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Why I'm Not Afraid of Outsourcing
Posted by Jonah Ellison on 2010 December 28
The first website i made was for $5 :)
the client got impressed and paid me extra $3
For the past decade, the media has struck fear into workers by reminding us how IT jobs are increasingly outsourced cheaply to India. As a U.S. web developer, this has never once concerned me because while overseas developers may be less expensive, their technical skill set is nowhere near as strong or competitive as mine. The old adage remains true: you get what you pay for.
If you decide not to hire a respectable, local firm or developer who is passionate about their trade, then make sure to understand and be willing to work with the large socioeconomic differences between India and America (or any third-world country). The level of professionalism and the quality of the final product will most likely be subpar. But don't take my word for it:
- Businessmen: don’t outsource your code.
- IAmA software developer with an Indian outsourcing major. AMA (Ask Me Anything)
- The posting of an open source payroll app (with a link to the code) leads to 9 pages of "plz send me teh codes" (by Indian newbie developers)
If there is one point I wish to make, it's that outsourcing your website is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with your business. Your site may come together smoothly, but there's also a good chance of a total disaster, one that you can't even see coming.
Let me share an experience of fixing up an outsourced website built by an Indian web development firm. If you have a basic grasp of web development, the amount of mistakes they made will be highly amusing:
HOW TO BUILD THE BEST WEBSITE EVER
- Misspell filenames.
- Ignore web interface standards like making the top logo link back to the home page or keeping the main navigation buttons the same throughout the site.
- For your page header text and navigation text, use a common sans-serif font, then create image files for this text.
- Use descriptive, easy-to-find names for files that aren't used and vague names for files that are important (e.g., for the community page JavaScript, create the file "thecommunities.js" but then actually use "nris.js").
- Create your pages with multiple <body> tags (since it's hard to see it between all those <style> blocks).
- Pretend to understand style sheets and the purpose of CSS files, but then use them sparingly.
- Do the server-side scripting in ASP, then throw in generic PHP class files in a random directory, since this functionality may or may not be used.
- Instead of using a database to store and retrieve data, use .csv flat files.
- Consistency? Trying not to repeat code? Who cares about that! Websites never need to be maintained or updated.
- Also, make sure to host the site on the slowest, cheapest shared server you can find, preferably in a country different than the website's target audience.
I won't get into the design since I'm not a designer, but you can always use a spiffy yellowish brown color scheme.
- 615 reads
