Ask HN: Client replaced me with offshore team – what could I have done?

Work for$9/hr

For once, stay in touch with this client, and get to know how they are doing.

It's not impossible they come back to you, sometime - not necessary either, but offshoring is much much more to manage than just a lower price tag - and perhaps they don't know it, yet.

For a), the big question is: why did they think it's a better option? What risks do your customers see in you/what did they dislike? A general feeling of "not getting their moneys worth" can be treated differently than "we're worried you get sick/disappear on a jungle trip/... and we're stuck without the only person knowing what's going on".

What controls did you have in place so you were not a SPOF for your client?

I myself am struggling with this with a few of my consulting gigs: I need to find someone as a backup who can stand in for me when I need to spend time with family, go on trips, or am generally unavailable ....

Was it discussed at start of contract about expectations of progress velocity and cost? If it was and you met those, they may have changed their minds about that and not much you can do to change that they did that. If it wasn't discussed, in the future with new clients, discussing expectations around speed of feature delivery and associated cost could help you filter clients.

I guess you need to figure out the company's attitude to what they're doing. If they're trying to build a software product then they're often happier to spend if they know they'll get quality.

If the company is not actually tech related at all, they likely see internal tool development as a cost center to be minimised where possible. Likely they do not know the difference between high and low quality code and might be willing to take a dip in quality for a greater dip in cost.

Of course, I did meet up with a successful businessman not that long ago that credited the high valuation and subsequent sale of his non-tech company with their impressive internal tooling and management system. Despite not being a tech guy (beyond being above-average computer literate), he totally understood the value of it. So, it's not a hard and fast rule unfortunately.

Was the $4k/wk based on a billed hourly rate?

In general, the economics of working hourly don't tend to work in your favor. On their side, it focuses the client on the rate and the hours and tends to encourage them to micromanage you. On your side, you don't economically benefit from increasing quality and reducing timelines.

It's hard and a lot of people are not good at it, but I recommend trying to do project-oriented work with fixed bids. It's much easier to focus the client on the long-term benefits of higher quality and shorter timelines in a fixed bid situation. And you economically benefit from increasing quality and delivering faster than you bid.

It's a lot easier to compete with offshoring when you set the context this way.

Companies make stupid decisions to "save money", it seems like it was a budget based decision, so unless you were willing to work for less money you did everything right

Tough situation.

It's still generally true that for offshore dev work companies get what they pay for, so if the company really can replace you with 1 US pm and 2 devs for only $4k/month they probably won't be very good. But they may be able to maintain what you developed so to that extent you might have worked yourself out of a job. At that rate it's also likely that the offshore team may not be as good or as fast as your former client expects, so it's worth keeping in touch in case they need you back.

Can you move higher up the "value chain" by doing more technically specialized work that's harder to offshore?

Can you generalize what you developed for this company into a SaaS product that you can resell to other companies into the same industry?

Realistically it's also just a fact of life that some companies, especially if they're not in high tech themselves, think that offshoring is a silver bullet to cut development costs without any side-effects.

In my anecdotal experience, you can't do anything outside of the C-suite. If a company is going to replace in-house employees and local contractors with offshore contractors, nothing will stop that, except for a few months of working with offshore contractors. If they get a good offshore team, they won't ever go back. If they get a bad one, they might learn a lesson from it.

You can't save them from themselves. As an employee, keep your skills polished and your resume ready. Build up a reserve of savings so that if you are ever asked to transition your job to your replacement, you can more safely quit the doomed job and focus on looking for a new job with a future instead.

As a contractor, cultivate a greater diversity of clients and ask for more money than you think you're worth. Companies that squirm at the asking price will try to replace you with someone cheaper eventually, so you might as well make it easy for them to signal their cheapness as early as possible.

Also anecdotally, cleaning up the mess from an offshoring gone bad is not enjoyable work. I wouldn't scream it from the rooftops, but other developers in your network who might be tapped by that company to do it in the future will probably appreciate a heads-up on what happened, to either avoid the client or charge a premium. You could follow up with the company yourself, but would you really want to?

If they survive this experience, there will probably still be good money to be made helping clean up the mess which will no doubt occur here.

Sometimes these things just happen, it's difficult to turn down a price tag that is that much lower. Things that help in the general case are doing a great job(obvious), building up hard to replace domain knowledge, and nurturing relationships with the client and personnel. But it's hard to know how you could of done things differently without knowing more about the circumstances.

Who made this decision and what was your relationship to them? (Sometimes the people you interact with value you work, but people farther up the chain see less of the qualitative advantages and more of the quantitative costs associated with working with you.)

