Could a single programmer being paid $120K per year be more productive than 10 outsourced programmers? [closed]

Question

A senior programmer of mine is paid $120k per year. Yes, he is very good and a fast coder too.

Though, is it possible for this person to be more productive than outsourcing 10 people from Bangladesh or Pakistan and pay them $12K per year?

Just wondering cause I run a software company and have been challenged with this question. As good as one person is, how would he compare to 10 people?

I appreciate any experience one can share with outsourcing and don't forget to multiply that by 10.

EDIT 1

Forgot to mention that the current $120K paid programmer is a Pakistani (migrant). So please it's not about race or where the outsourced workers comes from.

EDIT 2

An interesting proposition came regarding the programmer's age. My current employer is 44 year old age. Most of the outsourced programmers will be in their 20s. A team of younger coders vs one "old" coder?

EDIT 3

Thank you for all the comments so far. Most of the work we do are quite simple and somewhat repetitive. So outsourcing should be fine based on the comments seen. The current $120K per yer developer I have is good but like any of us he has issues. Some aluded that it might be ideal for me to let him manage maybe another 3 more developers from Pakistan cause he's Pakistani himself. But looking at his fit, he has more of the Mark Zuckerberg type personality.. timid and can easily be bullied. I'll have to work through my spreadsheets on this. But so far, all answers have been very good!

Answer 1

This question is exactly why a friend of mine almost went bankrupt with his company developing and selling a unique software for architects. He was the No. 1 leader in the (niche) market and thought "let's have more features in less time", and hired an Indian company to create the next version of his software.

The software was delivered on time, and it had all the requested new features. But it was unstable, crashed all the time, was slow and the acceptance of his customers was next to zero: They all moved to the next competitor.

He went back to developing himself (he had developed the software in the first place), stopped outsourcing, started paying more for experienced developers and now (after almost 10 years of struggling) he is back to position No. 1.

This YouTube video can be taken for software development for 100%.

Experience and knowledge in software development can NEVER be replaced by pure "coding time": 1,000 lines of code done by an experienced developer are worth way more than 500,000 lines of code done by people who rarely know what they do.

Another point: Software development is often not "dividable" into arbitrary numbers of tasks. Even in complex software you have a lot of dependencies and cannot develop on 100 libraries / parts of the code at the same time. So a large amount of your developers will sit waiting for the next free task.

And even if your development is complex enough to have 100 people work on it at the same time (this is HIGHLY unlikely as at the moment just ONE developer is able to handle it all): You need ONE person to coordinate who does what: If you e.g. organize yourself in scrum teams then there is a maximum number of members in each team (20 is seen as the very max usually) and you need someone to coordinate those 5 scrum teams so that everybody has enough work.

Project managers / scrum masters / however you call them usually don't work for 12k.

And one last point: I have been the 120k person in such a project. And I had only 5 "cheap workers" in my team. I had to rewrite ALMOST EVERY SINGLE LINE of the code of the others because it was

• buggy
• slow
• not expandable
• not accepted by the customer

Simply: Don't do it... it will not work.

Answer 2

I think you'd be surprised at what outsourced developer rates really are. This report on 2019 rates has Bangladeshi rates averaging at $25-$35 an hour - which is equivalent to $52,000 to $72,000 a year. Pakistan is the same.

Sure, you can probably find cheaper developers out there. But you can easily find cheaper developers closer to home. And probably about the same quality.

So those 10 outsourced developers you're paying $12,000 might produce more code than your single $120,000 home-based developer, but it's very likely going to be badly written, badly architected, buggy as all hell, and generally a nightmare for you. On top of that, you are going to have to co-ordinate with those 10 outsourced developers, and you're going to find yourself having all sort of communication issues (especially as there's a good chance they've picked up several other $12,000 a year jobs along with yours).

Answer 3

In addition to the existing answers I just want to stress one thing:

Humans are not like CPUs on a computer where more is better. Coordinating development is a highly challenging task that requires expertise and effort, as well as good interpersonal- and teamwork skills.

10 programmers, each being 50% as good as 1 well-paid skilled programmer, does not equal the productivity of 5 skilled programmers.

Hire ten mediocre programmers with minimal teamwork experience, and you will end up with a huge, uncoordinated, unworkable mess as a code-base, full of bugs and unmaintainable. Hire one good one, and you will likely end up with something workable.

Answer 4

Yes. A single really talented developer will beat ten cheap, disinterested beginners.

That does not necessarily mean this particular one will beat the specific outsourcer you have. But it is well possible.

