | 
         | Well, truth be told they're already surpassed us. If you want
         | cheaper, you might as well go to Spain or Italy or even France.
        
           | bilbo0s wrote:
           | That's not really true man. I've worked with devs from
           | Argentina and Ghana, and let's just say we were all surprised
           | at how much the managers at my company were paying to those
           | consulting firms. Think devs getting USD350 to USD1500 per
           | month while I knew for a fact that USD50 to USD225 per hour
           | was being paid out.
           | 
           | I think a lot of devs in the West would be almost shocked at
           | the amount of money devs make in other places.
        
         | cosmodisk wrote:
         | What differentiates US (most big software names come from
         | there) from the rest of the world is their ability to sell.
         | There are already enough countries on this planet that can
         | produce high quality software that could be sold as hot
         | buns.What most of those countries don't have is the huge VC
         | industry+ tons of people who know how and who to sell be it B2B
         | or B2C. This, however is changing slowly and you can expect
         | much more level field over the next 10-15 years.
        
         | PeterisP wrote:
         | The value that the role produces, and the growing demand for
         | even more software. Currently the companies can make a profit
         | paying the current high salaries and selling products, and they
         | need more developers - so one can expect that as the price
         | difference erodes, it will mostly be by the salaries of the
         | Asian developers being brought up to current first world
         | levels, not the first world salaries (for software - less so
         | for some other jobs) being brought down to the global average.
        
         | SamuelAdams wrote:
         | Since no one answered your question the best thing to do is
         | become very good at working with end users. BA work isn't the
         | same as software development but it is harder to outsource. You
         | usually need someone on site who can effectively communicate
         | with project stakeholders to capture requirements and write
         | them down in a way that developers at these shops can pick them
         | up and run with. That is a much needed skill, I've seen many
         | BA's make 100k+ at non FAANG companies in cities where the
         | median household income is 45k.
        
       | starky wrote:
       | My experience with working with Asia off-shoring is with physical
       | products, so this was interesting to see the software perspective
       | where there are multiple programmers working on something in
       | parallel, whereas my experience is more serial with the (English
       | speaking) sales contact communicating with the various
       | engineering teams as the project gets passed along.
       | 
       | Definitely agree with the can-do attitude of China. Sometimes I'm
       | pleasantly surprised, other times a vendor thinks they are doing
       | us good and screw us over by completing work before we have
       | agreed to it. This is mostly a temporary issue until you build a
       | relationship with the vendor (in China, relationship is
       | everything) and know each other's expectations.
       | 
       | While I've never worked with an Indian vendor directly, it is
       | interesting to hear about how people there have very narrow
       | knowledge bases. This is something I've noticed with people I've
       | interviewed that are recent immigrants, they know their area, but
       | when asked about the rest of what we would be asking them to do
       | they have zero clue. This is also (lesser so) a case with recent
       | Chinese immigrants. Not great when we are essentially hiring a
       | mechanical equivalent of a full stack engineer.
        
       | anthony_barker wrote:
       | He misses some stuff.
       | 
       | 1) 4 hours of time overlap rule - you need to have overlap of 4
       | hours between teams
       | 
       | 2) Requirements need to be much tighter with outsourcing. Often
       | you need a full BA whereas with some devs you can work without a
       | formal spec but some wireframes etc
        
         | SamuelAdams wrote:
         | No, Troy specifically mentions differing requirements depending
         | on the country that the ousource firm is located in.
         | 
         | >Another pattern I found time and time again when outsourcing
         | to India was that they'd want really detailed documentation.
         | This is always going to be a contentious issue and there are
         | many different views of how much should be done under what
         | circumstances. But more so in India than the other two
         | locations I'll talk about shortly, detail was important to
         | them. There were many occasions where we would make assumptions
         | that a feature requirement clearly implied certain things only
         | to later discover they was deemed "out of scope". Now that can
         | happen in any project in any part of the world, but it was
         | extremely prevalent in India.
         | 
         | > On the plus side for China though, one of their strengths
         | (particularly over India) was the ability to get down to work
         | with minimal documentation.
        
       | Ididntdothis wrote:
       | I really don't understand why US companies are outsourcing to
       | India. The time difference alone pretty much sets you up for fail
       | unless people want to be working at midnight all the time. I find
       | it much easier to work with Costa Rica it South America where you
       | can quickly make calls during the day. Especially with
       | outsourcing you need to do a lot of handholding to get things
       | going so you need good direct communication.
       | 
       | The whole idea of sending a big pile of requirements and then
       | getting something useful back simply doesn't work. You need
       | direct communication without middlemen.
        
         | lowercased wrote:
         | worked at a place in the south (think Georgia) that opened an
         | Indian office. about ~40 devs in the US office, they brought
         | in.. 5? to the Indian office. It was primarily for the time
         | difference, and their primary role was to triage and research
         | issues during the 'off hours'. Anything they couldn't figure
         | out bubbled up to the US, usually after several hours of
         | initial research. It wasn't a horrible approach, and I think it
         | worked OK because it was intentional.
        
       | thrower123 wrote:
       | I do a lot of work with a few of the big outfits, as we often get
       | pulled in to help setup a software product that they resell to
       | Fortune 500 companies as part of their package contracts.
       | 
       | I have never seen a case where they actually add value; it would
       | always be much easier if we could just get directly connected
       | with the end-customer.
        
       | discreteevent wrote:
       | On India: I worked on a project outsourced to one of the big
       | companies. A senior engineer there said that when people
       | offshore, the person making the decision is a bean counter. So
       | they only look at price. They take the cheapest and they get what
       | they pay for.
       | 
       | But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal
       | cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a
       | much better job done.
        
         | dreamcompiler wrote:
         | Cost can be reported as a simple scalar. Quality cannot. This
         | is why at most companies, cost counts far more than quality.
        
         | macjohnmcc wrote:
         | The company I formerly worked for outsourced to India and we
         | found a lot of accounting irregularities where we were be
         | charged twice for the unnamed senior developers and later find
         | out that it's the same person and that that person was not even
         | spending 100% of their time working on our project. It wasn't a
         | complete loss as some people really did a fantastic job but
         | overall I'd never recommend it to others.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | > But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their
         | normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could
         | get a much better job done.
         | 
         | The whole problem is nobody can hope to spot the real "smaller,
         | higher-quality companies" in that chaotic, offshoring-driven
         | environment. Race-to-the-bottom is the equilibrium outcome.
        
         | bradknowles wrote:
         | I remember being brought in to operationalize the first version
         | of Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail Gateways (NAVIEG) that
         | would run on Solaris (this was in 1996). It was outsourced to
         | an Indian company because no one in Symantec understood the
         | first thing about programming on Unix. Turns out that the guys
         | in India didn't understand programming on Unix, either.
         | 
         | The Indian developers basically just transliterated the Windows
         | code to Unix, and got it to compile. Then they shipped it.
         | That's when the real problems started, and I was brought in.
         | 
         | Now, I've never claimed to be a developer. At the time, I was a
         | consultant and Unix sysadmin, but the concept of "DevOps" had
         | yet to be born.
         | 
         | What I could tell them was that, in 1996, basing your Unix
         | implementation on Solaris 2.5 (not even Solaris 2.5.1) was a
         | bad idea, because there was a whole host of things wrong with
         | that ancient version of Solaris, and if they wanted to be on
         | that platform then they needed to be on a much more modern
         | version.
         | 
         | Secondly, threading on Unix at that time was ... problematic
         | ... and that was true even on the most modern versions of Unix
         | that were available at the time. Multi-process programming
         | worked well, however. On Windows, the reverse was apparently
         | true. So, naturally the outsourcing developers used threading,
         | and they used threading on an ancient version of Unix that had
         | about the worst possible implementation of threading. Oy.
         | 
         | Of course, learning these things at this stage didn't help
         | Symantec. They had already outsourced their aircraft and gotten
         | an Albatross back in return.
         | 
         | I did help them develop a testing regime that could relatively
         | accurately simulate a real-world distribution of mail message
         | sizes and types, with a real-world distribution of supposedly
         | infected messages, and then beat the holy living crap out of
         | the server trying to push that volume through as quickly as
         | possible.
         | 
         | And I did get called back to teach a class on Unix to the lead
         | QA team in Denver, so that they could try to support NAVIEG on
         | Solaris 2.5.
         | 
         | But so far as I know, the consulting company I worked for never
         | got called back to help them actually fix their design problems
         | with the code, and I think that project probably died a pretty
         | quick and vicious death.
         | 
         | Also, so far as I know, no one at Symantec ever again tried to
         | develop or support any code that would run on any flavor of
         | Unix or Unix-like OS.
        
