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

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


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Creating the service Getwear , we have accumulated a whole collection of stuffed cones, and half of them fell on the web development.

We needed to “revitalize” the design drawn by Gorbunov’s studio and the creation of a Configurator’s Flash engine with which you can create your jeans. Since we didn’t have any special financial resources by that time, it was decided to entrust the development to an Indian studio, which we conditionally 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 reasonable prices: we had very little money after the previous studio. We were also pleased with the enthusiasm of "Kryptonite": they quickly assembled our layouts into a digestible demo version, moreover they did it themselves. And in “Kryptonite” they are proud of the standardization of processes and quality according to ISO 9001 (as always, no one knows what these numbers mean). In a word, we decided to work.

However, the sanity ended before it began.

First, Indians have their own definition of the word “design”, which differs significantly from ours: they do not at all consider it an important part of the project, calling it “beautifications”, literally, “decoration.” As a result, everything turns out crooked and oblique. But they do not see it! For example, when we showed them our terrible prototypical prototypes (bluprint), the Indians gasped in admiration and said: “It's gorgeous!” (“It's great!”). For fun, we wanted to give them jeans patterns instead of website design, but we thought better of it in time: they would have done it without even thinking.

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



Or so:



A bit like the movie art Aliens, right? This is the result of an entire stage of our collaboration: 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 - this is not the worst thing that awaited us.

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

Well, imagine that at the reception at the dentist they promise to put a filling, and in fact they drill another tooth for a month, from time to time interrupting to tell tales about caries.

All this was accompanied by an innate inability to admit our mistakes, the inability to honestly say “no,” “we do not know how,” “we cannot.” As a result, we are stuck in a web of omissions and actual lies, losing weeks in order to simply understand what they can do.

Here is a prime example. We needed to create very complex configurator code. It was required to accurately repeat the effects of Adobe Photoshop with flash tools. When we agreed with Kryptonite, we heard the answer to the questions about the ability to make such an engine, “Oh yes, that's exactly what we are doing all the time.” In fact, it turned out that the company decided to just drag out time, offering instead of the engine a nice but completely non-functional parody of it, in parallel trying to learn how to do it as it should. Of course, Kryptonite failed.

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

It should be noted that the company behaved quite adequately in such a situation, if we can say so about the developer who created so much trouble. "Kryptonite" did not demand payment for that part of the functionality that it could not perform.

In our case, the Indian outsourcing was one big nuisance. We were haunted by even a stronger difference in mentality than with Americans: if the designers from the USA were boiled up, then Kryptonite not only did not do its job, but also directly slipped fakes. In short, close your eyes and try to imagine Indian developers or think about a joke about them - all this will turn out to be true.

After the failure with Kryptonite, we quickly enough our new developers - they were known DataArt. Our investor angel helped us in the search, who accidentally found friends in this company. In the end, we went to finish the jeans configurator there.

"DataArt"

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

Immediately after we started working on the Flash engine, our technical director, Slava, signed up for an internal mailing list for the project, so we were constantly aware of the development process.

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

We, like a beaten dog, waited every moment for some kind of trick, but ... it was not there. With DataArt everything worked without any problems. There were some difficulties in the process of configuring the design of the configurator, but all within the limits of normal human errors. In short, the experience is very pleasant.

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

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

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

Be sure to ask for a list of recommendations and contacts of referees. Select yourself several projects that are close to you and ask for the contacts of these particular customers.

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

Do not forget that there are independent systems of professional testing of developers. You can navigate through these systems to key employees who will work on the project.

You should always be aware of the progress of the project. Weekly meetings and emails are not counted. Ask for access to the project management system and watch, watch, watch.

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 give his opinion. Do you want double 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 - there’s a lot of deception.

Remember that the miser pays twice. And it's not only about money. Paying for something that actually turns out to be useless, you also spend time, which turns into money, which turns into time ... In a word, such a hellish recursion is obtained.

That was our experience in outsourcing web development. We were again saved by Russian developers, for which they thank you very much.

Please tell us about your experience. Have an offshore web development experience? Cooperated with Russian developers? What advice will you give?