anyone's company ever outsourced work to india?

[Gato Moteado]

no, i'm not outsourcing anything to india.

but, i was curious if anyone here works for a company that is outsourcing any work (particularly software or application development) to india.

how was the experience?
did the work get done on time and for the original estimated cost?
did the 12 hour time difference cause problems?
did the differences in business culture cause problems?

[SaveElmer]

1. Yes...

It was a pain in the hump...I don't work there anyomre, but my understanding is they are regretting the move...

Communication is really difficult, requirements are hard to communicate, things never come in on time, so the money they save using Indian coders is gobbled up in delays.

On top of that, Indian workers are now demanding higher salaries, which is eating into it further!

[LynzM]

2. Yes, both companies

Frustrating.
On time, sure. Well? No. Continued errors, mainly to due with language comprehension.
Makes it inconvenient to set up conference calls/training.
Some.

Sorry so short, gotta run!

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Yep

Experience? No full-time work for 5 years. (Yes, I'm a programmer.)

The work in general was lousy. It was a pharmaceutical company. They have had no end of problems with the outsourcing, but it saves them enough money that they just pay for the problems to be fixed.

I'm sure there were culture problems. In one case, a piece of work came back in one of the regional languages of India, complete with Unicode language files. Fortunately, that programmer had enough programming discipline that the conversion to English was easy.

So, are you hiring? Where?

--p!

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

4. My former company - ING did.

[Gato Moteado]

5. isn't that the company with the commercials.....

....where their logo is painted on a park bench and someone is sitting on the bench with the "ing" next to them? it looks like they are blocking the first part of the word and when someone asks them to move out of the way, all that's there is "ing".

:)

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

6. Same fucking company. A Dutch multinational.

[Dave Reynolds]

7. Yes, currently

40% of medical transcription from this institution is done in India.

[mnmoderatedem]

8. not directly but

I work in the IT industry and the threat is always there. Plus I have a co worker who lost her previous job via outsourcing to India. A coworker of hers at the time who put together a spreadsheet of the number of man hours it took to complete the given tasks (and yes language barriers and time zones are a problem) and the spreadsheet detailed how it took roughly 6 times the worker-hours to do the same tasks as if it were just done locally in house, and thus was not saving any money after all. His superiors were not amused at the truth getting out, and he was reprimanded.