Price of the coding - is it a nationality issue?

Couple of weeks ago Finnish magazine 3T got their hands on secret internal report from an large Finnish company about efficiency of coders in different countries. Report stated that even though Indian coders cost approximately 30% of what Finnish coders do, Finnish ones are 4,5 times more efficient than their Indian counterparts. This then means that Indian coders turn to be 35% more costly than Finns eventually. (Source: (in Finnish) 3T - Salainen selvitys: Intialainen koodaus on suomalaista kalliimpaa).

I've worked with at least, Finnish, Indian, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Slovakian, British, French, Mexican, US and Canadian coders and I have to say nationality doesn't make a difference. Despite the nationality there are really efficient coders and coders who just can't make it happen. There are noticeable national differences on work methods, but those don't explain the efficiency.

Trend in buying coding from some specific country drives to the situation, that there are too much demand for the knowledgeable resources. In these countries some less capable people do get hired and easily sold to high demand customers in countries where coding prices are high. This might make it look like coders in some countries are less capable than in others.

In countries where price of coding is higher, only the efficient ones get to keep their jobs. When the competition is fierce, less capable ones turn to do something else than coding (I bet many of you think managing of the coding now).

I like to believe that, in most of the cases price of the coder is irrelevant. Good coder can easily be 100 times more efficient than some other. I don't mean they make code 100 faster than others, but they can make much more clear code and create much less errors than others. So the overall result might be 100 times less work was done for some piece of software.

Also a good team can make a difference. Team with good internal ways of working, like code conventions, code review practices, architectural guidelines and open discussions will improve efficiency dramatically. These in their own sense make evaluation of SW project length a challenge. It's the team and following their efficiency that make it possible to estimate what's the cost and time of certain SW project.

There are noticeable differences in efficiency of certain coders and team of coders. I don't believe it's a nationality issue, it's always about how competent the individual and the team is. It doesn't make buying of SW development easy. What it should state to the buyers though, is that price is small function in SW development efficiency. There always need to be other measurements in use, to know the real price of the coder and the team.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Lean Software Development by Mary & Tom Poppendieck

This was one of the books I've planned to read from the days I started with Agile SW development projects. This was the book many said I should read about agile. I'm almost embarrassed that it took so long for me to start with this book. Now I've finally read it. Was it worth it? Definitely.

What I love about the book Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck is that even it's subtitle is Agile Toolkit, it isn't a such a toolkit that offers ready made solutions. I've never believed this one size fits all thinking which is sometimes pushed with Scrum and Kanban literature and this is refreshing exception to that thinking. This one offers explanations why things tend to go in some ways and what are the user or organizational problems these tools are trying to solve.

I'm actually pleased that I didn't read this when I was a fresh starter with Agile and Lean. I somehow feel the book would have been bit too much on that time. This book really encourages to see the whole and understand the underlying causalities between different parts of SW development. For that reason it was good that I had experience on many different levels and layers of Agile and Lean SW development to be able to reflect the lessons in the book to real life situations.

Book has lot of examples, most of them which really adds value to the book. Examples are often the best way to explain how the theory actually works in practice. That was exactly the way this book used examples. Some of the examples even felt really familiar to me and I noticed being in a similar situations which were described in these examples. That helped me to map these things better to real life.

I would recommend this book to all of you who want to understand the bigger picture with Agile and Lean SW development. This is the book that really sets the grounds to understand what this all actually is about. It gives more flesh around the bones for Agile and Lean. Those who need to see the whole before really understanding the details, this is the book for you.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen