There’s a growing understanding in American business that Indian programmers are bad. While this isn’t necessarily the case, there are a couple of things about working with Indian programmers that make the process more… difficult.
After all, if Indian programmers are so bad, why would people keep outsourcing programming jobs to India? This article will address these and other related questions and give you advice on avoiding hiring bad programmers.
The Communication Barrier
Managing technology project requirements is hard. It has a lot of moving parts that need to communicate with one another. That leaves a lot of room for communication problems.
You probably experience communication problems when your entire team of developers is in one building. Any time that you outsource a job to a different country you increase the potential for miscommunication.
If you outsource out of the country, there are even more opportunities. Your developer’s work will likely be in a different time zone. There will likely be some language barriers. If you are in America and you outsource to companies in places like India you’ve probably noticed this for yourself.
You probably would have had the same problem if you outsourced to another English-speaking country. While it’s true that many Indians do speak some level of English as a second language.
It can still be very difficult for you and them to understand each other. This is true both because of the speed at which you speak English and their heavy Indian accents.
For a number of reasons to be discussed below, Indian programmers are somewhat common and accepted. Think of it another way. Instead of programmers, imagine if your logistics team or your executive board was in another country. It’s easy to imagine the kinds of issues that would creep in.
Competitive Wages
Suppose there’s no time difference or language barrier. Suppose Indian programmers are just bad. Why would people keep outsourcing programming jobs to India?
Probably because Indian programmers are cheap. And if they’re cheap, they must be bad, right? Not exactly.
The conversion rate from US dollars to Indian Rupees is very high. For this reason, it is profitable for Indian workers to be paid in dollars. But they’re still working for less money, right? Not exactly.
Consumer prices on virtually everything range from twice as expensive to more than five times more expensive in America than in India. That low rate you pay for developers in India is probably starting to sound better now.
That explains why Indian Programmers can offer such competitive rates. It may hurt your wallet to pay the extra money for an American-based Software development company, but saves you a lot of hassle.
Think of all of the money that you lose when you can’t get work done when you want to because your programming team is several work hours behind. Or how much money you lose when you get an incomplete or unfamiliar product. Because your programming team couldn’t understand what you asked for and you have to start over.
So how do you choose good dedicated developers when your company has decided to outsource?
How To Find A Good Development Agency
The first step is to outsource with a company or individual that has a good track record. If a programmer or company is worth working with, they will likely have worked with other companies before.
Ideally, these will be companies that you have heard of. If a company doesn’t have a long list of happy clients, they are likely new to the game. If they are new, they probably have new programmers.
You can’t get good without experience but it’s not your responsibility to provide that opportunity.
The next step is to talk to the person that you will be talking to if you do business. It doesn’t matter if the programmers can understand you if you won’t be talking to the programmers. If you go with an individual programmer or a small group, you will likely be talking to them directly.
In this case, communication should be easy. If you go through a larger company, you probably won’t be talking directly to programmers. If the programmers are in India and the office is in, say, New York, you don’t have to worry so much about time zones and language barriers.
Not working with a group because of language problems is unfortunate. But you have to be able to communicate to get what you want.
Just like you shouldn’t feel obligated to work with someone with no experience, you shouldn’t feel obligated to work with someone you can’t communicate with.
How To Find A Good Freelancer?
If you work with an individual rather than a company, things are a little different. The individual should still have experience. They may also have a portfolio that includes previous projects, web mobile applications.
They are also more likely to provide references that you can follow up with. Try to hire Indian freelance writer from a platform for that purpose. These platforms usually have ways for you to see the kinds of jobs that they have done in the past.
If you work with an individual, you can also look at their education. This is especially good for working with people that haven’t been working long. These people often have less impressive portfolios and fewer references. They are also likely to charge less.
You may be surprised to see that many foreign programmers have degrees from colleges and universities in your country. If you haven’t heard of the college or university google it.
It could be that you haven’t heard of it because it’s in another country not because it’s a bad place. Or it could be that you haven’t heard of it because it isn’t that great.
There’s another advantage to hiring individual programmers for web development and mobile app development. It’s easier to work with them on smaller projects and on a shorter basis.
This means that you can give them a smaller project and see how they do without committing. This is much more difficult for project management when working with a company.
There are things that can make it hard to work with programmers from other countries. From time delays to losing details in translation. Even though Armia Systems is located in Chicago, IL our center of excellence is in India.
We get our share of these comments from potential clients who had a bad experience from unprofessional programmers. So we wanted to address the issue head-on!
Hopefully, this article has given you the insight that you need to think again about working with foreign programmers. You can often get quality work for a good price provided you do your research and get highly skilled Indian software developers with years of experience from the developer community.
