Now with India taking with a lot of our operations, communications for starters are very bad. Time zones make it very difficult to coordinate and have live meetings (e.g. 10am Utah, 12pm Bangalore). People there are not as ordered as we thought they could be. We continually have to track down errors in code and documentation. The turnaround is bad (40%+ or more) even with 3 different time shifts. Engineers in India prefer to make money in American dollars than in their local currency. Coming to America with HB1 is better. Lots of holidays and cultural differences makes it difficult to find people during emergencies. Sure, you get to have 4 engineers or more for the price of 1 American engineer, but still even if the Indian/Russian graduates from top 1 or 2 universities they are still slow compared to American graduates at any level. In-house copyrights is very common and I have not doubt that our code is already own by our competitors. High level customers and government agencies here in the state don’t trust no one without U.S. Citizenship, which makes it hard for us to support our software with only U.S. based engineers. They don’t speak other languages either. American engineers tend to speak other languages (French, Chinese, Spanish) which help with our north and south American customers a lot. Fixing of bugs can take months or years vs. non-US engineers where it used to take weeks before moving to offshore development.

All in all the good all saying “save a penny, loose a pound” is still a living proof.

PS: people outsourcing is good as you get BETTER quality programmers for less cost.IP except in places like china is strong.India has a IP protection office specifically set up to deal with problems.get rid of the silly xenophobia and ask your kids to study engineering rather than coming and ranting about having to compete with “lower” cost

Sounds like you are suffering from a communication bottleneck. Are you able to work directly with offshore assets? At TryBPO, we have a “cubicle next door” policy that ensures agents are available by Skype, email and phone during your business hours. This allows you to bounce ideas off remote personnel and provide feedback if something needs to be corrected.

My hunch is this is not being done at your company. Many India based firms prefer all communication go through a head manager who usually has hos interests at heart. Plus he is not a native speaker making feedback and open communication difficult if not impossible.

If you are interested in working with a western managed, fully open outsource provider I suggest giving us a call. Or at least pass our information on to your manager! ;-D At the very least we can provide some suggestions for improving your current relationship.