         | mathattack wrote:
         | Sometimes the math is "We can do it twice in India and still
         | save 50%"
         | 
         | Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows that the
         | correlation between quality and price is very loose. The lowest
         | cost provider is rarely great, but the high cost provider can
         | also be selling you a lot of juniors.
        
           | raincom wrote:
           | Exactly this. Usually, they have a couple of guys who are
           | really good in that team, along with lots of juniors who are
           | there for billable hours.
        
             | cosmodisk wrote:
             | That's pretty much the model amongs most vendors. Just so
             | recently we were implementing a new system. Our account is
             | small,so obviously we don't get the level of people some
             | big corp would do. A junior,yet capable, consultant was
             | working on the majority of the project. However as soon as
             | we started having some more serious technical issues, it
             | was like 'emm, I'm not sure'. Then we end up on a
             | conference call, 8 people in total. Bloody hell,I thought
             | I'll pull all my hair at the end of the call. Absolutely no
             | value or capabilities to explain how we get out of this
             | situation. Eventually, after our CEO suggested we drop this
             | thing all together, we did get some senior person involved.
             | Honestly, if I'd ever had a business,I'd hire on spot.The
             | ability to talk to different business people in a way they
             | could understand, technical knowledge and business acumen
             | was fantastic. Shame all companies only have one or two of
             | these people...
        
             | ta1234567890 wrote:
             | Sounds exactly like law firms.
        
             | mc32 wrote:
             | They demo the skilled people and once they have the account
             | they turn it over to the juniors...
             | 
             | But that probably works in most cases/places anyway.
        
               | makr17 wrote:
               | Yeah, but so does every US-based consulting outfit I've
               | ever seen... IBM, Oracle, Accenture. The knowledgable
               | Senior Dev answering your questions during the bid goes
               | away _quickly_ once you sign. They're off to convince the
               | next sucker...
        
               | bradknowles wrote:
               | That's why you write the contract to the outsourcing
               | company so that you lock in those experienced people for
               | an extended period of time -- like years.
               | 
               | But then the price mysteriously increases to the point
               | where you might as well have hired them on-shore and
               | you're not saving any money.
               | 
               | So, do you want to save money by offshoring everything,
               | or do you want to get good people to actually do the real
               | work that needs to be done?
        
           | detaro wrote:
           | > _Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows_
           | 
           | Probably why parent mentioned finding a smaller company. I
           | don't know about the Indian outsourcing market specifically,
           | but in many sectors it seems a few mid-sized companies are
           | the best for this sort of thing.
           | 
           | Which also means you need to find the right one for your
           | problem, your purchasing department won't be set up with
           | them, and you won't be able to just order as much capacity as
           | you want, so getting there is hard.
        
           | cosmodisk wrote:
           | https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.techspot.com/amp/news/79848.
           | ..
        
           | markkanof wrote:
           | This isn't exclusively an Indian outsourcing issue. I used to
           | do work for a small US based contracting company. At the time
           | I was mid to senior with about 10 years experience. On all
           | projects they would present me to the client as the level of
           | developer that would work on their project, but would then
           | also assign a few just out of bootcamp devs to work on the
           | project and we were all billed out at the same high rate.
        
