The tale of how we ordered web development in India, and how Russian programmers saved us

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    In the process of working on the Getwear website, we were faced not only with a terrible American design - we also gained experience working with programmers from India and Russia. We will be happy to tell you about this experience, and 8 tips will be a bonus for those who are thinking about moving programming offshore.



    When creating the Getwear service , we have accumulated a whole collection of full cones, with half of them in web development.

    We needed a “revitalization" of the design drawn by Gorbunov’s studio and the creation of a configurator Flash engine with which you can create your own jeans. Since we no longer had special financial resources by that time, it was decided to entrust the development to an Indian studio, which we will call “Kryptonite”.

    Kryptonite

    Kryptonite has positioned itself as one of the largest offshore web development studios. Among her clients were very well-known companies, such as National Geographic or Pepsi. Well, or Getwear, for example.

    We immediately liked the sane management and very pleasant prices: we had very little money left after the previous studio. We were also pleased with the enthusiasm of Kryptonite: they quickly assembled our layouts into a digestible demo version, and they did it on their own. And at Kryptonite they are proud of the standardization of processes and quality in accordance with ISO 9001 (as always, no one knows what these numbers mean). In a word, we decided to work.

    However, sanity ended before it started.

    Firstly, the Indians have their own definition of the word "design", which differs significantly from ours: they generally do not consider it an important part of the project, calling it "beautifications", literally - "embellishment". As a result, everything turns out crookedly and askew. But they don’t see it! For example, when we showed them our terrible template prototypes (blueprint), the Indians gasped in admiration and said: “It's gorgeous!” (“It's great!”). For fun, we wanted to slip jeans patterns into them instead of the site design, but thought it over in time: they would have done it without even thinking.

    For example, this is how an Indian designer imagines jeans:

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    Or so:

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    A bit like art for the Aliens movie, right? This is the result of a whole stage of our joint work: the Indians promised to draw and prepare photorealistic illustrations of jeans. After we understood the scale of the tragedy, we had to urgently take pictures and put on the site some completely random jeans.

    However, these Pythagorean pants are not the worst thing that awaited us.

    “Kryptonite” unpleasantly struck us with professional unsuitability: the employees did not know how to do the absolutely basic things that any schoolchild can do. For example, they could not convert a vector file to a raster file, they could not implement the basic project functionality in the code - it turned out that they did not know how to work with Flash properly, although they were chosen for this competency.

    Well, imagine that at the dentist’s appointment you are promised to have a filling, but in fact a different tooth is drilled for a month, intermittently intermittently telling tales about caries.

    All this was accompanied by an inborn inability to admit one’s mistakes, an inability to honestly say “no”, “we don’t know how to do this”, “we can’t do it”. As a result, we are bogged down in a web of omissions and actual lies, losing weeks just to understand what they can do.

    Here is a striking example. We needed to create very complex configurator code. It was necessary to accurately repeat the effects of Adobe Photoshop with flash tools. When we agreed with Kryptonite, when asked about the ability to make such an engine, we heard in response, “Oh yes, that's what we do all the time.” In fact, it turned out that the company decided to just take time, offering a nice, but completely non-functional parody of it instead of the engine, while trying to learn how to do it the way it should. Of course, Kryptonite did not succeed.

    In the end, we are tired of sponsoring the training of hundreds of thousands of Indian company programmers. Realizing that "Kryptonite" will not fulfill the task, we parted with them.

    It should be noted that the company behaved in such a situation with dignity, if I may say so about the developer, who created so many troubles. Kryptonite did not demand payment for that part of the functionality that it could not perform.

    In our case, Indian outsourcing turned out to be one big nuisance. We were pursued by an even stronger difference in mentality than with the Americans: if designers from the United States were hacky, then Kryptonite not only did not do its job, but also directly palmed off fakes. In a word, close your eyes and try to imagine Indian developers or remember a joke about them - all this will turn out to be true.

    After the failure with Kryptonite, we quickly enough started our new developers - they turned out to be the famous DataArt. Our investor angel, who accidentally had acquaintances in this company, helped us in the search. As a result, we went to finish the jeans configurator there.

    “DataArt”

    Concluding an agreement with DataArt, we had two alternatives: pay for the development by the day or pay for the development at once the amount that the studio estimated for itself. We chose a fixed payment.

    Immediately after the start of work on the Flash engine of our technical director, Slava was signed up for an internal mailing list for the project, so we were constantly in the know about the development process.

    The studio management was very pleased: the guys really did their work, and did not create the impression, as it was in Kryptonite.

    We, like a dog beaten by the owners, were waiting for some catch every minute, but ... he was gone. With DataArt, everything worked without any problems. There were minor difficulties in the process of configuring the design of the configurator, but all within normal human errors. In a word, the experience is very pleasant.

    In a word, the following slogan can be considered the slogan of working with DataArt: “Transparency, reporting, understanding of the situation, honesty”. Amen. As in the case of the design from the Bureau of Gorbunov, we significantly overpayed compared to the average price, but this overpayment turned into the quality of the product and the absence of problems in the process of its development.

    ⌘ ⌘ ⌘

    As a summary, we want to give a short list of tips that will be useful to companies thinking about outsourcing the development of their site:

    Examples of work and a list of partners are good, but not always enough. Pay attention to those works that are most similar to your project or separately ask for such cases during communication.

    Be sure to request a list of recommendations and contact information for advisers. Choose for yourself several projects that are close to you and ask for the contacts of these particular customers.

    Feel free to offer a test item. If you offer a company a large project, and she refuses to complete a small test task - this is an occasion to think. By the way, the test task can also be paid for - this money will not be lost, you buy for them confidence in the abilities of your performers.

    Do not forget that there are independent systems for professional testing of developers. Key employees who will work on the project can be drawn through these systems.

    You should always be aware of the progress of the project. Weekly meetings and emails do not count. Ask for access to the project management system and observe, observe, observe.

    If your team does not have an experienced specialist, ask someone to be your freelance expert. Let him analyze the quality of the code and express his opinion. Want dual reliability? Hire two experts.

    In fact, the previous advice can be formulated differently: if your team does not have an experienced technical director, it’s better not to even think about offshore web development - a hoax around.

    Remember that avaricious pays twice. And it's not just about money. Paying for what is actually worthless, you also spend time, which turns into money, which turns into time ... In a word, it turns out such a hellish recursion.


    That was our experience of outsourced web development. We were again saved by Russian developers, for which many thanks to them.

    Please tell us about your experience. Have offshore web development experience? Collaborated with Russian developers? What tips do you give?

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