Good to hear from you again. Well, in the case of pricing, you price yourself lower than someone in a bigger city. But it isn’t like you were pricing yourself way under market value – just competitively under.

So assuming that it costs $50/hr for freelancing here in the US, why wouldn’t someone in India price themselves at $25/hr or even $10/hr rather than at $0.10 an hour like the author is supposing in the article I cited? The author is talking about dropping the price way below market value which drops the floor.

As far as management structure is concerned, I think that the Mythical Man-Month proposes the surgical model as the way of doing business. The surgeon (lead programmer) is the head while the administrator (manager) is actually an assistant and facilitator to what the surgeon (lead programmer) needs to accomplish his goals. What we call “management” which does project planning and logistics, should serve as an assisting role to the technician. The problem is that we have the administrators at the top while the skilled technicians are the “grunts.”

Now how to identify talent? I think the first step is identifying if the person is just “someone who happens to program” and a true “programmer.” I think you were one of the first people who started giving me that insight into what constitutes talent.

At any rate, there are a couple of problems with that line of thinking [outsourcing] coming from management. First, as you said, is that you can’t outsource talent. On a deeper level though, how do you identify talent?

A manager who has never truly been part of the development community will not have the skills necessary to pick out talent even if it just walked in for an interview. It appears that the larger problem is not even the outsourcing of labor to India, but rather the priorities, goals, directions, and experience of management making those decisions. The wrong people appear to be in charge of the wrong places. To lead a development team to success, you need a tech-savvy manager to some degree, not someone that has no experience developing at all. In fact, the common wisdom is that even those promoted to manager should set aside a small amount of time to work on code just so that they can stay in touch with a briskly moving industry.

I see that you’ve read Mythical Man-Month. Now I’m going to have to suggest that you pick up a new one called- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager.

It is rather insightful and talks about the challenges of being a development manager with some great suggestions as to how you (as a development manager) should be viewing your team. It is a great read for anyone in a development team, regardless of your position.