First, do not underestimate the amount of overhead you get with a bigger team, and the effort to get a new team up to speed on an existing project, an existing framework or just your already existing software development standards. Your senior programmer can have a good part of the next project done by the time your outsourcers write the first line of code.

Second, do not underestimate the amount of management effort to run an outsourced software development team. This will be costs on both sides - so on your side it will take time from a project manager who is probably cheaper but not terribly much than the coder, and on the outsourcer's side there will also be a manger person who doesn't write code. Experience also shows that more iterations are required.

Third, the amount of existing knowledge about your business processes, the implicit requirements of your internal customers, the system architecture and dozens of other details that the outsourcing team will not have and that will cause issues down the line that then need to be fixed - depending on the project this can range from a time saver to a dealbreaker.

And finally, yes a senior developer will easily beat a few junior developers in productivity. The fact that for any given task, he has a vast experience of possible solutions in his head, can more reliably estimate which of those will work best in the specific situation and can implement it quickly and reliably without much trial-and-error or reading of documentation is a massive advantage.

All together, these items can well add up to enough to beat the numbers. Also keep in mind that software development does not scale linear. Just like digging a hole in your math 101, the fact that one person digs that hole in ten days does not mean that ten people can dig the same hole in one day. They'll spend most of the day standing in each other's way.

Answer 5

tl;dr:

1. Boilerplate coding of modules with standard interfaces is easier to outsource than custom software with proprietary interfaces.
2. Be prepared to spend more time on specification and documentation.
3. Provide resources to support and guide the external team.
4. Do not be fooled by a spreadsheet with hourly wages. There is significant non-obvious overhead.
5. Mitigate the risks.

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Here are a few anecdotes from my personal experience which may help narrow the "answer parameter space".

1. I have worked with a consultant programmer who single-handedly reverse engineered an industrial communication protocol for distributed devices and implemented a sufficient emulation (using an existing general communication library) under Windows which allowed us to perform a system test of the embedded devices we programmed in software on a PC. It was a productivity boost for testing and turnaround times and essential for debugging.

   This was something most programmers, myself included, simply could not do. It would be irrelevant whether you put 1, 10 or 100 to the task: You would not get a result.

   That's the most clear-cut case, where a replacement completely fails: A task which requires an extraordinary expert.

2. In another company a certain task was given to a team in India. They set up meetings, specifications, everything worked very well. After a few weeks the team asked a question which showed that they had completely misunderstood the scope of the task. Like, you ask somebody to implement the database connectivity of your online store and they start implementing a TCP/IP stack which you only learn a month later when they ask about Ethernet frame sizes.

   The likelihood of misunderstandings and late corrections like that are higher between different cultures. Many Asians find Westerners rude; many Westerners do not understand that Asians are more polite and tend to avoid confrontation, accusation and contradiction. For some Asians it is important to save face, so everything is reported being fine until some material defect (like a missed milestone) appears. The Westerners probably had missed the earlier, more subtle signs of trouble.

3. In my current company one of our senior engineers travels to the South East European home of the external team several times a year for a week or so. He answers questions, helps avoid misunderstandings like the one above, gives support with the complex build environment, promotes best practices, listens to their troubles like network connectivity and access to test results etc. and then reports back to team leaders here. In addition, there are bi-weekly telephone conferences with the external team and our team managers. External teams need a lot of care and feeding.

4. Young developers everywhere tend to change jobs relatively often while they pursue their career. English speaking Asians may change even more often because new companies emerge, or because there is an opportunity to get a work visa somewhere else where they can earn 120k. Working for you is a reference for their next career step. Be prepared for turnaround in your team of 10. Unfortunately the most likely ones to leave are the most experienced and productive programmers, including the team leader.

Here are some more general considerations.

1. Outsourcing works best — or works only — with exact, detailed specifications. This is ambivalent: Good specifications haven't hurt anybody yet; but on the other hand your senior engineer may already know what to do with just a few keywords because he has a system view and knows how this part would fit in. A detailed specification is part of the task which needs to be done. Once the specification is complete and correct down to a level that "anybody" can implement it, not that much work is actually left. (Some CASE tools would already generate some code for you from such a specification.) In effect, you will still have to do a significant part of the work at home.

2. Communication with an external team will be mostly in writing, for a variety of reasons: Contractual obligations, documentation, different time zones, difficult communication via the telephone. This makes the collaboration much less flexible than with an in-house senior programmer. Your desk neighbor can simply ask you something, can focus on a feature or tool you need right now for the rest of the day and so on; this will be much harder for the external team. If the requirements change a whole list of documents will need to be revised for the external team; if it were your colleague you could simply tell them.