       | iamsb wrote:
       | It is quite interesting to re-read this after the zoom ipo. Zoom
       | built a huge team in China, effectively outsourcing most of the
       | development to lower cost countries, that gave them leverage in
       | terms of being able to deploy capital more efficiently.
       | 
       | There are certainly ways to work around most of the problems the
       | author outlines. They are definitely real problems, same as
       | spending 5x for onshore resources. Ideally you should build
       | onshore teams, if you can spend the money. But if you can not,
       | then do not get discouraged by these problems. Employee churns
       | are not that difficult to mitigate, just matter contracting
       | properly with the employees and providing enough consideration in
       | the contracts.
        
       | throwawayesteu wrote:
       | How to do the outsourcing business if you want to provide premium
       | service? Even if the field requires specialization, say machine
       | learning / data engineering, it's hard to justify the price that
       | is 40% more than average for the area (say Eastern Europe).
       | Example: I work for a company that does ML/DE services, and I
       | believe that everyone in the company (we're small company in
       | Eastern Europe) tries their best to do the great job and do what
       | is best for our clients; plus seniority and talent is way above
       | average for the market (mostly due to specialization). But we're
       | still having hard time increasing our hourly rate.
       | 
       | What is something that we can do that would say "these people are
       | worth it, let's go with them even though they are more
       | expensive"?
        
         | cosmodisk wrote:
         | Higher prices!= higher quality. Here's how your post reads: we
         | have senior devs+ we try charge 40% more,yet clients don't buy
         | in. You know what? Every shop in town has senior devs and most
         | of them are passionate. Depending on which Eastern European
         | country you are based in, even the entire team full of PhDs in
         | ML with 10 years experience may not sound that extraordinary.
         | You need to find the reason why you are ACTUALLY better than
         | your competition.Do you have tons of white papers or cases
         | studies on your website that clearly show how and why you are
         | solving these problems? What are you doing differently compared
         | to the guys from the shop across the road? You need to be very
         | very comfortable with saying " fuck yes, we are 40,50 maybe
         | even 100% more expensive than any other company you'll be
         | speaking, but here's 25 reasons why you search for ML experts
         | stops here". These things are learnable, however if there's no
         | strong sales culture in the business,I'd advice to start
         | looking for someone who could deliver these messages to your
         | prospects.My experience: work for a company that operates in a
         | low entry, saturated market and sells services almost 3 times
         | the average price in the country.
        
       | shruubi wrote:
       | I just came out of being forced into running an offshore team
       | from the Phillipines for roughly six-ish months, my experience
       | was that they were very affable with good english skills and
       | worked hard, there was a noticeable problem with technical skill
       | which caused a number of bugs to occur to the point where I would
       | just spend the time fixing them myself than throw them back at
       | the team where they would cause more problems.
       | 
       | The biggest problem however, was that no matter how many times I
       | asked or provided documentation/feedback, they would ignore
       | established coding standards and established processes and just
       | do things their way, and when I would ask about this, I would
       | just get shrugs.
       | 
       | Finally, we got saddled with a "Project Manager", which I put in
       | quotes as their contribution to the process was giving daily
       | excuses as to not turn up to our daily progress calls, and the
       | ones he did turn up to, he would visibly fall asleep. When I
       | eventually pulled him up on this his response was that "he wasn't
       | directly paid for but an included part of the cost so you can't
       | complain about what you get."
       | 
       | Admittedly all of the above is rather negative, but I think this
       | highlights the "get what you pay for" aspect of offshore
       | outsourcing.
        
       | cbg0 wrote:
       | I work remotely from Europe for a North American company, so
       | here's my two cents on this topic:
       | 
       | Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very
       | bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added
       | benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually
       | suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless
       | of where they live.
       | 
       | While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations
       | in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing
       | corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand
       | recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting
       | up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and
       | where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent
       | in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire
       | the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area,
       | you're most likely not hiring only the best.
       | 
       | I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a
       | stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead
       | of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed
       | around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually
       | read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." - most would
       | trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies.
       | 
       | If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs,
       | don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office
       | and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career
       | with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of
       | time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | I think this is a really valuable perspective. Would be curious
         | to hear from more folks on "the other side" about their
         | experiences. I've often considered doing the expat thing and
         | trying to work in or setup such a shop.
        
