My experience with outsourcing, and some conclusions

During the past three years, I have employed 8 full time web designers and developers from the Philippines.

On the positive side, it has taken my business to a new level and enabled me to achieve a six-figure annual income. But there has also been a major downside, which has led me to change my outsourcing model from the beginning of this year.

The attraction of hiring Filippinos, is that they are cheap at around $700/month for a full time web developer. This looks great on paper. But the reality is that a typical Filippino home-based worker will do at best 3 -4 billable hours of work per day. On many days, they will do nothing. Their power or internet will go down, their child or a family member will get sick, they will fall asleep in the afternoon because of the heat... any multitude of reasons why they couldn't complete a full day's work.

I've read a lot of John Jonas's information regarding working with Filippinos and found it very useful. He is correct in that you have to make allowances for some major cultural differences between a third world country and a developed country.

These Filippino guys are normally working in the corner of their living room, with constant interruptions, no air conditioning in stifling heat etc. They also have a different work ethic to westerners. Family and leisure are very important to them. If someone drops around while they are supposed to be working, they'll stop and chat for a while.

I often do screen shares on skype with my guys, and during the course of a short conversation I will see chat messages popping up every few seconds from their friends. So I can only assume this chatting goes on every day while they are supposedly working.

Until now, I put up with this, due to the fact that even if I get 15 billable hours per week from a Filippino worker, I'm still making a good profit. But as my business has grown, and demands have increased to get projects completed by deadlines, I have found the Filippinos just too unreliable.

They will disappear for a day or two, then explain that they had a bad storm and the power was down. They will continually fail to report for work at the agreed time of 9am Philippines time, with the only explanation being that they "slept late".

So, I have now terminated all but one of my Filippinos. And the alternative outsourcing solution I have found is just so vastly superior, I wonder why I didn't discover it earlier.

I am now outsourcing all my web projects to a company in Vietnam. This is a company of 5 guys, working from an office, who have a totally different work ethic and skill level than the Filippinos.

I have been blown away by both the speed of their work and the quality. I am paying them $10/hour, compared with $4/hour for Filippinos. But it's actually working out less expensive and less stressful.

For example, an ecommerce site that a Filippino home-based developer would take 3 weeks to complete, the Vietnamese guys have done in one week. And the quality is better. With the Filippinos I would always have to tweak a lot of small things to get it looking perfect. With the Vietnamese company, they hand me a finished site that is good enough to present to the client!

I share this for anyone who's at at point of looking to outsource, particularly web development or mobile web development. I'll leave you to draw you own conclusions from what I've shared.