3. Everything else being equal, larger teams are less efficient because of the necessary communication and coordination overhead. For a start, one of your team of 10 externals will not be a developer but a team manager, and you will need somebody in your own company who can dedicate a significant part of their workday to coordinating the work of the externals. (This will be on top of the specification etc.) This is independent of the issues relating to outsourcing in general or international collaboration in particular.

4. "Never change a running system" should not be your only motto because that would prevent innovation; but it is a warning: Changing a way of doing things which is proven working is inherently risky. The external team may not work well together, may not actually have the advertised level of expertise, may fall apart after a few weeks or may simply need three times as long as planned. What I learned as an engineer is that predictability is perhaps more important than efficiency. Outsourcing adds some uncertainty which was not there when you were developing entirely in-house. I liked Mikesplace' advice of risk mitigation. Do not simply assume that the outsourcing will work, and don't make the future of your company depend on it.

Answer 6

Here's a bit of reality check.

First, you don't get a software developer in Pakistan for $10,000 a year. The salary for that developer will be more like $30,000 a year. But you can't get a developer for his salary only. You'll go through some outsorcing company who adds their cost and profit to your annual cost. So these 10 developers cost you $400,000 a year.

But that's not all. 10 developers in Pakistan are useless. To handle 10 developers, you need a project manager. Which will cost you about the same as your $120,000 developer who can manage himself. So now your 10 developers in Pakistan cost about four times as much as one good developer in your own country.

Then you are saying "productivity". What is productivity? I count productivity as amount of useful, problem free, maintainable software delivered. Outsourcing companies don't count that - they count billable hours delivered. And your outsourced developers don't count it either - they count lines of code, or story points. Quality is not something they care about. Actually, they will be discouraged from delivering quality, because that reduces the amount of things the customer (you) pays for.

With six to ten developers, with oversight at your company that is actually on to problems, you can probably deliver the same functionality. But nowhere near the same cost.

For a case where outsourcing cost a bank (Lloyds TSB) 100s of millions see this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/06/timeline-of-trouble-how-the-tsb-it-meltdown-unfolded

Answer 7

Speaking here as a developer

I'm being paid now twice what I was being paid 5 years ago, and I'm doing things 10 (or 100) of me simply wouldn't have understood 5 years ago.

Some days I can spend many hours analysing a situation then spend five minutes churning out some code that adds real value to our product, which is fast, robust and expandable due to the analysis performed. How would you propose your 10 outsourced programmers would coordinate that analysis?

If you think you need good quality code, the quantity becomes irrelevant.

If you don't think you need good quality code, good luck to you, there's plenty good answers here already that list the ways that can end in disaster

I read an excellent comment a few minutes ago asking if you needed surgery would you rather have a $120k surgeon or 10x $12k surgeons, yeah, that one answers itself. Your software product is a very complex thing, it's not like building a wall.

Answer 8

Since your question is just about comparing the output of a single senior dev to 10 people who may be devs, I'm not going to go into the logistical issues.

The first and most important difference between a good developer and a bad one isn't the amount of code they can write, but the correctness of the code they send you. So, you may not want to outsource your development if you're writing something where failure can mean death, as Boeing has found out. Even if no one will get hurt if your program doesn't work, bugs that make it to production can cost your company in terms of money, consumer confidence and regulatory compliance. Your site could be compromised because of a security vulnerability that requires a simple OWASP Top Ten exploit that your senior dev wouldn't have introduced, for example. Even sites that appear to work but in fact are not accessible to persons with disabilities according to local law may land you in court. Considering the cost of bad code to every company, you may suddenly value the code your senior dev writes more than the code your outsourced devs write, even if it is less features developed overall.

It is also not necessarily the case that your senior dev is able to successfully develop fewer features in the same time as your outsourced devs. Notice that I'm not saying they will write more code - anybody can write a lot of lines of code, but what matters to your company is not the number of lines of code, but the number of features successfully implemented. Features are rarely unique, and even if they have a little unique part most of their implementation requires doing things that have already been done, either in the system or in another one. Hopefully your senior dev is senior not just because they've worked in your company for a long time, but because they're able to leverage their experience to design and write the code to implement features quickly.

Answer 9

Are these 10 programmers comparable to the 120k programmer in all aspects that are relevant to the job?

If not, then I would say no, similar to my answer to the question “Will hiring 10 physicists allow me to accomplish what a single Albert Einstein can accomplish?”.

From a business standpoint, the 120k programmer solves a lot of things for the business... will these 10 be able to accomplish the same thing?