       | british_india wrote:
       | Exhibit A for the dangers of outsourcing software development:
       | Boeing's offshoring of the 737 MAX software.
        
       | PragmaticPulp wrote:
       | Hiring good offshore developers directly as remote employees is a
       | much better option, in my experience.
       | 
       | It requires more up front work to identify, hire, and retain the
       | remote employees, but you need far fewer developers when you can
       | appeal to the best developers who know what they're doing.
       | 
       | This doesn't work if your company has any attachment to
       | headcount, though. It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote
       | employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing
       | firm if your company only looks at the numbers.
        
         | MarkMc wrote:
         | > It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the
         | price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your
         | company only looks at the numbers.
         | 
         | Can you expand on this? I would have thought it was cheaper to
         | hire the remote employees directly than hire the outsourcing
         | company...
        
           | chii wrote:
           | The premise is that an excellent developer can command a high
           | price, whether remote or not. Some developers place a premium
           | in remote friendliness, and thus allow a slightly lower
           | salary for it, but only up to some amount.
        
           | ska wrote:
           | I suspect the argument is that workers are just not fungible,
           | but the outsourcing approach sort of assumes they are.
        
       | cosmodisk wrote:
       | Pretty much my experience re Indian outsourcing. What I used to
       | find most annoying is that 'manager' mentality: I appreciate a
       | lot of people like to boss people around and,as the author
       | states, it's kind of safer (and better paid) step on a corporate
       | ladder, but boy some of them are useless.. You talk to the guy,
       | he agrees to pretty much anything,even If I'd ask to build a lift
       | to mars.Then eventually he comes back with dev's questions.I
       | provide very detail and explicit info on what I need(For anyone
       | who has any knowledge in the tech they used it would almost be
       | like asking to write a couple of loops).Again lots of
       | yes,yes,yes.Then silence and again even more questions. Manager's
       | function is absolutely useless in this case. Also, if the churn
       | rate is low, the companies usually have very capable people who
       | tend to know their shit.
        
         | crystaldev wrote:
         | It's probably because engineers are not good at dealing with
         | customers.
         | 
         | Edit: Apparently nobody gets this reference anymore, and I'm
         | old.
        
           | bradknowles wrote:
           | No, we're not.
           | 
           | And don't you even THINK of stealing my red stapler. ;)
        
           | alatkins wrote:
           | Take my upvote fellow oldie. Office Space can't be mandatory
           | school curriculum any more :-)
        
           | inkeddeveloper wrote:
           | I'm a people person, damnit!
        
         | specialp wrote:
         | I think too they tend to give you their worst teams to start to
         | see if they can get it done. We had a team from India yes, yes,
         | yes us all the time, and then ask loads of questions 36 hours
         | later that showed they had no idea of what was going on and had
         | no hope of delivering. It would continue like this as it seemed
         | like they always wanted to have the ball in your court and wait
         | on you. The day + latency was killing us too and eventually we
         | were a week from deadline and I thought they'd never get it
         | done.
         | 
         | Then they must have brought in the SEAL team six of Indian devs
         | and just got it done with no further questions asked. I was
         | really surprised.
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | There just seem to be some cultures where saying "no" is
         | difficult or taboo.
         | 
         | I've never worked with Indians, but I've had it happen to me
         | with people in both Thailand and Austria. The Austrian one was
         | particularly bad because it involved the movement of people and
         | physical goods. Everything was "yes, yes, yes" until the day of
         | execution, when it was radio silence.
        
           | dfcowell wrote:
           | I can highly recommend "The Culture Map" which I'm about half
           | way through right now. Really helped me wrap my head around
           | this, and other cross-cultural communication pitfalls.
        