Another common sales tactics is client education related to disadvantages of alternate offerings. So you can talk about the hidden costs(like managing 3 people in wildly different time zone is more difficult and time consuming than 1 person down the street) and developer churn associated with off-shored software(and retraining associated with this churn).

Clients with expensive personnel will value on-shoring. For instance a law firm won't wants to pay their very expensive lawyers to manage an off-shore project.

But only sure fire way to find clients that won't offshore is to work exclusively with clients that are looking to onshore after an off-shore project just blew up.

is there anyway you can stay on and become the project manager? You have an integral knowledge of the application and projects, you know where all the bodies are buried which will be a HUGE benefit for the offshore team to get up and running. With some experience you'll be able to manage other projects besides this one and put that on your resume.

As we say in AA, when one door closed, another opens.

as you've witnessed, this approach, when applied well, has advantages, but also suffers from increased communication overhead and roundtrip times. as a result, prototyping and researching open-ended, not well defined assignments is not ideal with remote, given that the required feedback loop between customer and executor (you) is better kept short. maybe it would be best to enjoy both worlds? say, once you've onboarded the customer and are delivering, begin reducing costs for them by delegating units of work to cheaper, remote resources yourself? this way the customer is happy and stays with you. this has the added benefit of freeing your own time to take on new work.

You could have used bad variable names and no comments :). Use clojure or rust or D. Or R! Etc.

Nothing, if they don't have the money, they don't have the money. The only thing you can do is show you can do it faster and cheaper and perhaps offer a fixed price.

Isn't it like a standard practice? Hire an expensive professional first that will do all the heavy-lifting, then outsource bugfixing and maintenance somewhere else where it is cheaper.

$4k a week is top, top market rate where I come from, US Chicago, especially for 1 FTE.

As an independent contractor your client relationships are paramount to getting and retaining work. You should be aware what your client is feeling and be able to anticipate their next move. Ideally they'll just tell you what they're going to do but getting there takes time building mutual trust.

Consider spending extra time outside of your hands on work talking with your contacts at your client. Build that relationship and do so with multiple people in the company. When you work for yourself you are worker, manager, VP of sales and CEO. You'll want to spend time in each position so the needs of your company are satisfied.

Also clients build off each other. I've repeatedly gotten new work from friends and business associates of my clients.

Consider this a lesson and spend more time on those soft skills or put yourself in a job that doesnt require that level of self sufficiency.

What could you do?

Lower your price. The gap between a team and you is 3x. Hire a 2k developer to do the work and you manage project. Do this 4 times. If one client moves you don't have all of your eggs in one basket.

There are clients are won't outsource to India. The ones with .gov URLs tend to be that way.

Giving up the consulting to be an employee with benefits and reliable work, maybe you want a USDS job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20330257

Also try directly applying to various agencies and their contractors.

You have not much to worry about. I tried to replace MYSELF (billing $20K/month) with someone $5K/month. It was... shall we say, difficult.

Good help is definitely hard to find and if your client found good help, they should do good help consulting.

I've had literally dozens of clients try their toes in the greener grass only to return. Trick is to gracefully leave the door open. And of course raise rates after they return.

If you have been with this client for a year, just move on. If it was a month long, you need to devise a different strategy: don't be so fast with your solution. Once you give your solution, offshore teams can take that solution and chug along.

I am that client. Not exactly yours of course - but i am the client who is going to replace someone with India provider within next month.

Here is the context:

- Current worker is USA, Bay Area based and is good technically (4+ out of 5).

- Current worker is local and it is very convenient for us.

- Current worker is AMAZING talking to customers and putting off fires. His "talking" skills certainly exceeding his technical skills.

- The competing Indian provider is well tested, exceeding expectation in quality and skills.

- The Indian provider is very professional. We met him in person and had interview.

- The Indian provider charges 4 times less.

- The Indian provider has capabilities to scale his capabilities. So there are positive potentials for us.

- The project can be executed by remote team (i.e. there are no restrictions)

- Current worker (local) is employed by uncooperative consultancy who is planning to raise the rate for current worker for us against prior negotiated rate. Just because they [think that they] can. That same consultancy can (and will) be a competitor as they can gain a valuable hard-to-get skills if we continue to employ and train current worker. This is show stopper and we were forced to stop giving current worker access to advanced projects, keeping him currently on older projects.

- Current worker been offered to join us but he refused.

Your context may vary - but that's a fair context from the real project.

What's the market for Python devs like these days?

I know there is a lot of interest in the language from people coming from other fields, but I realize that doesn't necessarily mean there are enough qualified people to meet demand.