If you're down with the business homies you'll know that one of the hot topics of the last few years has been offshoring. If you're a company in the States that needs a website designing, why pay an American designer a fortune when you can get some guy in Mumbai to do it for free?
I occasionally get involved with offshoring projects, and the truth is that they're an almighty pain in the arse.
The main reason is that it's just bloody difficult to work with someone who you never actually meet. Email is cool, instant messengers are cool, but in terms of the quality of quick communication they allow they're a step back to the days of semaphore and the carrier pigeon. Phones are cool, but phonelines to India are often bad and Indian accents can be strong. VoIP is cool when it works properly. If you're restricted to these means of communicating with a contractor or coworker it's really difficult to form a good relationship and work out what makes the guy tick. It's even harder to weigh him up - is he a good 'un or a rotter?
When confusion arises, chaos breaks out. Emails cross, people fail to understand briefs and things that could be sorted out in two minutes with a proper phone call with someone you can understand wind up taking whole days to sort out. Because communication is so difficult, problems are magnified. Vague descriptions are a problem for freelancers at the best of times: give a woolly brief to an offshorer who doesn't know you and who is working in a different timezone and you're in trouble.
There are other problems, too: offshoring is often great for getting programming and other geek work done - providing you make the specification as detailed as possible. It's usually less successful for anything creative. Indian web designers (for example) often have great coding skills, but they rarely have a truly westernised design sensibility. Same goes for copywriters - even Indian guys who have English as their first rarely have the grasp of western idiom to pull off convincing copy.
But western businesses keep falling into the sucker trap. Why? Because it's cheap, and because it's cool. You can't blame the offshorers for trying, but you can blame the buyers for having the poor business sense to try to get involved in major projects with people they will never meet face-to-face.
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Published by Earthman
on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 1:00 PM. I occasionally get involved with offshoring projects, and the truth is that they're an almighty pain in the arse.
The main reason is that it's just bloody difficult to work with someone who you never actually meet. Email is cool, instant messengers are cool, but in terms of the quality of quick communication they allow they're a step back to the days of semaphore and the carrier pigeon. Phones are cool, but phonelines to India are often bad and Indian accents can be strong. VoIP is cool when it works properly. If you're restricted to these means of communicating with a contractor or coworker it's really difficult to form a good relationship and work out what makes the guy tick. It's even harder to weigh him up - is he a good 'un or a rotter?
When confusion arises, chaos breaks out. Emails cross, people fail to understand briefs and things that could be sorted out in two minutes with a proper phone call with someone you can understand wind up taking whole days to sort out. Because communication is so difficult, problems are magnified. Vague descriptions are a problem for freelancers at the best of times: give a woolly brief to an offshorer who doesn't know you and who is working in a different timezone and you're in trouble.
There are other problems, too: offshoring is often great for getting programming and other geek work done - providing you make the specification as detailed as possible. It's usually less successful for anything creative. Indian web designers (for example) often have great coding skills, but they rarely have a truly westernised design sensibility. Same goes for copywriters - even Indian guys who have English as their first rarely have the grasp of western idiom to pull off convincing copy.
But western businesses keep falling into the sucker trap. Why? Because it's cheap, and because it's cool. You can't blame the offshorers for trying, but you can blame the buyers for having the poor business sense to try to get involved in major projects with people they will never meet face-to-face.
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