I remember back in the year 2000 a going rate for a smart offshore developer was about $8-12/hour. At the same time, a good software engineer in Northern Virginia had a salary about $80-90K (which translates to about $50/hour).
So, it was no brainer to offshore as much work as you can (to get 4-5 developers for the price of one).
Now, the pricing has changed quite a lot. The offshore hour rate become $20-35/hour and an expenditures on local software engineer went up to about $75/hour. So, it’s now 2 to 3.5 offshore developer for the price of one onshore developer.
Frankly, one guy sitting in the office and communicating directly could be more productive (or at least of the par) than two offshore guys. So, on the first glance, amount of offshoring should go down.
However, there are couple wrinkles:
– An offshore personal pool is much-much bigger than local US (or European). So, if you want to find somebody good, smart and passionate, you have way more fitted candidates worldwide than in 20 miles radius.
– I believe offshore companies and developers has made tremendous progress for last 10 years. They learned how to work with customers, learned whole software development process from a cradle to a grave of a project and so on. (Just to make sure that it’s clear. I don’t say that ALL companies become good. I say that number of experienced software developers and managers became much higher within last 10 years).
So, long live offshoring 🙂
Hehe. “…to a grave of a project…” – well said 🙂
Yeah…In the case of choosing wrong offshore a project could be driven to a grave very fast 🙂
good one, I work for an outsourcing company, and agree with you to bits.
Прости что на Русскому
Ты както сравнивал зарплаты, и говорил что не правильно сравнивать абсолютные величины,
давай применять туже логику и тут
Ты упускаешь очень много деталей – oфис/бонусы/страховки/парковки/железо/мебель (Herman Miller) /ну и всякое такое, то что уволить иногда сложнее человека бывает (контракт + выходные пособия), тут контракт решает.
При том что офшор/оутстаф стоит 25-30$ это уже почти чистая стоимость 1го разработчика.
И также не забывай 20-30$ стоят тут специалисты высокого уровня их 20-30% такие тут будут стоить больше
остальные там (СНГ) все все также 8-15$
Dmitriy, please, if you can write in English.
Sure. The comparison which I made was approximate. However, even if I will include bonuses, insurance and so on, it wont’ change a lot the ratio. May be instead of 2.5 – 3 developer offshore developers per 1 one onshore, it will become 2.7-3.3
Regarding experienced vs unexperienced developers. I compared only experienced developers. Most likely the gap for unexperienced developers will be much wider. However, I am not sure that it’s good idea to hire a lot of unexperienced developers anyway.