       | admn2 wrote:
       | I heard Argentina as a popular place for "near-shoring", which
       | likely wasn't very popular when this was written 3 years ago.
       | Anyone here been using Argentinian tech talent?
        
         | numbsafari wrote:
         | When I worked as a consultant, mostly remote, working from
         | Argentina was awesome. Buenos Aires is a great city, and the
         | time difference is perfect for the lifestyle, as you are
         | generally slightly ahead of the US, so you can play late and
         | sleep in a bit while still getting a normal business hours day
         | in.
        
         | blaser-waffle wrote:
         | My org has a lot of talent in LATAM. Argentina is onerous due
         | to the ever changing financial situation (taxes, regs,
         | currency, etc.). We do have a few bodies down there, though,
         | and general consensus is they're competent.
         | 
         | Chile and Mexico are generally more stable, and both the
         | Chilean and Mexicans I've worked with remotely have been solid.
         | We had a technical (data center) team in Mexico that only had 1
         | English speaker but still got stuff done quickly and timely.
         | 
         | Also heard good things about the Zona America in Uruguay. No
         | direct experience with it, however. Part of me thinks about
         | sneaking away down there for a few years...
        
         | jermaustin1 wrote:
         | I've worked with a number of Argentinian developers through
         | using Avanade and Accenture on projects. The developers were
         | great, even spoke decent English, but since it was through
         | Avanade or Accenture, after 3 years of the managerial-
         | interference, overhead, cost overruns, and contract disputes
         | with what is considered in-scope/out-of-scope, the projects
         | were eventually canceled. Had we just been able to hire the
         | developers on an hourly basis, everyone would have been
         | happy... well except the sales managers, delivery managers,
         | development managers, and project managers.
         | 
         | That said, I didn't care for the way that our company was
         | billed $75-150/hr for a developer that makes $350-1200/mo, and
         | that the developers made so little when their managers were
         | billing so high.
         | 
         | Early in my career, I was livid when I found out that my time
         | was billed to the client 3x what I made, so I cant imagine how
         | demoralizing it would be knowing you are paid 20x less than you
         | are billed out.
        
           | cosmodisk wrote:
           | This, sometimes has very interesting consequences. A friend
           | worked for a company that basically moved parts of
           | sales/customer service to a Northen African country.They
           | hired people on a few hundred dollars a month(if that much)
           | to sell high ticket hotel bookings sometimes going for
           | thousands/day.The team struggled to comprehend that anyone
           | could get a room that costs 10 times more their monthly
           | wage.This highly affected their ability to service/sell.
           | Eventually the entire thing got canned and moved to Europe.
        
         | Ididntdothis wrote:
         | Pen testers. They were very good and the time zone makes things
         | much easier compared to India.
        
         | powvans wrote:
         | I'm based in the US and worked with a remote team in Argentina
         | from 2013 to 2015. They were fantastic. Most of the team was
         | based out of the company's office in Cordoba, but we also had
         | some remote devs who lived in Buenos Aires rotate into the
         | team. The offshore firm took great care to make sure that
         | everyone on the team was well trained on the specifics of our
         | project and general development processes.
         | 
         | Last I heard they were purchased by Mercado Libre in what I'd
         | assume was an acquihire.
        
         | rossdavidh wrote:
         | I worked very briefly at a place (which was run poorly, btw,
         | which is why I left), that used Argentinian devs for some of
         | the work. The devs seemed good, and the similarity in time-
         | zones compared to U.S. helped a lot with communication and
         | coordination.
         | 
         | I did hear, however, some discussion in the office that there
         | was a strong suspicion that the Argentinians were working on
         | other customers' projects during the time they were supposedly
         | 100% on our project.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Discussed at the time:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925
        
       | AnimalMuppet wrote:
       | The worst I've ever seen: Not only did the contractor deliver a
       | buggy, half-finished product, he also used our printer to print
       | out an offer to a competitor to sell them our source code!
        
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