The introduction to Lesson in India: Not Every Job Translates Overseas matches my experience with “bargain” programmers:
When sales of their security software slowed in 2001, executives at ValiCert Inc. began laying off engineers in Silicon Valley to hire replacements in India for $7,000 a year.
ValiCert expected to save millions annually while cranking out new software for banks, insurers and government agencies. Senior Vice President David Jevans recalls optimistic predictions that the company would ‘cut the budget by half here and hire twice as many people there.’ Colleagues would swap work across the globe every 12 hours, helping ValiCert ‘put more people on it and get it done sooner,’ he says.
The reality was different. The Indian engineers, who knew little about ValiCert’s software or how it was used, omitted features Americans considered intuitive. U.S. programmers, accustomed to quick chats over cubicle walls, spent months writing detailed instructions for overseas assignments, delaying new products.
I recall Anderson Consultants (boo! hiss!) writing ridiculously low-level design documents to send to the Philippines a decade ago: “The FooBar module adds the Foo and Bar variables and returns their sum.” This was a decade ago. I didn’t see how it saved anyone any time; spec’ing modules out took longer than writing and testing them.
It sounds like it can be done correctly though:
Shifting work to India eventually did help cut ValiCert’s engineering costs by two-thirds, keeping the company and its major products alive — and saving 65 positions which remained in the U.S. But not before ValiCert experienced a harrowing period of instability and doubt, and only after its executives significantly refined the company’s global division of labor.
The successful formula that emerged was to assign the India team bigger projects, rather than tasks requiring continual interaction with U.S. counterparts. The crucial jobs of crafting new products and features stayed in Silicon Valley. In the end, exporting some jobs ultimately led to adding a small but important number of new, higher-level positions in the U.S.