Ask HN: What are your views on India based development agencies?

Number one thing: highlight the people in your team. Problem with working with Indian agencies is that the programmers are hidden behind the project managers. That is not effective way of working in iterative work.

India is a big place. To me that is like saying, "what are your views on development agencies based in the world?"

My view is that its hard to form a generalised opinion on a entire sector. Especially when that sector is in a country with 1.3 billion people.

I have experienced working with two different Indian development teams and both of my experiences were characterized the same:

1) Over-communication to a fault

2) Low code quality

I don't know how can you change my perspective, but I would suggest not trying to change the perspective of Indian agencies as a whole - but rather why you are different than the stereotypical Indian agency.

Which customers? What perspective? What platforms?

You'll need to be clearer in what you're asking. Are you asking for opinions, or advice?

1. For the most part terrible code. 2. Only interested in payment, never project 3. Never listen when you tell them you don't want their services.

I cannot for the life of me see why this is on the front page of HN tbh

You need to compete and market based on quality and knowledge, by just price.

I have a competitor of yours trying to get a meeting with me. Their pitch is that I can have 10 programmers at $20/hr each, a 75% savings based on US programmers!

The problem is I want solutions, not man-hours!

I think the problem is is fundamental as the Indian educational system. Having worked in this technology business for 20 years as an engineer, I have a terrible opinion of Indian engineers. They talk a good game, and make it seem like they know what they're doing but then the end result is terrible cold quality and the opinion that the Indian engineers are lazy.

So, you can certainly try to put lipstick on your pig, but we all have 20 years experience with that pig And we know that it's a pig, even if you dress it up.

Have tried a lot of times ( 8 times to be exact), the only one that worked is now doing his own projects and launches a SAAS. The CEO was involved in every project. Every project took a very long time though and deadlines were not met.

Other experience, estimates are wrong, filling in more hours than actually worked and they always say yes. But what they mean is we can't or don't understand what your mean and we will stall the project.

I've used large (Wipro/TCS) and small firms, and poor code quality is common amongst them all. What's more apparent is their lack of ability to innovate or think on their feet. If I give them a "familiar" problem to solve, they're generally okay, but anything that requires them to think outside of the box, they tend to overcomplicate and the result is often terrible. Also, I no longer find them to be cost effective, especially when they charge by the day, and can't get things right even on the fourth attempt...

How can you show someone you are good mobile developers? I would focus on communicating how have done amazing work for previous customers, and try to earn referral business. Also, do amazing work!

Focus on something in demand and sell yourself as experts in it. The problem of many agencies is that they offer to do everything and anything and because of that appear desperate and not serious. When you're one of the best in a specific area it's much easier to sell your services, and also easier to expand your focus later when you're established and recognised.

it's a little different but when I look at my experience with developers from Xteam or TopTal (very positive experiences) vs other agencies (some in India) that I've worked with I see a set of clear differences. One is quality in code. I'm very rarely having to correct work, whereas other agencies we will receive a project and it often way off base. The work might meet the spec but not of quality and certainly can't be built upon. In another post, you mention team augmentation and I think that is a great idea. I would also echo concerns about autonomy and ability to innovate. Again with X-teamers/TopTal devs they usually want to help drive technology decisions and want to help to own a project. They then build trust by executing successfully on those ideas. I think if you differentiate on quality, augmenting teams, and autonomy, you will be able to rise above stereotypes that have been built up. That likely means charging more and spending more time screening potential hires. Smart companies will recognize that it's worth paying more so they don't have to pay several times over to fix what was done by a lower quality team.

Low quality, mediocre delivery to spec, frustrating communication, but cheap.

>> How do we work on changing customer's perspective?

What perspective are you trying to change here? This question is broad.

Rather if you are more specific and give one or two broad examples of what exactly happened vs what was expected by your clients and how to address them etc., you might get more useful answers.

Remember Indian IT companies vary from small boutique shops to mid-size to giants like Tatas. Company culture/ operating practices vary based on size and skill base.

The industry is quite mature and you may want to provide a little bit more information about your size/ context /problems faced, to get specific answers or recommendations.

From the US the time difference is a major problem. You can never discuss anything during normal work hours and any issue will have a one day turnaround. Or you stay up late all the time and then it takes over your personal life. We have some devs now in Costa Rica which is much easier to manage because you can discuss things on the phone during the day.

I kind of get what you're saying. I live and work in Germany where there is the stereotype of a very high standard that we carry around on all our products i.e. there are companies that would not do business with us if they did not get the "Made in Germany" stamp from our exported goods/services. This is an image - whether correct or not - that was acquired over a long period of time where many companies (BMW, Bosch, Siemens, BASF, Bayer, etc) provided high quality goods/services and built up an international image.

Anyway, this is a positive perspective customers have, and I admittedly benefit from it when doing business. In a lot of ways, the opposite can be said in terms of stereotypes for India, and so that's tough and I suppose what your question is about.

The thing is, even if perhaps I get an initial project in part due to a positive stereotype, that customer will not recommend me or use me again if I don't perform excellently for him i.e. making him better off through the interaction.

So that's what I focus on. And if you do that, in my experience, stereotypes won't matter at all. You won't be an "Indian Agency" but "Insert your company name" who does great work.

Some things I do to keep/maintain customers are: having very high standards of quality i.e. if a customer uses me I want them to remember me as the best contractor they ever used, they should be impressed at how clean/well-executed/designed/on-time the software delivery was. I also keep things professional, succinct and timely, and goal oriented and expect the same from the get go. Also if anything is not clear to me I make sure we clarify it and get on the same page immediately. Clients and you both hate wasted time/effort.

