Does Outsourcing Programming Really Save Money? 653
itwbennett writes "In a blog post titled 'Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Cheap Overseas Programming', John Larson tells the story of a startup that shipped its initial programming to India, paying $14 per hour, with predictably disastrous results. Larson concludes: 'I have yet to see a project done overseas at that sort of hourly rate that has actually gone well.' But in this not-uncommon tale of outsourcing woe, is the problem really with the programming or with unrealistic expectations?" The comments on Larson's blog post (originally titled "Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India") seem to me more valuable than the post itself.
I outsourced this first post! (Score:5, Funny)
Seems to work ok.
Re:I outsourced this first post! (Score:4, Funny)
I had someone laugh for me.
Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the overseas programmers suck (debatable, but let's assume) doesn't mean management isn't going to go for the $14/hr carrot.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
It might take a few years, but you'd think that eventually they'd catch on that these projects are costing more to maintain and start teaching that in business school. If it's just for throwaway one-off programs then outsourcing probably isn't so bad though.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
> It might take a few years...
Yup, I've been hearing that since 2000. How much longer do you think? 20 more years? 50? A century? I don't think so. Show the PHB two salary numbers, he's going to pick the lower one, never mind any other factors (e.g. overall cost).
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because they dont give a rats ass how much it costs in 5 years.
They care about the balance sheet for the next 90 days.
This will not change until they fix the problems with corporations.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
This will not change until they fix the problems with corporations.
Then you have a long wait becuase corporations have worked the way you object to for as long as there have been corporations (and if think corps are a recent phenomena you don't know very much about them.) Corporations answer to one entity, their investors. Who are the investors? If you have a 401K- YOU. Retirees, pension funds, individual investors, hedge funds made up of other investment entities, if you save money in any way YOU are the person who causes these "problems" you're referrring to. Your only fix really is to remove any profit motive from yourself, so, fix away.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
And yeah, not all investments are divorced from their investors. Just usually mutual funds, like GP was talking about. You know, the sort that "regular people" invest into. The fact that you have had actual communication with your fund manager sets you apart from the masses.
As for "going elsewhere", my company's 401k plan has a list of places I can put my money. They're all treated the same. And I'm going good when it comes to wealth, I HAVE a 401k option.
They might as well be aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations answer to their investors, that's a laugh. The modern corporation is an illusion run by psychopaths to confuse and decieve their investors. The number one goal of corporations today, is to guide as much of the company income towards company executive pockets and to maintain this for as long as possible until the company explodes under the weight of impossible debt.
The reality is failed offshoring is driven by nothing but pure greed. Some executive will claim the project costs 'x' based up a salary of 'y' but by offshoring for a salary of 1/5'y' they will save money and the executive deserves 10% of that saving as a bonus, of course when it fails the executive has already received their bonus and has launched a bunch of other half-arsed schemes since then.
As for the off-shorers they are coding for a price and they will contently code what ever crap they have been told to code no matter how piss-poor the results.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
lmgtfy:
Research:
1: Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD. Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav
Sci Law. 2010 Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93. PubMed PMID: 20422644. [nih.gov]
and the summarizing article from Time [time.com].
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. The number of people that discount the short-term thinking of outsourcing cannot be overstated (parse that - hopefully I wrote it right).
I have looked time and again for over 10 years (having been laid off twice - once directly attributable to outsourcing and the second time to the current downswing) as to when this wave of outsourcng will change.
PHBs will look at the bottom line alone.
Let me give you an example. At a bank I worked at, we had a memo right from the top - for every local hire, there MUST be at least 7 overseas - otherwise the local hire is not allowed. I found the quality of work being done there sucked! Of the 800 odd people on various projects, there were more than 700 offshore - the rest were onshore - and I was privy to those rates. Offshore rates were 1/5 of the onshore equivalent. I remember one of the local bosses railing at one of the onshore representatives of the minions at the quality of code being delivered. It seems if a zero was entered into a field instead of a non-zero number, the web app would crash (or it was something equally stupid - please don't hold me to actual issue).
Given that these banks took such a large amount of money from US taxpayers, the least they should do is to ensure that any new jobs they have are given to onshore people. Instead, they have gone extreme - and are offshoring more than ever. Ingrates R Us.
Background: I am originally from India, one of the original outsourcers and have seen, with mine own eyes, the precipitous fall in quality of the offshore developers. Until about the mid- to late- 90s, things were not so bad. But Y2K changed all that. All and sundry became s/w developers. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha, it's similar in US too. The web turned everyone into a "dev" even if they only know HTML and some high level scripting language. So now there's a glut of programmers that just aren't very good.
As "Joel on Software" puts it, even if you're using Ruby on Rails and just push a couple buttons to create a web page, you still need to understand the fundamentals like pointers and recursion. If you can't understand those then you will have difficulty with abstraction elsewhere.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who tried in 2010 are feeling the pain now.
I am not finding any shortage for American Software Developers work for good developers.
