Exporting Jobs to Eastern Europe
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Hi Paul, I'm in Switzerland, so Bulgaria / Romania are 2 hours away by cheap flight. It will be necessary for the people to visit us or for us to visit them on a monthly basis, and the proximity does help. I hadn't thought of SA, but the distance will not help. What would you pay monthly in SA for a dynamic Technical Writer with good computer skills - we're talking quality here? Simon
Hi Simon, Simon Brown wrote: I'm in Switzerland, so Bulgaria / Romania are 2 hours away by cheap flight. It will be necessary for the people to visit us or for us to visit them on a monthly basis, and the proximity does help. finally I found someone who is in Switzerland! Cool. :-) Which part? I'm in SZ. Oh, well, to your question. I originally come from Slovenia but I work in Switzerland, too. You could say that managing outsourcing to the third world is my speciality. So far, I've outsourced four projects - two to India, one to Slovakia and one to Slovenia. I must say that it is much bigger problem then it seems. It requires very special sort of management. I found two things to be a huge problem - the quality and the work culture. Knowledge was a problem with the small companies, which didn't have the opportunity to develop technology overview (simply didn't have any decent projects so far). When I was outsourcing my first project from Germany to India, I thought it would be like in the office - people sitting at the computer working like hell 8.5 hours a day and talking about work at lunch too. Well, instead, by checking the dates on source files I discovered, that people were working only in the evenings, some days no work was done at all and the results were of extremely low quality. I think it is fair to say that there were exceptions to this rule, too. I don't want to humiliate any part of the world here - I'm simply explaining what happens when you do not have direct supervision of people working. Another problem was communicating the requirements. Whenever I outsourced something of importance it was returned half done. So I ended up using local resources for all the complex tasks. And that produced another problem, namely, the price of communication grew. We needed to provide very detailed specifications and very elaborated designs in order to get any work done in quality. We needed to write the data class sample (template) to have them done in a decent way. So, basically, we did a whole lotsa difficult work in house and the cost reduction was not as large as we thought - when we looked at the prices - and cost benefit was paid dearly and in blood by my nerves. All in all, for decent outsourcing you'll need the following: - very capable writers to communicate concepts in a clear and concise way, - very capable small core team of engineers in house, doing proofs of concepts in house, building architecture, design and developing patterns, - a good and st
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Secas se kada si mi rekao da lupam u vezi komunizma i kapitalizma? Da neces mozda da se selis za Srbiju. :)
Kapitalizam je definitivno bolji od komunizma, ali sad i Srbija postaje kapitalisticka (hvala Bogu). A inace, ne nameravam da se selim u Srbiju jos neko vreme (osim ako me ovi Ameri ne najure). Uglavnom, ohrabrujem coveka da ulozi pare tamo. Patriotizam? Mozda... :-O :beer:
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Secas se kada si mi rekao da lupam u vezi komunizma i kapitalizma? Da neces mozda da se selis za Srbiju. :)
Sta je sad ovo, sunce mi kalajsko? Nemojte da mi pravite SAO Code Project? ;-) Tomaz
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Kapitalizam je definitivno bolji od komunizma, ali sad i Srbija postaje kapitalisticka (hvala Bogu). A inace, ne nameravam da se selim u Srbiju jos neko vreme (osim ako me ovi Ameri ne najure). Uglavnom, ohrabrujem coveka da ulozi pare tamo. Patriotizam? Mozda... :-O :beer:
Ama, vidis da dok ne napadnu Irak nema nista od oporavka ekonomije. To ti je osnova ovog ovde. Na ratovima im pociva standard. Vidis kakvi su im programeri, skoro da nema divelopera kanadjanina(ja sam ti u Torontu). No zivi bili, pa da vidis za jedno 5-6 godina sta ce od USA biti. Ne predvidjam joj dobru buducnost. A pa bolji je, samo koliko i zasto.
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Please don't be so withdrawn - express yourself. :mad: Here in Switzerland we have about 2% unemployment and a tradition of working with countries rather than blowing them up. :-D I'm european and am asking for peoples' experience in working with small companies in the emerging european countries. Soon they will be members of the EU. Lots of love :rose::rose::rose: Simon
Simon Brown wrote: Here in Switzerland we have about 2% unemployment Depends on tha Kanton, but I think the number is more like 3.3%. Tomaz
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Sta je sad ovo, sunce mi kalajsko? Nemojte da mi pravite SAO Code Project? ;-) Tomaz
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Ostavite me tu. Za mene je prekasno. Procitao sam Atlas Shrugged. :-) Tomaz
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Hi Simon, Simon Brown wrote: I'm in Switzerland, so Bulgaria / Romania are 2 hours away by cheap flight. It will be necessary for the people to visit us or for us to visit them on a monthly basis, and the proximity does help. finally I found someone who is in Switzerland! Cool. :-) Which part? I'm in SZ. Oh, well, to your question. I originally come from Slovenia but I work in Switzerland, too. You could say that managing outsourcing to the third world is my speciality. So far, I've outsourced four projects - two to India, one to Slovakia and one to Slovenia. I must say that it is much bigger problem then it seems. It requires very special sort of management. I found two things to be a huge problem - the quality and the work culture. Knowledge was a problem with the small companies, which didn't have the opportunity to develop technology overview (simply didn't have any decent projects so far). When I was outsourcing my first project from Germany to India, I thought it would be like in the office - people sitting at the computer working like hell 8.5 hours a day and talking about work at lunch too. Well, instead, by checking the dates on source files I discovered, that people were working only in the evenings, some days no work was done at all and the results were of extremely low quality. I think it is fair to say that there were exceptions to this rule, too. I don't want to humiliate any part of the world here - I'm simply explaining what happens when you do not have direct supervision of people working. Another problem was communicating the requirements. Whenever I outsourced something of importance it was returned half done. So I ended up using local resources for all the complex tasks. And that produced another problem, namely, the price of communication grew. We needed to provide very detailed specifications and very elaborated designs in order to get any work done in quality. We needed to write the data class sample (template) to have them done in a decent way. So, basically, we did a whole lotsa difficult work in house and the cost reduction was not as large as we thought - when we looked at the prices - and cost benefit was paid dearly and in blood by my nerves. All in all, for decent outsourcing you'll need the following: - very capable writers to communicate concepts in a clear and concise way, - very capable small core team of engineers in house, doing proofs of concepts in house, building architecture, design and developing patterns, - a good and st
Hi Tomaz, Thanks - you have raised some most interesting points. Old Simon HB9DRV
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Neboj, na niektorych miestach im tam funguje velmi pekny komunizmus...;-) Rich
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Hi, Out of interest where are you located? We are being quoted about 25 Euros per hour for a good guy in Romania, 35 Euros for Bulgaria. That is a very fine wage over there, no wonder the people are so motivated. Old Simon HB9DRV
Simon Brown wrote: We are being quoted about 25 Euros per hour for a good guy in Romania, 35 Euros for Bulgaria You can get UK guys for the same - honestly I've seen contract jobs being offered at less than £20/hr == €35 and going. Also flights from the UK to Switzerland are relatively cheap. Also with the IR35 scenario in thr UK - working from home is no problem in fact it is preferable to most (eg they'll do the job cheaper). Also I would have thought that Germany would also be a good source with the relatively high unemployment. I am hoping my contact is fairly stable as it seems like it is a battlefield out there.
Technically speaking the dictionary would define Visual Basic users as programmers.
But here again, a very generalized, liberal definition is being employed and it's wrong
- just plain wrong - Tom Archer 5/12/02