Of all the numerous cold calls I get, inquiries from potential offshoring partners lead the pack. Their main pitch, of course, is that I can lower my development (or support, or QA) costs by leveraging offshore labor at a third or less of domestic rates. This argument is tends to be all the more compelling the further up the management chain you go: CEOs and boards of directors will often ask why we haven’t dealt with cost issues by adopting an offshore development approach.
Although I can see both sides of the argument, this post will focus on the negatives. I’ve come to a very firm stance on the topic of offshoring: the risks and the hidden costs tend to far outweigh the potential advantages. To be sure, I may have come to that stance largely because I’ve rarely, if ever, worked in a company where I felt the necessary prerequisites were in place to be able to even consider offshoring as a viable option. More on that later.
The lure of offshoring depends on a number of implicit underlying management assumptions that in my view amount to myths or misunderstandings. To ascribe to these myths is to go against decades of lessons learned in the trenches of software development. At the risk of being perceived as setting up a straw man argument, here is a list of just a few of these fallacies:
