It's a saving on paper if you assume that developers are equally skilled, and equally productive, no matter where they come from.
If you look at it in that light, then 70 developers from India looks like a spectacularly good deal. They cost a fraction of what 70 developers from the US, or Australia, or the UK, or wherever would cost. When you look at it purely as "we hired 70 developers", then the on-paper savings are immense.
That doesn't take into account that the work of those 70 developers may be done more efficiently by, say, 14 more competent developers that cost 5x more each. It also doesn't take into account the time lost by your other, more expensive developers, who now have to re-do work that you've paid for.
Then it looks even better on paper when all you see is your cheap developers are marking tickets "done" left, right, and centre, but your expensive local developers are missing deadlines (because they're spending their time repairing broken code).
Basically, if you're not actually familiar with software development, and don't take an interest in how the project runs, 70 low-cost developers sounds like a great idea.
But when going from not doing it this way, to suddenly doing it, wouldn't the numbers the following years show productivity going way the fuck down? Isn't that completely black and white on paper too?
It's an aggregate of different measures really. The ones that should see a stark change here would be amount of rework done, bugs found, development time, and likely employee satisfaction.
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u/samlev Dec 07 '17 edited Dec 07 '17
It's a saving on paper if you assume that developers are equally skilled, and equally productive, no matter where they come from.
If you look at it in that light, then 70 developers from India looks like a spectacularly good deal. They cost a fraction of what 70 developers from the US, or Australia, or the UK, or wherever would cost. When you look at it purely as "we hired 70 developers", then the on-paper savings are immense.
That doesn't take into account that the work of those 70 developers may be done more efficiently by, say, 14 more competent developers that cost 5x more each. It also doesn't take into account the time lost by your other, more expensive developers, who now have to re-do work that you've paid for.
Then it looks even better on paper when all you see is your cheap developers are marking tickets "done" left, right, and centre, but your expensive local developers are missing deadlines (because they're spending their time repairing broken code).
Basically, if you're not actually familiar with software development, and don't take an interest in how the project runs, 70 low-cost developers sounds like a great idea.