I recently started working on a 3 months old project, that was outsourced to two Indians genius. One of them left just before I arrived.

I had the chance to discover those guys were not using any version control system, just exchanging a zip file. I don’t even talk about the codebase, never seen such a mess …

Even better the project managers, were not using any IT program to follow the project advancement, but just Excel!!!

After a few days I realised that the remaining dev was not committing anything, the guy was always lying, (so many people died around him + some emergencies)

So, the guy got fired, but don’t worry management found new genius to save the project 🙂

Can someone tell me if outsourcing is really working?

Depends on who you outsource to

If you combine outsourcing with proper resource management + monitoring, yes.

If it's "how can we spend the least amount of resources on it"…

No. Absolutely no. Desaster is preprogrammed.

@IntrusionCM exactly, outsourcing requires much better project management than in house usually and thats where most failures in outsourcing starts.

Outsourcing as a pure cost save is hard, especially for small projects since the extra management easily eats up the lesser dev cost.

Outsourcing due to difficulty to find good devs often have a higher successes rate since those usually do not skip on management, price was not the defining metric but competence.

But it still requires the right king of management that know what to look for and how to evaluate.

And long term outsourcing also often work better since for long term there will be more incentive for the external part to do a good job since an ongoing contract is better than a short one.

And a larger partner can also be better if you are large enough since then reputation can come into play.

Still, its always hard and needs the right people, and that is often not the same people you would need for inhouse.

@Voxera Your comment makes sense to me. But I feel that too many companies don’t care much about the technical side.

I feel that they don’t even try to hire inhouse devs, they will just go for the cheapest option.

And last but no least, so many project managers don’t have any idea about what software development is.

That’s really frustrating, I have been working in IT for 4 years, I don’t think there will be 4 more years as a dev.

From my experience: you get what you pay for. I worked with great people from all over the planet and then some. They all got paid well, because they could deliver value and therefor negotiate (by themselves of through a recruiter) a great salary.

@TechTech0 which is why so many projects goes over time and budget.

outsourcing to india works when your goal is to have the illusion that you saved money.
as in, the only goal.

outsourcing to countries which actually have actual good coders (there is such a stat, countries sorted by their programmers' skill) works.