Ganesha's Arms help him code faster than you.

Ryan Henson Creighton of Untold Entertainment posted an article on freelancers versus outsourcing to India.  He had this awesome picture and caption of Ganesha that I had to duplicate it on my blog.  The gist of his article was lamenting how a team of outsourced programmers can create tons of “top-notch” websites for pennies on the dollar compared to their western (read: expensive) counterparts.

My hope is to dissect this fear one piece at a time in a series of articles and reasons why not every computer job or freelancing gig will suddenly find itself in India.

Firstly: Computer Programming is NOT based on the factory model.

A lot of software engineering practices and models of operation seem to base themselves on the theory that computer programming is like a factory model that can be scaled with more labor.  This is a horrible analogy, but this meme is unfortunately repeated by many management teams across the software engineering landscape.

Probably one of the best and most accurate analogies of software programming comes from “The Mythical Man-Month.”  Programming is more like a “surgery” table than it is a factory.  Most complex systems act like a body with all its moving parts working as a whole.  And because a program works as a whole with all its moving parts, there is only a limited number of things people can be working on at a time – much like having too many surgeons working on the same person on the operating table.

This is the first place that you find that you cannot simply purchase more people and solve a complex problem quickly.  In fact, having too many people may slow down the process rather than speed things up.

Secondly: You can’t outsource talent.

Now taking the surgery analogy further…  Would you outsource your heart surgery to someplace cheaper?  Does a cheaper doctor mean you will have a better surgery?  People will not buy things simply because they are cheap.  Depending on how much they value of the end product, people will still pay top-dollar for a good result.  “You get what you pay for,” is very true in this field, and I have heard a few stories from freelancers who have had to clean up or redo messes made by outsourcing.  The fact of the matter is that people will pay for talent.

Dr. Evil

The reverse is also true in that talented people will not price themselves cheaply.  Why would a highly-skilled and talented person in India not charge equal to or just under their more expensive counterparts in the West and live like a king with a lower cost-of-living?  A person of a certain skill level will not undervalue themselves in the market.  To quote Dr. Evil, “Why settle for millions when you can make billions?”

So unless you are developing a computer program that easily fits under the mold of “easily replicatable” like some sort of template that you can replicate a million times over, I don’t see outsourcing as necessarily the best choice.

And if anything… GAME PROGRAMMING does not fit this category.