I think a lot of the rub is the fact the businesses are no longer tolerant like in the 90's to those unprofessional quirks of those IT people and expect a more professionalism in their organization. So the Jeans and Tee-Shirt are being replaced by Slacks and a collared shirt. Working flex time is pushed more to 9:00-5:00 and we are no longer getting Huge Salaries just to write HTML.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
You actually dress as a show of respect for others. It's an easy boost for your career with only a minor outlay. Good quality dress items only need to be cleaned and pressed infrequently and are actually more comfortable than cotton which dirties quickly and retains sweat and moisture.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
You put on a suit as an engineer and you'll find it hard to get a job in California. On the East Coast though it opens up a lot of doors. It really does depend on locale.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're not aware, a bunch of "hippies in jeans and t-shirts" have done quite well here in Silicon Valley. While obviously there are many other factors at play, one reason for the success of the valley is that, by and large, nobody cares what you look like so long as you're intelligent and get your work done. Keep your suits, we'll keep our t-shirts, and call me when your fashionocracy catches up to our meritocracy.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4)
I hate all forms of corruption, but ill still choose a guy in a suit over a hippy in jeans a t-shirt
I wouldn't. The guy in a suit doesn't have the skills to get away with wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The "hippy" probably gets to dress like that because he's so good at his job that the company is thrilled to have him there.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
A long while back I had got transferred from SE to a tech job within the marketing department, and had to at least wear a sport coat and tie. (I bought a Harris Tweed.) I learned fairly quickly that a business suit is just a toolbox. Some of the outer pockets are mostly for show (or some very thin materials - notes, etc., maybe a few business cards), but the inner pockets are designed to carry the tools of the trade - daytimer, wallet+checkbook thing, business cards, etc. Keys and some other personal items go into the pants pockets. Properly designed suits (and sport coats) are what allows men to carry all that stuff around without a purse. So it's just like a mechanic's toolbox.
Suit coats used to have watch pockets, but those are no longer necessary. It might be interesting to re-introduce a similar pocket for the cell phone. Although that might be better in an inner pocket, with a pickpocket preventative of some kind - maybe a mechanism that keeps that pocket closed unless the arm is raised into the position to remove it?
It has long been the case that (except for the fashion plate 'shiny suit' types), the more expensive suits were built in such a way that you could carry more in them without it showing. A very good tailor will ask you "Which side do you carry?", which refers to which side you put your wallet in. The tailor will adjust the suit to hang straight when the wallet is in that breast pocket, so it's hard to tell that it's there.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
> It might take a few years...
Yup, I've been hearing that since 2000. How much longer do you think? 20 more years? 50? A century? I don't think so. Show the PHB two salary numbers, he's going to pick the lower one, never mind any other factors (e.g. overall cost).
Actually, it's already happening. US companies that are moving IS jobs over seas are behind the curve. Companies that shipped jobs over in the 1990s are starting to bring them back.
One reason out-sourcing/off-shoring doesn't same money is management. You need on site management where ever the programmers are, but you still need the management structure at the home office to oversee projects.
Another reason is just we just haven't figured out how to work in remote teams. There certainly are exception, instances where teams of people geographically separate have turned out a successful project. But those are the exceptions. In most cases, conference calls and shared desktops just can't replace sitting next to someone and looking over their shoulder at the screen.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is software is an expense that adds little value to bottom line unless your a software company. Therefore go cheap and invest in more sales and accounting gurus who can better raise the stock price and bring better value to the shareholders. That is what is taught in business school and makes sense. You dont save anything as it never generates revenue.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
"That is what is taught in business school and makes sense. "
Yet the company I am at that has a non business school owner who goes against ALL the crap they teach at business schools is still here after 40 years and 3 recessions.
All of out competition is now gone. The last one filed for chapter 11, 1 month ago. WE are the ONLY company now left on this side of the state while all the Business school morons cant keep their business running.
I don't care if you have 20 phd's in business. you suck compared to a man that pours his heart and soul into a business and does the right thing before maximizing profits.
Honestly, business school grads are some of the stupidest people I have met. They can't comprehend concepts like customer satisfaction, customer retention, talent retention, and paying people what they are worth, not what they will begrudgingly accept.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I could mod your post up higher (but hey, it's +5 Insightful as I speak, so what can a guy do, right?).
I, too, work for a small manufacturing business where the owners are not from "business school backgrounds". They simply understand our industry and have hands-on experience with it, and do their best to run a successful company.
I've seen plenty of other places run by the folks with "professional degrees" too, and typically, they get way too fixated on spreadsheets and reports, vs. having a firm grip on the realities unfolding right in front of them every day.
You *do* want a few basic, easy to interpret and use reports being generated, so you can nip problems in the bud. (Say you've got guys out in the shop who start slacking off, pretending they're really busy when they're not? They might be pretty effective at making the people observing them believe they really are working as hard as they can. It's not that hard to pace yourself so you take 15 seconds to put a box on a belt, or make sure you cut a piece with the saw *slowly* to waste a little time without anyone noticing. But a good daily or weekly report on man-hours spent and output completed would "red flag" this behavior pretty quickly.)
But keeping one's head buried in the numerical data seems to be the downfall of many an MBA out there. You simply can't base all your decisions on what produces the best numbers for you in certain columns.... You've got to actually care about what your business does (yes, even if in the short-term, that occasionally means taking a loss to please somebody).
Take our business, for example. In the recession, we really took a beating and we had to do 2 rounds of painful layoffs. Still, we did what was needed to trim things back to an effective skeleton crew of employees who could keep the place functional ... and we held our prices as low as possible, and provided the same level of customer service we always did (even when we had to pay to correct problems for customers that weren't really our fault, sometimes). We outlasted one of our biggest competitors, who has been a thorn in our side for decades. (He responded to the downturn by running a barrage of expensive advertising and giving away special promotions and perks.) Now, we suddenly have almost all of his business, which is giving us a big boost moving forward.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that some number of years/decades back, most of Corporate America lost its sense of direction/balance/mission. Today it's "all about the money," and personally I believe that's wrong. If you're a car company, and you're "all about the money" instead of "all about cars" you may not have failed yet, but you're clearly on the road there.
Obviously you can't ignore the money. By the same token it's probably handy to have some MBAs around. But you need to keep track of who's in charge and what's the mission, and that shouldn't be the MBAs - it should be somebody experienced in the company's products.
