Outsourcing Software Development

No, we are not getting into the debate on offshoring or bangaloring a job. Let's talk about the quality of consulting companies in general.

I had worked on either side of outsourcing. It is common for consulting companies to bid low and jack up the cost as the project progresses. It is like the Chennai auto guys demanding more when you are nearing the destination. The Biz Dev team doesn't care about correctness of estimate just as the developer does not care about the correctness of code.

I come across problems that could have been nicely sorted out had the developers been a bit enterprising in looking out for solution in search engines. Because of such a quality of developers, both the parties face loss. The consulting company's loss is low billed time as against the actual time taken by the developers to solve the problem. Customer's loss is on lost opportunity or on living with non-optimal systems.

Consulting companies have a tight grip on Internet access and do not encourage its people to look out for solutions by others. Customers get an illusion that the work is progressing faster by cutting down on wasteful browsing or chats.