At the time of writing this, I am an independent consultant who has not been particularly busy for well over a year, and whose principal client does most of their software development in India. Still, I’m not looking to change careers after 20 years of work and graduate school.
I’ve read a lot of articles decrying the morality, patriotism, or short-sightedness of offshore development. But I’m writing as a practitioner who must decide how to judge and adapt to a new reality. I want to give two specific reasons, which I haven’t heard put forth yet, for skepticism regarding the practice of offshore software development.
Irrational exuberance
The pendulum is swinging too far. It’s not enough for the people promoting offshore work to be enthusiastic about it. They have to 100% bought-in, and ridicule any other way of doing business. In the industry, I hear two things over and over:
Venture Capitalist: We won’t invest in any company that doesn’t use extensive offshore development.
Entrepreneur: It would not have been possible for me to start my company without the economics of offshore development.
This herd mentality is like any other business fad, such as the superiority of the new economy. It wasn’t enough to embrace ecommerce as a way of doing business. If you were engaged in traditional commerce or media, you were labelled a loser. I don’t take the VC’s or Entrepreneur’s remarks as false or totally misguided. It’s rather that I hear them so much that they now strike me as mindless cant. There is getting to be less and less careful judgment behind these statements.
The View From Below
There is less enthusiasm, and significant frustration, coming from the offshore development managers as compared to the corporate leaders. The people I know who are most deeply involved in offshore software work tell me that the results are mixed, and that the long-term situation is not accelerating but leveling off. These people are as well-positioned to make offshore development succeed as anyone I can imagine. Here’s what I hear from them (paraphrasing):
“We are bringing our software testing work back in house. We weren’t able to specify the testing requirements precisely enough to get real economies from their work. We had to iterate too many times. It’s our fault for not making the requirements clear enough, but the effort we would need to do it right seemed greater than just doing it ourselves the way we had been.”
“There’s a growing problem with turn-over. Our one manager offshore is not able to develop a long-term bond with employees that will keep them around. There are always new opportunities for the most talented offshore employees and they will leave to take them very quickly. Usually there isn’t even an opportunity for a counter-offer.
Worse, we were forced to sue some of our former contractors because they developed a directly competitive product. When faced with the suit, they agreed to stop working on it and gave us all the code.”
“People think that in India there is a huge population of talented and well-educated software engineers willing to work for almost nothing. My experience is that there are more educated and experienced programmers in Massachusetts than in all of India. We have tapped out the source of top programmers there. Now there is much more competition for talent, just like here, and as a result, there are higher wages and lots of turnover.”
This last comment could be misread to say that one State in the US is “smarter” than all of India. The point is actually that the higher education system of the US is much larger and better developed than in India, and in fact many top Indian students come to study in Massachusetts, for example, and then graduate, and stay there. Eventually, India may develop a higher education system that educates as many people as well as the US system does. Maybe one day people will line up from all over the world to study engineering at several hundred schools in India. But that hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t even happened in Japan or Europe. And when it does happen, it will coincide with rising living standards that make the Indian programmer just as expensive as the American or European or Japanese.
Bursting the Bubble
I think that the bubble of enthusiasm will burst with the first few major failures. I suspect we will see some of these scenarios play out shortly:
I’m not rooting for these things to happen; just predicting them. My confidence comes from the public chorus saying nothing to support these predictions, but a lot in private telling me they are already coming true. So I’m not giving up on software development as a profession in the US. There’s too much code to be written, and not enough good programmers in the world to do it as fast as we need it.
Copyright 2004 Peter
Prokopowicz