To switch from the car company analogy to the software company analogy, would you rather buy your software from a company that's "all about software" while managing to make a profit, or from a company that's "all about profit" while managing to make software? Which company do you think will produce better software? (or better cars, to switch the analogy back.)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not what public companies USED to exist for. They USED to exist ti make profits and pay dividends. Now, every shareholder imagines themselves to be a daytrader and insists that if the stock price doesn't go up, then the company is doing something wrong.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
Ten or fifteen years ago, Fortune Magazine (IIRC) published a study of the occupants of the 'head shed' - Chairman and C-level down to VP level executives. They found that a large majority of the whole set had graduate degrees, mostly MBAs. But taking only Chairman and CEO, a majority did not have college degrees, and quite a few did not graduate from high school. Those folks were the ones who had whatever it takes to go out and build a company, and hired the rest. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples. Hewlett and Packard may also be examples - they had degrees, but were electrical engineers.
Based on this, I concluded that the drop-out path is much higher risk and requires more self-determination but has higher rewards if you make it - and a job at McDonalds awaits you if you don't make it. Taking the MBA path you are more likely to do well, but unlikely to do extremely well. Some take the ski jump, some ski down the fall line.
Interestingly, a study I read a long while back said that entrepreneurs have a much higher than average incidence of ADD - along with explorers, fighter pilots, and creatives of all types. :D
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha. I used to know (distantly) the scion of a self-made man (I've known several of those, actually). The founder of the company started out during the early days of the Depression. He was homeless, no education, either 1st or 2nd generation immigrant. He walked along the roads picking up bits of metal, and carrying them to the scrap recyclers to make a dime. He slept under bridges. Soon he found enough materials to build a little push cart, and he was able to pick up and bring more scrap in each trip. (I don't know but I assume he also picked up and sold or used stuff that was too good to go to the scrap guys.). Eventually he scrounged up enough money to buy a truck. By then he was able to afford a room in a small fleabag hotel.
By the time of WWII he had a rather successful business, recycling metal.
After WWII he got in to scrapping out war materiel - old ships, jeeps, etc., cutting them into pieces and sending them to the steel plants for reuse. By the time I was sentient Zidell Explorations was a huge presence on the waterfront in Portland OR, running a half mile or a mile along the waterfront. There were always from four to six old ships, military and commercial, getting torn apart. By the late 1960s most of the metal was getting loaded onto ships and sent to Japan, where it was turned into Toyotas. Zidell was one of the largest companies in Oregon by then.
He died. His son had no interest in the business AFAIK. From what I was told he just bought houses and cars, and white powder, and women. He was, by all accounts, a very rich and very bad MF. He did spend some time in jail, IIRC for felony assault.
And thus, just as in The Good Earth [wikipedia.org], the money recycles back through the system. Others made lots of money selling him toys.
Folks who grow up rich have a very serious disadvantage - they don't have that driving motivation to NOT BE POOR. So they don't work that extra hour. So, generally, they end up working for someone else. They may get paid a lot, but they are still working for the guy, or the family of the guy, who built the company.
And that is the point. Except for the very biggest corporations that were formed out of mergers, back in the day there was one person, or a few persons, who started from almost nothing and BUILT THAT SUCKER. And those are the CEOs and Chairman of MOST corporations. I'm not saying they are nice people - but most of them are indeed self-made, still to this day.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Funny)
Available evidence suggests you can sell an unfinished program just fine.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Employees of some outsourcing outfit do not work for you.
They work for their own company.
That contractual wall that separates them from you ensures that they will never care about your company nor go out of their way to
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
And there is a substantial business risk in transferring the corporate processes to a new, different process. Case in point - a company I used to work for bought SAP, and budgeted 1 year and $300 million for the cost of the software, changing their systems and training for the US half of the company. Three years and almost $1 billion later, they finally were mostly done. The company cancelled the rollout to the overseas half of the company, and SAP stock dropped 20% the next day.
That old computer system is ingrown into every aspect of a company, down to the color and layout of the receipts handed out for petty cash. Replacing it is very much like replacing the nerves in a body without putting the patient to sleep during the operation. And when, as is common, the big company is the result of a dozen or two dozen mergers of many smaller companies (themselves also mergers), it is likely that each of those smaller divisions is still running on their old systems for the same reason, and it's just too expensive AND dangerous to change.
Citibank reportedly spent $500 million just fixing Y2K bugs in their existing system - and saved their company, according to the reports. Imagine changing operations to fit to a new system written from scratch.
Probably 1/2 of the problems that will crop up will have to do with business processes that nobody realized even existed.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're overestimating the rationality of people when it comes to economics. People don't actually do things that are cheaper and more efficient. Most people in management will spend $100 chasing $2, and they'll get rewarded with raises and bonuses for doing it.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Funny)
I'm trying to grasp the mental gymnastics involved in going from owning a color laser to leasing one. Was any drinking involved? Did any of the male executives suddenly spring out of their office smelling like the leasing company's female representative?
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
The way thing work now, that's never going to really happen. It's the MBA effect. The goal of an MBA is increasing ROA, there are two ways to do that, either increase revenues or decreases assets. One is hard to do, the other is pure profit for the current quarter. That's why many projects (and factories for that matter) get outsourced. Reduce the assets and the magic number goes up. Brag about it to your peers and get promoted to some other job, the sucker who comes after you gets to clean up the mess.
The "it will cost more later" argument won't do anything as long we allow disposable idiots to run businesses. That why it's so remarkable when someone who doesn't consider it their one and only goal to increase a magic number comes along and leads a company to (temporary) greatness. There's a convincing argument that Google, Apple, even Microsoft (among others), became huge because their CEOs looked beyond the numbers games and actually cared about the companies they were working on. Dell's the current example for the idiot CEOs who only care about numbers that don't actually mean anything, Dell gradually sold off it's assets to a Chinese company, now that very same company is in the process of cutting Dell out of all the businesses it used to own. Why? Because Dell doesn't own anything but a brand name and a web site, now.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Same tactic politicians use.
