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Yakov Fain's Java Blog: "Cultural Differences in Outsourcing"

China, Russia, and India Compared
By Yakov Fain
Article Rating:
May 8, 2006 09:30 AM EDT
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 12,242
Cultural Differences in Outsourcing

This is not about which country has better programmers. What cultural issues did you experience with the offshore country you've dealt with?

I'm not trying to generalize, or present any natioinality in a negative way, but this what I've heard so far:


  • India:  programmers do not say no, which does not mean that they've correctly understood the assignment and will deliver what you expect.
  • Russia: money does not motivate them that much. Threats like "I won't pay you unless you'll code this in 5 days" may not help. But if you tell them that so-and-so can do this in 4 days, they'll do it in 3.
  • China: they won't admit that there is an issue unless it becomes an obvious disaster.

    Can you add more of a culture-specific outsourcing issues?
    • I wonder, if anyone tried to work with the offshore teams of smart developers who do not speak English? Theoretically, this may open up an entire world of quality workforce if you have a middleman you trust, who speaks both languages?

    posted Monday, 8 May 2006

    Published May 8, 2006 – Reads 12,242
    Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
    Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

    More Stories By Yakov Fain

    Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Yakov co-athored the O'Reilly book "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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    Most Recent Comments
    Yakov Fain 09/29/08 10:05:31 AM EDT

    This was an old post. I've written more on the outsourcing subject in my free e-book Enterprise Software without the BS available at
    http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/enterprise_software_without_t...
    GSzatvanyi 09/29/08 06:10:38 AM EDT

    That's a very interesting topic. Actually, according to recent studies from major Big 4 auditor, 69% of all outsourcing deals fail, completely or partially. The main reason for this is lack of cultural compatibility between the vendor and the client and poor relationship management. Find more on this issue by reading this article here http://www.outsourcing-factory.com/en/stay-informed/white-papers/cultura...