It makes it appear cheaper. Which is all that upper management cares about. Hour for hour, it takes an offshore resource about twice as long as it take one of our U.S. developers to accomplish a task, due in no small part to the knowledge of the system the U.S. developer has built up over the year. But since the off-shore resource costs one third to one quarter the U.S. resource, upper management likes it fine.
“Hour for hour, it takes an offshore resource about twice as long as it take one of our U.S. developers to accomplish a task, due in no small part to the knowledge of the system the U.S. developer has built up over the year. But since the off-shore resource costs one third to one quarter the U.S. resource, upper management likes it fine.”
Once built a simple web application using offshore developers. The application had a total of 12 pages. About 4 were complex with the rest being quite simple. It took us about 500 hours to write a 360 page document defining each pages functionality and layout. After this we still had to have it developed, tested, and rolled out.
Sure the offshore developers were 1/3 the price but the rest of the work was significantly higher. A competent local developer could have developed the entire app in the 500 hours it took us to document it for the offshore team.