Do you ever feel like your offshore programming team just gave up? Have they stopped asking questions or don’t have answers to yours? The problem may not be laziness but cultural.

Over the weekend I finished reading the hugely popular novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It is a story about several boys growing up in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion, how one named Amir comes to the U.S. during the war and then returns during the rule of the Taliban.

At one point near the end of the story Amir consults an attorney named Omar Faisal in Pakistan about adopting an Afghani child and returning him to the U.S. Omar had spent a considerable amount of time in both Kabul and the U.S. and was raised in Berkeley. He explained several times that it was extremely difficult to adopt a child and bring him to the U.S. without any paperwork when dealing with the INS.

Here is a very small part of the story:

“You’re telling me to give it up?” Amir asked, pressing his palm to his forehead.

“I grew up in the U.S., Amir. If America taught me anything, it’s that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts’ lemonade jar.”

That really struck me. Americans just don’t quit! It’s interesting to hear how Americans are perceived in other cultures.

It also reminded me of a personal incident while working with an Indian engineer at one of my startups about 15 years ago. It was late at night and we had to configure a couple of computers for a big demo the next day. I asked the Indian engineer to move a disk drive from one computer to another.

There was some problem like a missing driver or a wrong cable – something that was challenging but certainly could be fixed. But an hour later I found the Indian engineer working on some other small task. “What about the disk drive?” I asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t get it to work.” He said it with no shame or concern. I was shocked!

“So what did you do – just give up?” I was mystified by his lack of urgency.

After all, we couldn’t tell the prospective customer, “Sorry. We had this really cool demo lined up for you, but we couldn’t find a cable.”

Since then that engineer has become a U.S. citizen and settled in San Francisco with his wife and two daughters. His career has advanced quickly and he now works for a major strategy consulting firm in the U.S. We are still great friends and were recently reminiscing about the old days. “Do you remember the time you asked me if I ‘just gave up’ when were hooking up those computers? That really made an impression on me.”

I don’t think my friend would have ever peed in a lemonade jar, but he certainly learned how Americans feel about giving up on a major task that night before the demo so long ago. You may need to gently teach your offshore team the same lesson to get the results you expect.

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Professional programmers from Latin America that have emigrated to the U.S. are looking back to their home countries as a source of software development talent. 

Why? 

Because their experience with other outsourcing destinations suffered from a lack of English skills, cultural and time zone differences. Besides that, travel to places like India takes too long and is too expensive. 

You can read about some of these Latin entrepreneurs in the Outsourcing in Local Time article in a recent issue of Red Herring. 

An advantage of outsourcing to Latin America is the ability to implement a collaborative Agile software development process with your nearshore team because of the significant overlap of workday with the U.S. 

Meanwhile, the governments of Central and South American countries are encouraging these increased business ties with the U.S. Recently the government of Chile visited Silicon Valley to promote outsourcing to Chile.

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A recent Gallup survey discovered that 77% of Americans say that outsourcing is bad for the U.S. economy. “Beware: Your Customers Oppose Outsourcing” (subscription required) is the provocative title of the article published online in the Gallup Management Journal where the survey results are presented.

The question posed to 39,000 households was:

There has been some discussion recently about “outsourcing,” which is when American businesses hire workers in other parts of the world in order to save money. Which comes closer to your view . . . Outsourcing is bad for the American economy because it sends good jobs overseas, or, outsourcing is good for the American economy because it keeps the cost of goods and services down?

There is additional information in the article about how opinions on outsourcing vary by subgroups of age, education level and political party. How many of these households are trying to run a software company or IT department? Probably zero.

Hmm. . . Should you not outsource your software development because of the survey results? Should you not tell your customers?

Your customers won’t care.

That’s because the survey shows that Americans’ poor opinion of outsourcing is created by a lack of satisfaction and poor communication when calling an outsourced customer service phone line. The survey results include answers to various questions about outsourced call support centers.

This is not a survey about outsourcing, and certainly not outsourcing of software development. It turns out that what Americans don’t like is poor customer service. And who can argue with that?

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Outsourcing to Vietnam may seem like a dangerous undertaking to many Americans, like heading up the Mekong in search of Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. But it is a different world today with Vietnam becoming a member of the WTO earlier this year.

Business is booming in Vietnam and many Vietnamese-Americans passionately promote their homeland. Last week, the Vietnamese Strategic Ventures Network or VSVN hosted the VSVN Technology Business Conference 2007 last week in Palo Alto, California.

As you might expect, the audience was mostly Vietnamese-American. I am sure there were several profit-seeking capitalists among them. But I was also impressed by the dedication, concern and love expressed for their home country.  

I moderated a six-person panel discussion there about Software Outsourcing to Vietnam that included vendors and also U.S. executives that shared their experiences outsourcing to Vietnam.

We discussed the pros and cons of outsourcing to Vietnam, from low rates and an eager and motivated work force to the challenges faced with poorly spoken English and cultural differences.  For example, does “yes” mean, yes I heard you say something, yes I understand, or yes I will do what you asked!?

One panelist, Dave Klug from Alcatel-Lucent uses a practice of following up every conference call with a written description of what was discussed and agreed to.  He even recommends using instant messaging during conference calls to repeat major points in writing to ensure better understanding during the discussion.

In another panel discussion, Professor AnnaLee Saxenian from U.C. Berkeley used Vietnam as yet another example of the “brain circulation” phenomenon described in her new book The New Argonauts.  Brain circulation has replaced the old “brain drain” problem that many developing countries experienced in the 1960s and into the 1990s. The best and brightest left their homeland (or escaped as is the case with many Vietnamese in the late 70s and early 80s) and went to the U.S and other western countries to be educated.  Then they stayed and many became very successful, delivering little or no value to the old country.

India, Taiwan and China are the countries sited in her book. Engineers and scientists are returning to these countries and starting ventures that reach across multiple national borders.  The Vietnamese Diaspora and the recent return is now another example.

To read more about the conference check out this San Jose Mercury News published a review of the conference Vietnam: The New ‘Gold Rush’ after the first day of the conference August 3, 2007. It covers more of the political and business strides that Vietnam has recently accomplished.

In general the positives of outsourcing to Vietnam outweigh the negatives and they are competing well against more well known outsourcing destinations of India and China.

Would you consider outsourcing your software development to Vietnam?  Why or why not?

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