Search:
Recent Posts
Categories
Archives
Great Guy Post
Guy Kawasaki has a great post this morning on the Lies of Engineers. Here’s lie number eight:Â
“‘We can do this faster, cheaper, and better with an offshore programming team in India.’ Rank and file engineers usually don’t tell this lie; it’s the CTO who does. Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.”
This is so true! At my last place of employment we were going through a complete ground up redesign of the Web site and CRM system. The CEO told me I should consider outsourcing to India to save money. After collecting myself, I explained to him in so many words that he was strait up smoking crack if he thought that was a good idea. I can guarantee that we’d still be working on 1.0 of that system if we’d gone that route. Instead we had it up in five months using very talented programmers who sat about 10 feet from my office.
As far as version 1.0 of any system is concerned you ought to do it in house or with an extremely competent outsourcing firm that is willing to set up shop in your office space. Its fine to outsource pieces of a project after that point but you never outsource the entire enchilada. I cannot place enough emphasis the value of putting people in the same room with a white board. You can’t do that if the white board is in India.
“I cannot place enough emphasis the value of putting people in the same room with a white board. You can’t do that if the white board is in India.”
You can if you you outsource your marketers as well.
Just kidding…
Left by Jordy on 04/28/2006