Like many companies outsource to India, my company come to realize outsourcing is not as effective as the business magazine claims. No one can escape from the fundamental law of economics, what you pay is what you get. Yes, going to India seems cost saving on paper, but it really sacrifice the quality of work, which often don’t show up in any project management matrix until it’s too late. This week, I doing code review for my Indian team. Their code is so bad that it is driving me nuts.

In the project status meeting, one of them claim his code is done, all the tasks are completed. However, when I review the code, it’s all garbage. The code is not doing anything, not testing what the program suppose to test. It is pretty much a glorify print statement that prints “PASS” at the end. I have tell him rewrite the code from scratch. Maybe we forgot to tell him on top of meeting the schedule, the program also has to work.

I review other code pieces from other Indians programmers. Well, the code works, but it is the ugliest code I have seen in a long time. Instead of writing a for-loop, one guy copy and paste the code 4 times and change the index in each code segment! Instead of using a single if-else statement, another guy split the code into a dozen if-else statements having exactly the same if condition. Maybe they were paid by the number of lines of code they write, so they purposely inflate to make the program look larger.

To be fair, a few of them are quite decent, but I found the majority are just simply annoying. I wonder is it a cultural problem that Indians are sloppy in general or I am just (un)lucky enough to work with mostly incompetent people?

I am back in India for two weeks.  I am not very excited, but work is work.  This time I am taking dragon air and make the transfer in Hong Kong.  The new 777 from Air Canada is pretty comfortable, the seat is wider and it has power sockets.  I can keep my laptop charged and use it for the whole trip.  The wait for transfer is 4 hours, so my dad came to the airport and I went outside of the restrict area to have dinner with him.  On my flight from Hong Kong to Banagalore, I think I am the only Chinese on the plane, except the air hostress.  I can’t believe a flight flying out of HK, running by a HK airline has no Chinese passenagers.

I touch down on the new Bangalore airport.  It is much better than the old airport.  From afar, it is pretty up to world wide standard.  Although things still a bit shady when you look closer.  Like the roof is not properly sealed, the door is kinda flimsy.  There are no hawker trying carry your luggage and charge you a ridiculous fee.  The custom has more counters, compare to only 2 counters in the old airport.  No more tuck-tuck waiting outside trying to fish passengers Any how, it is still quite impressive.  The new airport is far away from the city, so there a nice highway going into town.  The highway is lit and has line on the ground.  Other than occasional speed bump in the middle of no where and stop signs that everyone ignores, it is on par with newly developed countries like Taiwan or Korea.  As I was praising the construction and though Indian has finally start getting better, the highway just ends.  Yes, the highway ends abruptly and become a grave road right before entering the city.  The airport highway is not connecting to any major road in the city, it just ends on the outer skirt of the city that goes no where.  Ok, India is still India.  It’s still not quite there yet.

In this project, I am supervising 3 team members in our India office.  This week, I am really disappointed by their lack of productivity.  I have assigned them some tasks for the week and they are very behind in completing the tasks.  It would take me two days to finish those tasks my self and I already take the difference in experience into account and gave them a week of time.  It turns out their deliverable is still late, it looks like that will take them another half a week to get to done.  It seems I have over estimated their productivity.  I am quite unhappy about their work.  How can I finish the project on time with these three not performing grunts?

On a second thought, maybe I should be happy about their lack of productivity.  The company should know the gold rule: what you pay is what you get.  The Indians get a 1/4 of my salary, it is quite obvious that they are as good as me.  If they cost much less and still work almost as good as me, then I should start worrying about my job.  Finish the project on time and drastically cut the cost by outsourcing is a mission impossible to begin with.  The deadline is expected to slip.  As long as it is not my fault and there is nothing I could do, I cannot be blamed for the failure.  Failure is the mother of success, as long as we learn the lesson.  I think the lesson I learn from this outsourcing experience is that I should never over estimate the productivity of the Indian contractors, especially the junior guys.