Sell off the capital buildings, then rent them from the new owners. Claim profits during your term, and put it into the programs of your supporters. Let the next guy figure out how to pay the rent.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not the MBA effect. *sigh* I have an MBA. I rant about the exact same things you do. They don't teach managing to the quarter or tweaking some stupid number to get a bonus. Quite the contrary, they teach building incentive systems that DON'T reward doing stupid or harmful things to your business. The "it will cost more later" argument is perfectly well respected by any competent MBA, though of course how much more and how much later matters. The damn sad thing is that if I come in and engage in a course of action that drives a company's revenue through the roof this year, but puts it out of business in 5, the market will put the share price through the roof and give me a ton of money. The market is not composed of MBAs. It's composed of fools. The only solution I can think of is simply not to take a company public, because when you do, you have to pander to fools rather than build REAL value.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah one of my friends said that there is a cultural thing in some countries like India where people refuse to admit that there is a problem, even when they're calling you for help about their problem. He works with hardware rather than software, but it's the same idea.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. You should feel threatened, because quality frequently doesn't win out.
There are a lot more McDonalds than five star restaurants.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Informative)
His point is that, yes, managers are going to be blinded by that $14/hour price tag and go with that route, but those projects usually fail. They are pitched for too many man-hours up front and they usually run over, and even then the result often isn't up to snuff. The result is that they give up and hire American (Western) programmers to finish the job at market rates. Thus most of the "value" of the overseas effort becomes a cost overrun, but the worst part is that time to market suffers because the initial specification valued cost over time to an unrealistic degree. A company can only get burned like this so many times before cooler heads prevail.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if the managers who made the decisions stick around. If they take their bonuses and leave, then it may be the guy who ends up cleaning up the mess who also gets the blame. After all there wasn't a problem until he pointed out that the work wasn't going to get done on time, and now he's spending so much money to fix a problem that was only supposed to be a small fraction of that to start with...
Office politics can be as stupid and unrealistic as the real stuff. Also once the decision has been made, some people can become completely unable to accept that it was a mistake or that it should have been done differently. They'll blame someone else for hiring the wrong outsourced IT company or not tracking the project closely enough.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
A company can only get burned like this so many times before cooler heads prevail.
That has not been my experience. I have seen businesses make the same mistakes over and over again, and cooler heads just never prevail. Aside from my personal experience, we see it all the time that some CEO gets hired to a company, they totally screw things up and leave in some level of disgrace, and then they're hired by another company to be the CEO and repeat the whole thing over again. We've seen "geniuses" at Wall Street almost destroy the world's economic system, get away with it and stay in their positions of power, and then they turn around and engage in the same behavior.
People often aren't rational, and people often don't learn from their mistakes.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder if it's that business is *evil* or if they simply don't know. I know it's easy to assume they're evil, but the more I work in this field, the more i think it is simply that they don't know.
Almost all of our business folks come from either a finance background or are a product of the industrial revolution.
Finance... well all they want is to plug in some equations and compare numbers and that's the end of their thinking.
Industrial management is all about GOOD PROCESS and fungible parts. You need a few skilled people to design the process and assembly line... then the people are replaceable cogs. 95% process, 5% people is they key to success in the industrial age. Because R&D costs are typically small relative to the manufacturing costs, R&D was typically allowed to do its own thing. If costs needed to be made, why cut the R&D... there's plenty of manufacturing workers (fungible parts) to cut.
Now what do you when manufacturing is no longer a key component of your business. As in software. When business looks at costs... the only thing they can replace the manufacturing worker with in their minds is... the people in R&D. They're the ones making things. They cannot conceive of a world without fungible parts. Even though the fungible parts have all been automated (the whole point of computing). The compiler does the manufacturing. Yes, there are still some parts that are not fully automated, but that's just waiting to happen.
They simply take all their old industrial age management techniques and try and apply it. Remember it is 95% process, 5% people. This is why you get such an emphasis on project manager, product manager, technical manager, programmer, workflow... They are trying their hardest to just build a process that will make projects successful.
Now some companies do get it. The industrial revolution is over. You need to learn new skills. So the big tech companies for example... get it. It is 95% people, 5% process. It has more in common with a guild of craftsman or a profession. They luckily only need to deal with the madness of finance people. But at least they've rid themselves of industrial age management.
And it is changing. The big companies that DO software do get it and have changed. Increasingly they're making their products into services (yay... cloud computing)... I don't see much of a future in outsourcing itself. Which I guess means if you feel threatened by outsourcing... I'd feel just as threatened being on the outsourcing side.
Off shoring is another issue all together. If they can get very skilled people in another country for cheaper...they will and that is not the same as outsourcing.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, that really hits the nail on the head. My experience with outsourcing has been that about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 depending on the place will be solid coders. The rest make passable grunt coders if you have a professional developer reviewing what they do and correcting their mistakes. Outsourcing seems to work best as a labor multiplier for a solid local developer/designer/architect.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
My company outsourced a piece of a project (GUI redesign). The result looked good and met the requirements but turned out to be inadequate. No error conditions were handled, any change to the test cases caused it to fail. However, since they brought it in on cost and schedule they were given a larger piece as a follow-on. We ended up rewriting both the GUI and the second piece and were late by a year. You can blame the spec (they did) but no US developer that had to support the finished product would have done shoddy work. I think the outsource company did it deliberately because they expected to be paid to fix all of the problems.
Re: (Score:3)
Delivering shoddy work may pay off in the beginning, but on the long term, I am pretty sure much it's stupid. You've lost one customer, and gained bad reputation.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely. A huge problem with dealing with outsourcing is that the specs required are nothing like what people are used to. Your average Indian contracting company will work to the spec and nothing but the spec. If the spec does not say that function calls should be checked for error returns, they will not be. If the spec does not say what each and every error message must be you will get a single question mark for the ones not clearly specified.
My wife has worked with this sort of thing. Management was very happy in moving all the programming jobs to Ireland and India while (short term) keeping the spec writing in the US. What was never understood was that the volume and detail level of the specifications needed to increase 5-10x from what it was. This might have been obvious to anyone that had dealt with outsourced programming before, but it was never factored in.
