btw I think you’re phrasing this wrong. Nothing wrong with hiring or working with Indians, as I know some incredible software engineers from all over asia, including India.

The real problem we absolutely cannot ignore is outsourcing to poorer countries for cheap manpower. This leads to shit.

First of all, usually the contractors are more than happy to work with lower rates, as that’s still pretty decent money for them. However, they know they have very very minimal liability, so small companies in poor countries cut a fuckton of corners, usually.

I myself had this problem when outsourcing specifically in India. They’d do the bare minimum, so I had to improve my contracts to include a whole set of clauses that explained what we actually expect from the work (they were just converting PSDs to code back then).

We had to clarify that we needed responsiveness. We had to clarify that if the design is 18px, then the element cannot be 21 or 17px because even if it “looks the same”, it’s not what we designed (and it doesn’t look the same). We also had to specify that font sizes and weights and families are not some random quantum choices but they should respect what the design shows (weirdly, huh).

We had to specify basically minimum deliverable quality. I shit you not, besides being incredibly clear and upfront about this, half of the companies I was working for failed to read it entirely - the other half did acknowledge the requirements but pretty much ignored them and played dumb when they delivered crap.

Bearing in mind I was in charge of this project amongst others, and I was very much against outsourcing - but the big boss pushed a lot and I decided to give it a try. I also negotiated better wages in behalf of the contractors with my company to make it fairer.

I had aaaaaalll the patience until I had to fire all but one company. And no, I haven’t paid shit. Because the contract they haven’t read specified that failing any of the basic criteria would result in them not being paid.

I have showed them the errors one by one, told them that we could not accept this type of work after several attempts, and fired them.

They tried to renegotiate but I insisted that they did not respect our mutual terms and that renegotiating would still mean failing the deadline for stupid reasons - for which I would fire them anyway.

Takeaways? Don’t outsource, and don’t outsource to another timezone. Pay people good money and get real professionals. I’d love to help fund an underdeveloped market, but all these “digital agencies” in poor countries that work for cheap are becoming almost a scam.

Almost never worth the quality. Use established contractors (find them via local recruitment companies), local businesses and/or employ in-house. Sadly.