[Dominic Harr]

Very low initial bids followed by poor quality work that comes in late, if at all.

That's been my experience.

Interestingly enough, we tried used Satyam last year, for a small Lotus Notes project, expected to take 6 months total. Same thing happened. Based on an initial low bid, they got the contract. But 6 months passed and all they had produced was a very unacceptable design doc. They spent the entire project budget just trying to figure out what they were supposed to build, and in the end failed at that.

[Southack]

"used Satyam last year, for a small Lotus Notes project, expected to take 6 months total. Same thing happened. Based on an initial low bid, they got the contract. But 6 months passed and all they had produced was a very unacceptable design doc. They spent the entire project budget just trying to figure out what they were supposed to build, and in the end failed at that."

Satyam's a perfect example of a firm that won't even show you their bug tracking logs for their software development.

Sheesh, people...*that's* a BIG freakin' clue.

And spending all of their time on phone calls and emails trying to figure out what you want is pretty typical, too...except that like most offshore companies, they keep *telling* you that they KNOW precisely what you want delivered by the end of each conference call...yet they never do.

Man, it burns me up to be told only what I want to hear rather than the truth.

But of course they are getting the contracts and getting to bill, so the longer that they can drag these things out before being exposed as a low-quality provider, the better for them, I guess.

What has happened is that this outsourcing fad has bumped India up above its skill level. India *does* have some good programmers. Most of them can't back up their overt over-confidence, but a few of them really are OK. But as for getting specs both right and on-time, that's another thing altogether. And as for working well with their own staffs to deliver quality code to spec, on time and on budget, well...they aren't *there* yet, culturally.

Turnover alone on Indian projects can easily exceed two thirds of their programming staff per year. How the heck do you get people working well with each other when they won't even know who they are going to be working with by the end of their project?

And data security is a joke over there. Shoot, your *code* that gets developed over in India is going to be made available to anyone else who wants it whether you like it or not, and your data certainly isn't safe.

If this process had gone sanely, without the wet-eared MBA's creating this juggernaut of an outsourcing fad, we could have gradually brought India into the business fold by having them maintain our old projects and programs. It would have given their programmers valid business programming experience, and it would have promoted stability rather than driven their turnover rate through the roof. There was a valid place for outsourcing such old code offshore rather than simply having all maintenance stop on such out-of-date items.

But when this fad finally comes back down to Earth, there will be so many CEO's who got burned that "outsourcing" will be a dirty word for a decade or more.