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Being on the other side I can see the crowd that is working so i will say "Cheap" is the only benefit. "Good" is only if you are lucky and find good people to work and "fast" depends on how the mid level manager is managing the overall work (i have seen cases where managers dont let us deliver complete modules as more delay means more billing hours.
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Great insight Rahul. I think we'd all benefit from any suggestions you might have about good ways to find productive teams to work with and get the most out of the relationship. Have you seen this done well?
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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I am a technical guy and not much involved in management activities so i dont know how much i will be of help but i can surely tell about my very first project(or career). It was a great work place and we did pretty good work. The reason for this, I think is:
1. We were working offshore along with the team working onsite but we all had full access to each other. We can call each other anytime we want unlike in other projects where there is one person for client interaction and the technical team from both the side will have to use him to communicate. and the problem gets worse if the middle man in a not a techie.
2. Things here are very dynamic when it comes to manpower allocation. people get assigned and reassigned. so people dont get chance to become domain specialist but people do work hard to get things done. And we were lucky that the clients technical team provided us full support whenever we needed it and that really helped a lot.
3. I am a big fan of agile. we were using scrum and that tends to be developer centric. also it reduces a lot of useless documentation which is something managers like to use to create delays.
4. Frequent communication between developers from client side and offshore team keeps everyone on same page and make things very smooth.
5. lastly, i saw two kind of projects. one is fixed money where offshore company gets fixed amount for the work. and time based billing where companies get paid for time. for first type of projects managers usually try to quote less people and less time(which seems lucrative to clients) but the sole idea is to get work done for fixed money and with compromise on quality. The scenario is exact opposite for other kind of projects. for this i think the client company should discuss with their technical teams the time/resources the offshore company is offering and decide whether it is too less for the task to too much for the tasks.
I might be wrong and might have upset some people but this is purely my opinion and experience.
P.S. when i say manager i mean mid level guys who are only involved with money matters. project leaders and project managers, so far i worked with, are really dedicated towards work and delivery.
NO HARD FEELINGS IF I OFFENDED ANYONE IN ANYWAY.
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Interesting article. The company I worked at in 2009 outsourced a number of projects to you-know-where. Among other responsibilities they were also commissioned to run test scripts and regression tests, etc all of which were given to them as part of the knowledge transfer phase. About eight months later they applied a database update that ran incorrectly albeit successfully. I was told that about a week later the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan. It was proved that they never ran the test scripts or regression tests. It apparently took about two weeks to roll-back to the previous production copy and then apply the transaction updates. Needless to say, the company threw the book at them and lost a number of business deals during the downtime. They had to ask one of the redundant developers who worked on a key system to come back in and advise them. He did, at a take-it-or-leave-it daily rate which I believe was close to an eye-watering £900 a day which was passed onto the outsourcing company as part of the penalty condition clauses for poor delivery of service.
I'm sure there are many successful outsourcing initiatives.
When I buy power tools I buy only the best. I've learned from experience that if you pay less to buy cheaper it can cost you twice as much: the first time to realise that the reliability and quality were a mistake and the second to buy what you should have bought first time. Naturally I will not name the outsourcing company or the UK company involved in order to protect the innocent. 
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Tablet computing is here, whether you like it or not.
Source: AllThingsD
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AKA "Lion iCloud Edition".
Source: TIME
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The smart money is on Android, iOS... and Windows Phone?
Source: SRT Solutions
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Both, and the differences teach us much about Ruby internals.
Source: Pat Shaughnessy
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Down vote with no explanation countered. I do not use Ruby but feel in this type of forum a down vote should be explained.
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Thanks. I'm sort of unclear on the concept of downvoting a news item. If you don't agree, ignore or explain what's wrong with it. We all learn that way.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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For the edification of the autodidact.
Source: Eric Moritz
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If only I could battle buggy code with a D20.
Source: Andy Budd
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Your random numbers aren't as random as you think.
Source: NYTimes.com
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As the need for more secure mobile communications has gone up, the price has come down.
Source: Ars Technica
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Copyright, copy-left... let's call the whole thing off.
Source: Stephen O'Grady
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Fixing four issues that have caused me the most grief.
Source: Matt Might
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Just a brief "thanks" for posting these links. I really appreciate them.
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense. -- Steve Landesberg
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We may need to completely redefine the way we view the web.
Source: Trent Walton
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