Answer 10

Yes (but with caveats)

Regarding pay - note that if your friend's take-home pay is 120K, then his cost to the company is considerably higher - I'm not sure what those costs are in the US anymore, let's add another ~80% onto that (payroll, retirement fund, holiday-pay, cost of floorspace, etc etc). So we're looking at ~200K in costs.

Let's look at the outsourced developers - I've used Eastern Europeans, and you can get quite good quality for ~20/hour there. So let's roll with that - at that rate, your developer cost is really around 35-40K annually.

If you spend some time hiring correctly, you really can find a few (say 2 or 3) developers from that region who will absolutely write more working code than your one developer. This might push your price up however - let's pay them 50K annually - that's still around 50K cheaper than the local developer.

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Caveats

The first is that good developers in non-US countries aren't stupid, they want to come to the US to work, so you'll probably either end up paying them more to retain them in their home country, or if they're particularly good you'd be advised to consider moving them to the US.

The second is that there are some cultural issues to overcome - I'm not going to get into that here - and this can cause problems with your offshore talent if you're not aware of them.

The third is that a 10x developer anywhere will be hard to replace (see "move them to the US"). Don't lose them!

Fourth the co-ordination of work can be tricky. Many companies (large) are opening tech hubs in these regions to offset this. They do this by sending local managers overseas to command the culture/organisation of these offshore regions, and by allowing themselves to bypass dubious middle-men companies and control talent directly. This yields tremendous savings and you get to really attract better talent.

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Summary

If your question is just "can one person truly compare with 10" then it's really "it depends", on the one person and the ten being compared against. But you can make savings by offshoring work. This is naturally what has provided downward pressure on tech salaries after all.

Answer 11

Comparing 1 good developer to 10 foreign is not a good comparison because it would be a risky approach to do such a thing. Comparing a team of 3 Western developers to 2 local and 5 offshore would be a better comparison. Because the two locals would be able to architect and QA the work and mitigate project risk in a way that could never be done with 10 offshore devs who could completely screw things up and waste 100% of the project budget. I once personally managed 3 offshore devs and I am a senior developer and the 2 year project was a success, during that same time a highly respected Business analyst from the same company, well, his offshore managed project (same offshore company) ended up being flushed down the toilet

Answer 12

It's a mixed bag. Outsourcing is a great thing if you know what you are doing.

I managed a Fortune 50's key business unit outsourcing strategy for a few years. We were able to get some amazing rates and (more importantly) great commercial terms. There were a lot of benefits, too. Increased productivity with lower cost was one of them...but it's not as simple as just sending work to low cost geos. There is a lot of risk mitigation that goes into it and you need to have a plan.

First, low prices seem great but the bodyshop is going to take their usual margin. You think the sales teams are going to surrender their sweet, sweet commission? No way. This means that the workers doing your work are feeling the pain. You end up with expeirence builders who work cheap for six month and then go find a better job. Turnover is a real problem. If you just need warm bodies to crank code them maybe this is not much of a factor. If you expect people to stick around you will need to pay them a little more.

Second, your pool of cheap workers probably won't be the best quality. Expect rework and many, many hours on phone calls between 10:00pm - 2:00am if you are in the US. They will require detailed direction.

Third, the technical scope is maybe 20% of your problem. You need to really think about the business terms. How do you expect to manage warranty terms? IP indemnity? IP ownership of deliverables? Supplier's limitation of liability? Supplier's rights to terminate? Injunction mitigation/supply line protection (if you have customers that will depend on this work)? There is a whole supply chain/procurement component here that needs to be understood. A lawyer will tell you to take a hard line against risk. Practically, you need to determine where you can yield/concede "to get to yes."

If you choose to outsource, you need to spend A LOT OF ENERGY defining precisely what you need your people to do. They do not think and they won't problem solve...they're not paid to. They will take the shortest possible route to completing the deliverables in the scope as they are defined in writing. If you are envisioning something and assume that no competent coder would need basic, entry level directions to make your vision a reality, think again. "Certainly they will realize that they need to..." is never something you should be thinking. EVERY LAST DETAIL must be clearly defined.

As far as billing goes, do not agree to "actual effort", "true hours", "time and materials", or any other open ended billing structure. Your scope needs to be written well enough to get fixed cost, milestone payments, or time and materials with not-to-exceed pricing. Your supplier will bleed you dry if you just open your checkbook and agree to pay based on hours with no regard to deliverables.

If you go this route, consider hiring someone who knows what they are doing and take a lot of notes. You can manage this. It's not rocket surgery. Just skip the learning curve.