Vietnam - 1. Outsourcing

After working as a CTO (I considered myself more like a System Designer) for a small telco Filanity Corp. for 6 months. I realized the importance of outsourcing.

Our head office is located in Huntington Beach, California. However, we'd like to reduce the software development cost. I recruited a team of 10 developers in Vietnam.

• 1 x HTML/CSS/Photoshop Designer
• 1 x Photoshop/Flash Designer/Developer
• 8 x PHP Developers

I've live in Australia for almost 20 years. However, my Vietnamese is pretty good. There isn't any problem communicating with the Vietnamese developers.

The cost for the developers has been reduced significantly. A senior PHP developers would only cost us about $500 USD/month.

When hiring people in Vietnam, the following issues should be considered:

• Extremely hard to get Linux programmer.
• Spaghetti code.
• "Instant noodle" code. Most programmers are trained for that purpose. Most of the projects they've done are small projects. No maintenance is required.
  
• They can get the tasks done, but other people or teammate cannot understand.
  
• Don't be surprised if you see function with more than 100 lines of complex code.
• Wheels will be reinvented, many are not even round!
  

Well, they are quite smart. They just need to be trained!

After all, practice made perfect! Actually, only perfect practice made perfect!