<story><title>The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/real-reason-outsourcing-fails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmichaud</author><text>This actually rings true to my experience. I&apos;ve been responsible for several outsourced problems, and one common factor among them is trying to get Indian programmers and PMs to just be straight with me. I&apos;ve tried being direct by telling them that it&apos;s okay to tell me if something is wrong or to give me a realistic picture of progress, and I get &quot;Yes sir, I will certainly be very honest with you, sir,&quot; but nothing changes. It&apos;s a difficult barrier. I haven&apos;t figured it out yet.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/real-reason-outsourcing-fails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>I have mixed feelings on this, as somebody who does outsourcing from a country which is not known for failure to appreciate subtle social dynamics.  (Korean has six different forms of address based on relative rank?  I could &lt;i&gt;actually use&lt;/i&gt; six before lunch on a typical day at the office.)&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, we&apos;ve had outsourcing projects suffer from cultural issues.  However, they&apos;re not all related to the high PDI/low PDI distinction -- some of them you could shoehorn into that, to be true, but sometimes when any engineer swears that he absolutely will have a project ready by the end of the day he is just estimating poorly rather than being overly polite.&lt;p&gt;The number one problem we have had in outsourcing to a particular country is pervasive competence issues, followed by communication issues (egads, no, Babelfish is not an acceptable way to translate engineering documents), followed by a poor mesh in management styles which is exacerbated by both of the other two.  We outsource to another country, where we have not had the pervasive competence issues.  Things tend to go much better there.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not going to name names, but suffice it to say they&apos;re both in that top 10 list and within a few points of each other.</text></comment>