Of course the end result was that the added costs for spec writing and design ended up pushing those jobs offshore as well. If you are going to spend 10x as many hours on a job, it might as well be done at a cheaper rate. It will be humorous to see what happens to this in the end, but it will take a long while to collapse.
Same company bought a building and all the upper level people were congratulating the VP that pushed the deal through because the building was already wired for networking. Of course it was wired for Token Ring and they were using 100BaseT Ethernet so ever bit of wire had to be ripped out and redone, but that was long after the congratulations. Probably cost them 2-3x what a bare building would have, but nobody figured that out until much, much later.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India) - which makes explaining requirements more difficult, but at least they can do math properly.
Not all overseas developers suck, and not all US developers are awesome. I can see why management would be willing to take the lower cost option, when they aren't guaranteed (or qualified) to identify and hire good talent locally.
Don't be the ugly American (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India)
English is an official language of India, and not the primary one. The primary official language is Hindi - you know, their native language.
I realize it's vastly preferable that they speak English if they work for you, but you're implying there's actually something wrong with Indians who don't speak English, and that's absurd. There's nothing any more backward or stupid about an Indian who doesn't speak English than there is with a Canadian who doesn't speak French or a Belgian who doesn't speak German.
Don't practice the cultural ignorance and arrogance that befalls other Americans. I think you're smarter than that.
Re:Don't be the ugly American (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't be the ugly American (Score:4, Insightful)
English is an official language of India, and not the primary one. The primary official language is Hindi - you know, a native language.
FTFY
There is no single native language for all of India. There isn't even a single native language for a majority of India. Hindi is is the most popular first language in India but native Hindi speakers are largely confined to handful of states of the North/Central area. India's high tech centers, where most of the outsourcing/offshoring takes place, are mostly in the South.
Re:Don't be the ugly American (Score:4, Insightful)
you're implying there's actually something wrong with Indians who don't speak English
Nobody is implying that a particular Indian is defective if he does not speak English. On the other hand, if the Indian that you're specifying your requirements to, in English, does not speak English very well, then the end result is going to be defective.
Pay less for the same suckage (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps from business's perspective it works like this: Since we don't know how to leverage, motivate, and manage talent, we might as well pay less for the same suckage.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
usually you only get to pick one
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
That is because management sucks too. And has problems dealing with the fact that there are business critical people that are more important than they themselves are and are not managers at all. I firmly believe that a lot of outsourcing projects really are driven by managers unable to deal with the fact that the engineers are a lot more important as individuals as they are and far less replaceable. And better educated. And actually have a clue on how to do their job, at least the good ones. That engineers generally (and justified) look down on management types may also play a role.
Side note: There _are_ good managers. But they are even rarer than exceptional engineers, as there is no management education process that filters out the numerous duds.
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
In response to the suck speculation. I know some really good Chinese programmers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. They're not going to work for $14 and hour, unless you throw in a percentage of the company's shares and some serious pandering from management. Crap Chinese programmers cost about RMB¥5000 a month, about US$5 an hour, but prices climb extremely sharply after that. Outsourcing companies will hire those crap ones and pocket the difference, every time.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Chinese, Indian or whatever programmers. It's just the Chinese companies, and I assume Indian companies who actually need to sell their own product want to hire the good engineers to get the job done and so they are in demand in the market and thus expensive. To an outsourcing company however, maintenance is an externality, they don't care if something is well engineered, just if it meets the requirements to the letter, or at least appears to then its good enough, so anything will do.
Why would you go with a Chinese outsourcing company then? Well, I am in the business of making good software, but here's how it would go if I wasn't. I'd fly you on a junket and you'd stay in a 5 star hotel, paying for a few extra nights because who wants to go on an overseas trip without seeing the sights. You'd come to my office in Beijing, it is big, has a lot of people in it and they look like they are working hard. I would then precede to show you some professional looking slides and give you some serious false impressions as to what we have delivered in the past and I'd deliver it with such unerring conviction you would have to believe it. Then I would take you out to dinner, Peking duck, abalone and alcohol, I would invite some girls from the office, receptionists etc., who would smile at you and blush when you try to speak English with them, that's just what Chinese girls do, but you feel like they're into you. Then I would take you to do something else, grand sights, more booze, or a really, really good prostitute.
Now, this is what a Chinese sales guy will give your manager: optimism, presentation and vice. What can you give him? Well, results presumably, but they come later. Up front you can only give him cautious estimates and a list of things that can go wrong. Why would anyone but a non-idiot manager choose a local team of engineers who know what they are talking about when he can have a free holiday to an exotic country and hear some really pleasing things?
Outsourcing companies are there to make money, pure and simple. Nice things cost money, that can be good engineers (local or overseas) or it can be the sales team and what the sales team and their junkets and presentations.
By they way, I'm obviously not North American, but I've worked with American engineers, a few of them have been really great, most of them have been quite ordinary, kind of like what you get here in terms of ability, but usually a little more methodical and steady. The advantage is mainly that you know what you're getting when you hire locally (or find your own talent overseas rather than relying on an agency).
Re:Faulty Reasoning (Score:4, Informative)
They'd managed to create a search algorithm with a big O of something around n cubed. I set about rewriting it to get it down to N all while wondering why on earth Outlooks API didn't support this relatively basic feature. It was at this point that I discovered that the API actually did support it, however the programmer had written a wrapper around the API hiding the method in question, then re-implemented it in the train wreck of code I was removing. That was the last time I ever worried about competition from cheap outsourced labor.
Unrealistic Expectations? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unrealistic Expectations? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that $14 and hour, once management overhead and other costs come out, isn't even a reasonable living in India. Figure that after all the overhead and costs come out, coders are probably making less than $4 an hour. Last I checked ( I was vaguely curious about living there for a year or two at one point) average salary for a technology professional in an Indian city is around $25-30K a year. A lot less than even pretty depressed areas of the US or Europe, but still a Hell of a lot more than $4 an hour.
This tells me that most likely when you're paying $14 an hour for coders in India (I'm specifically using India here, because I have at least some idea what "reasonable" pay is there) you're not getting good coders by Indian standards, let alone any arbitrary external standard. If you want an average talent you have to pay average rates. So in India, if you want an average talent programmer, you're probably looking at paying the *programmer* (not the contracting company) $14 an hour. Now add overhead and costs to *that* (also factor that he managers and such are likely correspondingly better, and therefore more expensive) number and I bet contracting India isn't a lot cheaper than doing it in house.
Agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen the work infosys and wipro do. They are the high end of Indian programing sweatshops yet everything I've seen from them stinks. They promise the world but don't deliver any better than a first year degree student could in any developed country. Except a first year student would be cheaper, has the same time zone, and speaks the same language.
College Hires the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you hit on something, even if you haven't realized it. Companies don't hire first year students. The numbers have been dropping for almost a decade now. Companies get it into their head "why deal with college hires when we can use experienced off-shore". Well you can't keep a pipeline of experienced programmers in the US unless you make the investments in the next generation of programmers.
Re:Agree (Score:4, Funny)
Naw, the exchange rate sucks.
Re:Agree (Score:4, Interesting)
...The biggest problem I have run into is cultural, you'd have better luck getting someone to work in Green Bay during a Packer game in the US, than you would during a hockey game in Canada. Also their sense of urgency is much more "American rural north" rather than "Manhattan" so there are occasional mismatches in expectations.
Hmmm, you do realize that outside the western US, Germany, Japan and some other uptight countries, this is actually the "normal" way of life for the largest part of the world? Some call it "quality of life".
Most of them seem to be drunk most of their "off" time so good luck with oncall.
This may or may not be true. In France, people drink wine almost like water. Germany and Belgium are known for their beer. Scandinavian countries' weekeend passtimes is drinking any alcohol they can get their hands on, so would you call all of them "drunks"? Again, this labeling thing mostly seems the problem with the uptight and stressed out USians - the rest of the world works just fine as it is.
Outsourced Programming Flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been involved in many outsourced projects, a number of problems tend to crop up again and again:
1. Offshore programmers frequently lie about their programming skills
2. Competent Indian programmers tend to do fairly well if given very explicit instructions, but are at a loss if something unexpected comes up. They tend to be less adaptable and nimble than U.S. programmers.
3. It ends up taking longer than estimated, even for simple projects.
4. Hand-holding and rework end up eating up all time and money savings.
5. By the time an offshore programmer has skilled up enough to actually be useful, they leave for a better position. (Especially true for India.)
To my mind, outsourcing programming is a management fad that is (hopefully) already falling out of favor due to poor results.
Re:Outsourced Programming Flaws (Score:5, Funny)
That shows a failure of the American programmer, not a problem with Indian programmers. ... why not? Sure, boss, I'll be a CCIE.
1) Why can't an American lie? Liars expect people to lie, management, especially upper management, requires sociopath tendencies which equals lying, so, freaking lie about it to keep the boss happy. If a guy in India who just graduated school can claim 10 years C++ experience, why can't I claim 20 years? I have "CCIE-level" experience although not a CCIE. Actually, in the restricted arena of BGP I probably do, but I'm lost in switching. If I know its a BGP job, and the boss doesn't care if I lie, and the competition in India will lie
2) The boss likes "needy" "unempowered" employees. So do it. Ask him dumb questions constantly to keep his tiny little ego boosted. Whats so hard about that?
3) Tell the boss it'll take longer, and F off more. Again, whats the problem, you worried you'll wear out the foosball table or what?
4) Don't worry about needing handholding or spending more time on rework than initial development. Just do it. The boss likes it; or he wouldn't be going to India where they do it all the time.
5) Leave for greener pastures as soon as possible, preferably before the project crashes and burns.
The price is "too low" for a american programmer because the boss is hiring incompetents in India. OK, the problem isn't the american can't get hired for an "incompetent" level job at $1/hr, the problem is the american is supposed to be applying for high paying high end architect and management jobs, which he can't do because he's only a programmer, but then again, the indians can't program, so its all kind of even in a way. And if thats they way the man wants it, thats the way the man gets it.
This all seems to be "programmer getting frustrated trying to make and enforce management decisions while not being in a position of management authority". Just zen up a bit and go with the flow of reality. If the boss wants incompetent liars, don't whine about it, either become the boss and demand something else, or become an incompetent liar, or work elsewhere. Its simple, really.
Re:Outsourced Programming Flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't college teach me Lying 101 and 102?
Those are MBA levels courses
Re:Outsourced Programming Flaws (Score:4, Informative)
You summed the problems up very well.
I also found Indians say 'Yes' to everything even if they don't understand what you are talking about. That can cost days of lost work when you find out they didn't have a clue later.
Re:Outsourced Programming Flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
That's it, exactly. Same experience with Malaysia and Korean devs and managers. The answer is always "Yes, yes, of course, we will do that, no problem," to any question. I understand that it's partly cultural; it's considered rude to just say no. But it goes way beyond that: they will lie straight to your face (or over a video link) and actually get tetchy about being questioned, even when they have a track record of failures and screw ups behind them.
Other fun things to deal with are the rapid staff turnover, the guarantee that they'll take the code you paid them to write with them to a competitor, and that you might find that you don't even have a copy. Keep the source repository under your control, and no commitee, no payee.
Zero Success (Score:3)
I have yet to experience an out-sourcing project come in under budget. The typical project seems to run 3X what the initial projects costs presented, and that is based upon comparable pricing. When someone says $14/hr bill rate, my blood run cold and causes me to expect nothing but an abysmal failure.
Fungibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern management philosophy depersonalizes employees into interchangeable resources. There is Management, Knowledge Experts and "Cogs".
They don't even care that it's more expensive using cheap programmers to get a job done - it's worth it to them to not have to depend on any individual contributor.
Fits with my experience (Score:3)
I'm watching a project from a place I don't work via friends that are there right now. A web store of sorts - the kind of thing that's a solved problem and they probably could have bought an off-the-shelf product. But no, it had to be bespoke and the local contractor subcontracted to, umm, a nameless Asian country (that is triangular, and a subcontinent - but nameless).
To programmers that appear to have never USED a web store, much less written one. People who had to have the term "your basket" explained to them. As for brilliant programming, they have some kind of development environment (or lack of discipline in its use) that allows bug-regression: solved bugs suddenly re-appear when new code versions are introduced later to solve others. We're talking a year late on what should have been less than a year worth of project.
I agree that working for less than half price gets you a lot of forgiveness for running even 100% over budget, but the cost on the local staff doing the requirements and testing has been high. Even in this economy, people have been quitting to get away.
From past experience, no. (Score:5, Informative)
I once did some contract work for a place that made the mistake of outsourcing a major programming job. My job was to maintain the outsourced code, and keep it functioning (barely) while the internal programming team worked on building a complete replacement from scratch, at half the cost, with the actual system requirements being fulfilled. I spent four months fixing bugs in deliberately obfuscated perl code, at consultant rates, because none of the internal staff they had hired was either able to figure out perl code in general, or willing to even try to sort out that mess. The outsourced programmers in question had the dodgy business practice of deliberately making their code difficult to read, and only including comments like:
# 16426-b
The code in question contained wonderful constructs such as pointless loops where a value would be iteratively divided by the numbers from one through a thousand, then restored to it's original value without being used in the altered form. I started the project with about 6 million lines of perl code, and by the time it was over and the replacement was ready, tested, and brought online, there were only 2 million lines in the outsourced code, including about ten thousand lines of comment code that had been added while I was working on it. I hadn't even looked at about half of the remaining code.
After the initial work was done (poorly), the outsourced programming company announced that their code maintenance fees were being increased, thinking that their poor coding style had essentially locked the client in, and left them unable to get help elsewhere. The only staff member the company had who was willing to make the attempt unfortunately committed suicide after only a month of trying. (Personally, I believe it was unrelated, but the other programmers there claimed she was perfectly fine until she started working on that code... after two months of it I could see why they would think that.)
So yeah, in my experience, outsourcing programming does not save money - if the company I did that work for had just had their own people write the original code, they would have saved a massive amount of money.
Re:From past experience, no. (Score:4)
Not entropic compression algorithms, just chopping out large sections of code that didn't actually do anything but slow the whole system down. (Like the aforementioned subroutine that did iterative division, then restored the original value. )
To bring in an inappropriate slashdot car analogy, this is like taking a car, and reducing the weight of it by removing the family of African Elephants that were tap-dancing on the hood. The resulting mess was still broken, but much smaller than it was with the elephants still there.
Outsourcing... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you pay someone by the hour, they will work as slowly as they can...
If you pay someone by project, they will cut corners to finish quicker.
If you pay someone by lines of code they will write bloated code.
All of this is even worse when the developers are halfway round the world and you can't keep track of them so easily, and when you don't have sufficiently clued up people on hand to inspect the code they have written.
Nope (Score:3)
But generally, this is what happens:
1. Project is developed in-house.
2. Management notice that though the quality of the project is good, it's too costly and by outsourcing it, they'll reduce the budget by 90%.
3. Project is developed overseas, usually India.
4. Management notice that the quality of the project is extremely poor and decide to bring it in-house even though it will cost them 10 times as much.
5. Goto 1.
This may seem un-PC... (Score:3)
I think one of the major issues with offshoring to India or other locales is cultural.
In most 1st world countries, employees are independent and, honestly, brazen enough to respectfully tell their boss/team-lead/architect about all the holes and errors they may have made when spec'ing out some work. This is substantially due to the fact that getting fired in those countries for attempting to improve the product quality non-existent or protected (wrongful dismissal). In emerging economies, the peon has no protection and if they dare "show up" their boss by pointing out problems, they face the real risk of losing their job and being deemed "unemployable due to insubordination". That may mean they end up destitute and out on the street.
I've crossed swords with VPs and CEOs in my time, for what I deemed as was good for the company/product. I risked getting nuked, but felt that the risk was worth it because my intentions were good. Sometimes this has resulted in the leader swallowing their pride and adopting the change, sometimes I've ended up on the wrong side of a decision. Thinking back, I doubt I'd ever had done that if the downside wasn't getting a layoff but instead losing my home and being unable to feed my family.
Outsourcing sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I am really amazed at how much our clients undermine their own goals. I understand that cost is what drives programming jobs to my country - but I still have to see a really successful product come out of this. It would be difficult to find a single cause for this, but all of the following are at least partially responsible:
1 - Low wages.
2 - Lack of good programmers getting involved: some of the programmers you can get for the lower wages are great, some suck. I've seen companies taking just anyone interested to fill programmer positions for such jobs (you can train them, right?). Getting involved in the selection process may help prevent this.
3 - Lack of trust in the the outsourced team: you can't think of the outsourced team as a bunch of mindless morons and expect them to care about your product. In those cases in which the outsourced team was a very good team, it didn't make the slightest difference because people was told what to do, and not to think - which makes hiring inexperienced people a pretty attractive alternative.
4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.
5 - Communication: communication is harder when people is spread all over the world. IMHO you need to compensate this difficulty by having some tool to help you keep in touch. In my current company, we use skype, and we keep in touch at all times with the client, which really helped solve this particular problem.
6 - Planning: planning is much more difficult when delivering work to someone who is not right at your side.
