It's a girl ("I am the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants (Indonesian/Chinese on one side and Russian on the other side)").
1) The problem with domestic outsourcing is you frequently come up against the issue of "I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now." For small site projects like wordpress blogs this may be acceptable, but for actual software I still can't imagine a situation where outsourcing is cheaper, which is why most respected software companies don't do it.
2) Which is a huge issue. The concept that you WANT them to go away afterwards (again, with the exception of something like a wordpress blog) both disincentivizes them to produce high quality, lasting code and also means you lose your support for their code base.
I'm not saying this is how your company operates, I'm sure you have great programmers who deliver good products. But I've yet to see the scenario everyone dreams of: We pay a lower price long term and end up with a great maintainable codebase that we can easily pass off to other developers and we never have deal with the outsourcers again. Just never happens.
The domestic firms to which you outsource typically don't want #1 to happen. They want to build a long-term relationship and hold your repeat business. They want to become such experts on your software that it's not cost effective for you to pay their competitors to work on it.
The way they can stay less expensive than in-house development is simple. They can use time division multiplexing to put an entire team of workers on your project. Each worker may have six or seven customers he works on across the year, six or seven codebases with which he is intimately familiar.
You may have the budget for one developer on salary, full-time. Instead of hiring that one guy to alternate between overwork and sitting on his ass, you could pay an entire team of people for three months of work every couple years. Additionally, you get the skills and experience of that entire team. You're not limited to what one contributor is comfortable with.
I'm sure that's true for many, many firms. But, in my experience running a domestic product development firm, the single best way to acquire repeat business is to exit completely and gracefully. Doing so builds a trusted relationship not only with the business managers who authorize our work but also with the technical resources who have to live with our code. When we give both groups reasons to trust our integrity, I find that I'm able to negotiate better, longer-term maintenance agreements (when those make sense) AND that I'm presented with opportunities to bid on future projects.
Clearly, many HNers have had poor experiences with outsourcing (whether domestic or overseas). But there are good guys out there, I promise.
>But, in my experience running a domestic product development firm, the single best way to acquire repeat business is to exit completely and gracefully.
Very much so the truth. Additionally, giving great business advice to go with your software works well too. The business of software is unfamiliar to most of the people hiring software developers.
> I still can't imagine a situation where outsourcing is cheaper, which is why most respected software companies don't do it.
IBM and AT&T both hire outside resources....
>the concept that you WANT them to go away afterwards
I was making a riff off a joke about prostitutes which is why I chose that exact phrasing...you don't want them to go away, but you don't want to pay them except for a very occasional upgrade.
>I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now.
On quality: Some places would rather get a hack for 1/3 the price than a stable piece of software. Not that should be the baseline, but people are (unfortunately) highly tolerant of crappy software if it fixes budgetary problems. Does that mean you should offer the hack? Sometimes. I have done it, but I offer the better thing too when possible, and explain you're going to pay a lot more for V2-4 if you buy the really cheap V1.
1) The problem with domestic outsourcing is you frequently come up against the issue of "I wont need to support this in a month so fuck it I'll just finish it the quick hacky way now." For small site projects like wordpress blogs this may be acceptable, but for actual software I still can't imagine a situation where outsourcing is cheaper, which is why most respected software companies don't do it.
2) Which is a huge issue. The concept that you WANT them to go away afterwards (again, with the exception of something like a wordpress blog) both disincentivizes them to produce high quality, lasting code and also means you lose your support for their code base.
I'm not saying this is how your company operates, I'm sure you have great programmers who deliver good products. But I've yet to see the scenario everyone dreams of: We pay a lower price long term and end up with a great maintainable codebase that we can easily pass off to other developers and we never have deal with the outsourcers again. Just never happens.