Finally, on the personal side I try to constantly self-improve and hone my areas of expertise so I can get things done more efficiently and be quicker on my feet and more creative/innovative with my solutions for customers. This is actually really big. Most (good) clients really really want someone who can think for themselves, is creative, and takes a problem and brings back an amazing solution. This can be difficult, I know, since a lot of clients won't give you enough information or even attempt to think their own problems through, etc. But with some you can help (being upfront, asking well-formed precise questions), and with the worser ones you can usually recognize them very quickly even in the initial project discussion and my advice is always walk away.

If you do these things, you will have absolutely no problems finding customers who love you and recommend you to everyone regardless of where you come from (at least IMH experience).

Best of luck.

The core problem is that companies from US or Europe contracting Indian agencies do it because of price. It's always more convenient to contract a local agency, in the same timezone.

For that reason, most Indian companies focus on getting the cheapest price and do so at the price of quality.

If you want to do quality work, you'll have to hire more expensive developers and you'll be more expensive. You need to figure out a good positioning because you'll be more expensive that your local competitor, and less convenient than firms closer to your clients. Add to that the low quality image that won't go away until all your competitors start going for high quality development.

I worked with only one, the one my partner foolishly chosen before I've joined him. Issues we faced:

- Developers were almost completely illiterate when it came to basic things, like http vs https, using git, encryption vs encoding. That's just something I wasn't ready for

- Using old technologies, i.e. Eclipse for Android development when almost everyone is on Android Studio, having libraries which haven't been maintained since 2010 as dependencies

- Communication was horrible, I had to write 10-20 emails before I could get any answer

I taught a dozen or so as part of our outsourcing years ago at <omit> Consultancy in Vashi Mumbai, all except one turned out to be useless (this one guy was awesome though, I always wonder what happened to him against useless peers), and these were apparently the cream of the crop. All stereotypes turned out to be true, shit code, slow progress, no straight answers, record high hours recorded, frustration with the loose neck and yes man responses,in end outsourcing was canned. Hospitality was great though, nice people, musuems, awesome food, kingfishers, trips to Goa, Id do again if against a more generous expense package.

Stay away from it, other then tax advantages you should stay away from it. Nothing but horrible experiences.

I'm convinced there are schools over there that print Masters degrees in computer science with only 6 weeks of training. I'm only half joking.

Having worked with Indian companies and for Indian companies the last 20 years here is my advice.

1) Learn to say 'no' or 'we need to understand this better before we can give you a quote or a deadline — too often, way-way too often Indian outsourcing companies oversell their capabilities. Learn to say, 'this can be done, this can't be done' within the timeframe/budget etc.

2) Increase your prices, get more senior developers (increase their salaries). For most western companies even a 100 increase in price is still many times cheaper than what they can get and if you get better developers because you can pay more you will be able to better meet your deadlines.

3) Invest heavily in proper frontend people. Give them extra training if needed so they know how to write optimized code. There is a world of difference between solving the problem and solving it elegantly. All too often what you get back works but is useless because it's too slow.

4) Hire western project managers. Don't get me wrong I have worked with some really great Indian managers but understanding the western culture and expectations and being able to understand western expectations would remove 90% of the confusion that happens today.

5) Did I say, increase your prices and your salaries?

6) Be better at writing PRD's and set expectations, make sure you can meet those expectations and don't be afraid to push back on what's possible to deliver early on. The sooner a client knows there will be delays or the sooner they know their timeline expectations can't be met in time the better. That allows them to plan accordingly.

7) Did I say, Learn to say 'no' or 'we will have to look some more into this'

Ping me if you want more concrete advice, it's an area I care about a lot because I worked with Indian companies a lot.

Solving the quality, expectations and honest feedback would increase any Indian development house directly into a top-tier partner for me.

Basically, in my experience, and the experience of others I've spoken to, you need to do almost exactly the opposite of everything the India dev agency industry does. The sector as a whole it completely trashed and discredited in the UK, from what I can see, and if I interview somewhere and they have an Indian agency on-board somewhere, it's a major red flag that something very, very bad is probably happening somewhere.

That's because every single Indian dev agency experience I've had, has resulted in a net negative outcome, sometimes so bad we've thrown away _everything_ they've touched and started again.

A couple of ideas that might make everything "nicer":

1. Increase code quality. Commit to it. Understand technical debt and commit to reducing it. Refactor. Code reviews. Cite and apply industry standard texts like _Clean Code_ or language-specific texts (e.g. _POODR_ for Ruby). Test coverage, great documentation, highly readable code: they're not optional any more.

2. Go agile and lean. Don't expect BUFD. Realise the client is learning as they go too.

3. Don't take specs from a client and develop code that meets them. Develop the spec _with the customer_. Use BDD properly.

4. Realise there are many things that go outside the spec. Pre-empt. Don't wait to be told. Realise that functional requirements are less than 20% of what is needed to successfully ship a product. There are many things I would "just expect" a developer to do, but every time I've worked with an Indian dev agency I got exactly what I asked for, no more, no less, no common sense applied. Do I really need to tell you the "password" field should be encrypted at rest, and which crypto scheme to use? No, you should do that because it's basic common sense, and tell me what crypto you chose, and why...

5. Say "no" more. Say "I don't know" more. Say "we made a mistake" early when it's obvious you made a mistake. Don't pretend you/your colleagues are an "expert" in something if you've read one or two books or developed a couple of projects: you're still novices until you have 3-5 years experience of doing that thing. Embrace that, be honest about it, it's OK. Price yourself accordingly.

6. The sector tries to compete on price. Try and compete on speed or quality instead.