5 - Etc, etc.
There's a "right" way and LOTS of wrong ones. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know of a couple of software projects that are outsourced and getting good results.
This one basically the formula for one of the best of them:
Each team is overseen by a local (stateside/canadian) lead programmer who can actually review the code properly.
There are guidelines in place for documenting and commenting the code. Don't follow the guidelines, don't get paid.
And they pay close to what US programmers for a similar project would demand.
As such, they never run out of a supply of candidates. They can afford to be VERY choosy about their hires. And they get damn good value for their money.
Yes, they went through a few scammers during their early spin-up. But they had that sort of thing built into their expectations. They eventually wound up with a crack cadre of programmers and software products that are some of the best-documented I've ever seen anywhere. You could literally spend a couple hours reading the documentation and start working on the software.
Then you get the guys who think they're going to set up a programmer sweatshop someplace and pay sub-subsistence wages to hordes of thousands and magically fall on the fair side of the "infinite monkeys" principle.
I have zero pity for these fools and the crap they wind up with (if anything is ever actually delivered).
I'd be more worried about Indian publishers (Score:4)
This, mostly, doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I'm waiting for it to happen. . .
Essentially, the problem is that when another company is being payed hourly to develop a product for you, mostly they care about selling you hours, not selling you good software.
So, as long as the Indian companies are working at selling hours instead of copies of software, they perhaps don't have much incentive to really get it right. But, once some Indian companies realize they can just make the software and publish it themselves, selling directly to customers, then the incentives change - the customers won't buy bad software, so they'll need to make sure they develop the programs to a certain level of quality (perhaps they can get away with *lower* quality, as long as it's "good enough" and is cheaper than the competition).
I might just be ignorant, but so far, it doesn't seem like theirs been any big self-publishing software companies developing in India (and China, and other developing nations that are starting to build tech companies), but I don't see why it couldn't happen, and that worries me far more than "outsourcing".
I feel that the U.S. and Europe are far too complacent and far too smug about being "intellectually superior", and figuring we can keep our economy alive, despite losing manufacturing and lots of other jobs, by having a "knowledge economy", as if the rest of the world for some reason can't develop their own tech sectors that can out-compete ours. I mean, we already know that most of the rest of the world does better in school than U.S. students, so how is that going to work?
Down and out (Score:4, Funny)
I wanted to be the "Laid" in Laid Off but but my wife gave me "The Look".
purpose of outsourcing (Score:4, Informative)
I've commented on this before, but there are GOOD and BAD reasons for outsourcing. All of these stories focus on the BAD (and they're truly horrible). It's easy to have schadenfreude about managerial disasters, especially if said managers fired you for this kind of project.
If you're outsourcing something that is your core competency, you're going to rot away to nothing. They will walk away with your secrets and become the direct solution provider in your space.
If you're outsourcing something that is creative or inventive in nature, you will fail. They are geared to bill hours, want to minimize their own labor by recycling solutions, and don't care so much about success because rework is still work.
If you're outsourcing something that depends on today's level of dedication and problem-solving, that's creative and inventive. But also, you will fail because you don't own those rare dedicated and problem-solving employees. They're predictably terminated by their managers, replaced with cronies or the next batch of diploma-mill graduates. If you get something good out of an outsourced worker, they will quit for a better job tomorrow and you'll have to start over again. And there's usually a no-poaching agreement to make it harder for you to groom and select the gems from their labor pool.
However, if you're outsourcing something that is rote, uninteresting, easily explained, clearly documented, often repeated, and does not rely on motivation or personality, then you have a chance. There's no reason for you to hoard and cultivate a set of employees who are best kept as fungible, as replaceable, as off-the-shelf, carbon-copies of each other as possible. Get them cheap, and get them to turn the repetitive process crank that you don't want to turn.
Offshoring the project is identical to local outsourcing, but all of the challenges of time zone and language and culture are just magnified greatly.
I used towork for outsourcing company (Score:3, Informative)
Don't blame programmers for poor management (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't get the guy down the hall to do it right, don't expect it come back right from India correctly either. Most software fails are due to poor planning, misunderstood or absent requirements, poor design with no input from customers, and so on. Yes, most of us who've worked with or managed foreign teams know that the coding from India (or Iowa, for that matter) may not always be top notch, but coding is the easiest part. Planning, useful documentation and management of a well conceived project is the difficult part.
Short answer (Score:3)
The short answer is no, it only appears to. Data shows that whatever is saved by outsourcing new development is made up for by increased maintenance costs. I worked for a large government agency that would outsource new development and have the existing programmers maintain legacy code. Very often, they even paid for the training for the outsource staff, which came out of a training budget and not the actual development budget. Then when the project was completed, it was turned over to the existing staff to maintain.
The problem with this approach is that the existing staff never comes up to speed, they don't know what went into the design decisions, etc. (yes, there is documentation, but it isn't the same as being part of the project). This approach is not unique to government entities, either. Many large businesses take this approach.
While I was employed there, we changed the process so consultants were used to maintain the legacy code and trained the internal staff on the new technologies needed for projects. We went from being habitually over budget and late to on budget and on time.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
This story is backwards... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure there are geek teenagers in my neighborhood that would take 10$/hr to write code for my professional software product.
If I do, is the story really that they are bad coders? No, the story is that I don't know how to run a business and I have shit for brains.
If you executives/management can't put talent in the seats for the positions that count you will fail. End of story.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:4, Funny)
PLEASE let Microsoft move to India. Then it really will be year of the Linux Desktop.
Re: (Score:3)
Optimist much?
You can't just throw money at a project to "make it go faster." It can be good, but it won't be fast, and it won't be cheap. If you want it fast, it will be crap and it won't be cheap. If you want it cheap, it won't be fast and it won't be good. See "The Mythical Man-Month". Or meditate on why "adding more people ju