Working With Overseas Development Teams.

Posted on September 23rd, 2009 at 10:00 pm by Josh Cagwin

Last week I had the chance to speak at Collekt, a creative group meet up I am a part of. During this time the subject of working with overseas programmers came up and I was able to share a little bit about my experiences I have had working with them. I would like to revisit this topic a bit and share my opinion and a few of the pros and cons I have had with overseas programmers.

At a previous job I had as a User Interface Designer I had to work with a team of eight programmers based in India. I quickly found out how much of a nightmare it can be.

Pros:

Well honestly, the only pro I possibly saw working with programmers overseas is that they work for dirt cheap possibly saving a company money. I personally take this “pro” as a con, meaning that it defaces value of programmers in the United States causing them to have to work for less than they are worth in many situations and even worrying about losing their job to the overseas programmers working for next to nothing.

Cons:

Communication- This could very well be the biggest problem that leads to many other issues. I experienced hours and even days wasted due to communication problems. Having to communicate mostly by email and documentation caused countless flaws in the process. The language barrier was also a problem here.

Time Difference- When you are sleeping they are working, meaning when you continue with your part of the project the next day and find bugs and problems from what they completed over night you have to wait another whole day for their part to be fixed causing more delay.

Slow Development- The above explains this problem

No Face To Face Meetings- This relates strongly to communication and was always an issue.

These are only a few cons listed, but I found them to be the main issues, and it always ended up coming back to communication being the main problem. I can strongly say that with all the wasted hours and days due to these few issues that it’s not worth the little bit of money companies may save and really hurts the projects more than it benefits.

Have your worked with overseas teams?

What was your experience like?

6 Responses → “Working With Overseas Development Teams.”

Aaron Irizarry

5 months ago

I couldn’t agree more… i can see the appeal to save money…
But more times than not communication barriers, time differences, and the sacrificing of quality leads to extra man hours on the US end to fix errors and right the ship.

So in the end the cost ends up being more, from a quality side, and from a dollar perspective as well.

~ Aaron I
Analiza

5 months ago

I couldn’t agree with you more!
We have been using a team in India for about 2 years now and it’s by far one of the most challenging things both teams (one based in South Africa, where I am at and the other based in the US) have had to go through…

The language barrier was really tough and at times we were answering the same questions backwards and forwards, which lead to frustration on our part and confusion on their part… I understand that it saves on costs for the company, but it also leads to slips in development time and the quality of the code produced… which in the long ran makes me question if all the savings on cost was actually worth it…? Don’t get me wrong, they produce really great work, but I just think the language barrier plays quite a big role here.

Great read Josh, thanks for sharing!
Becky Cagwin

5 months ago

As a manager of designers and artists in an educational media company for several years, working with programmers from foreign countries was a GREAT challenge! As mentioned, the biggest was communication. After many hours of frustration, spending time to define the meanings of words was time well spent…the same word had a different meaning in India, still different in Brazil, and even more different in England. Once meanings were established, there seemed to be less frustration. BUT…in the long run, is $$$ really saved using foreign programmers. I found that $$$ really wasn’t saved…more $$$ was spent in time and personnel in the base company correcting mistakes and even redoing work done by the foreign programmers…sometimes the entire project had to be redone.

Have enjoyed your blogs, Josh! Keep blogging in interesting topics for the designer community.
Cory Dzbinski

5 months ago

It’s like trying to swim in a straight jacket.
John Lincoln

4 months ago

Some great points here, Josh. I’ve worked with many of these dev teams in my day and everything you say is true.

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