Why offshoring tech projects sucks

Let me be brutally honest

I was tempted to hold back a little on this one, but I thought it's my website, I can write whatever I like, and I might as well tell the truth. I haven't personally offshored a tech project before, so this isn't quite first-hand information, but I've spoken to loads of people who have offshored, and I've taken on numerous projects that failed with offshore teams. I've got quite a lot of experience picking up the pieces of offshore projects.

I am completely biased because I want you to work with me rather than an offshore team. I'm marketing to you here in some ways, but hear me out because these are real stories, and although it's a biased opinion, I think it has merit. There's logic behind it based on repeated patterns I've seen.

The reality of offshore development

If you're tempted to offshore, you know what? Fill your boots, go for it. I'll be here to pick up the pieces when it's a complete failure. That might sound harsh, but I've seen this story play out too many times.

I think offshore absolutely can work, but only when you've got someone highly technical and experienced who is used to managing offshore teams based onshore to work as the intermediary between you and them. If you're expecting to work directly with a team in India for £15 an hour, send them what you want doing, and have it come back perfect with no problems and end up cheaper - you will be disappointed.

The management myth

People massively underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to manage an offshore team. It's not a freebie. It's not a no-effort thing. It's a huge amount of effort. If you don't want to do it yourself, you need someone on your team or need to hire someone who can be the intermediary and keep things on track.

Most of the time, it's a false economy. Yes, they have lower hourly rates, but they take forever to deliver anything. Here's a really good example from a project I took over from an offshore team:

The £15/hour trap They charged only £15 per hour, but every feature, big or small, was at least 100 hours of work. We're talking about minuscule things here. I charge significantly more than that (though I don't charge hourly anymore), but some stuff they were charging 150 hours for - £2,250 - is like half a day's work, if that, for someone switched on. It's just nonsense.

The quality nightmare

Another company I took over had offshored everything. Everything the offshore team wrote took hours and hours to complete. Everything they wrote was poor quality, filled with bugs, and brought down the system. When I picked it up, unravelling all the rubbish that the team had written took weeks. It ended up being so much more expensive than just hiring a professional who knows what they're doing from the start.

The code wasn't just slow to write - it was fundamentally broken. I've seen offshore teams produce code that:

• Crashes under normal usage
• Has massive security vulnerabilities
• Doesn't follow basic coding standards
• Is impossible to maintain or extend
• Lacks proper error handling
• Has no testing whatsoever

The "code is everything" fallacy

There's another misconception I mentioned about the management side, but let me go deeper. People think building software products is all about writing code. The code is the bricks. If we use a house analogy, building a house is more than just laying bricks.

If all you can do is lay bricks, you will not have a house at the end of it. You might have something that's maybe kind of liveable, but it's not a house. You need foundations, planning permission, drainage systems, electricity, waterproofing, roofing, insulation - the list goes on.

Going back to software, it's not just about writing code. You need to understand:

• Application architecture
• Security best practices
• User experience design
• Backup strategies
• Deployment management
• Performance optimisation
• Integration patterns
• Error handling
• Monitoring and logging

There's a whole world of stuff that needs thinking about, managing, and driving forward. Unfortunately, most offshore teams won't be able to do this for you. They'll be able to turn out code at a snail's pace or reasonable pace, but driving a project forward from your idea to reality? I think you're going to be disappointed.

When offshore might work

I've done some simple, straightforward things offshore - marketing graphics, basic data entry, simple website updates. But a whole complicated technical project? It's going to end badly.

Offshore can work for:

• Well-defined, simple tasks
• Non-critical components
• When you have experienced technical leadership onshore
• Projects with extremely clear specifications
• Work that can be easily tested and validated

But for building a complete SaaS product or developing an MVP? The complexity is too high, the communication overhead too great, and the risk too significant.

The communication barrier

Beyond the technical issues, there's the communication problem. Building software requires constant clarification, iteration, and decision-making. When you're working across time zones with teams that don't fully understand your business context, every conversation becomes a bottleneck.

I've seen projects where simple changes take days to communicate and implement, not because of technical complexity, but because of the back-and-forth needed to clarify requirements. Time zone differences mean that questions asked at 9 AM get answered at 9 PM, creating 24-hour delays for every clarification.

The true cost calculation

Let me break down the real economics:

Offshore team: £15/hour

• 150 hours for a simple feature = £2,250
• Multiple revisions and bug fixes = +50%
• Management time = 20 hours at your rate
• Delays and rework = +100%
• Total: £4,500+ and months of frustration

Experienced developer: £75/hour

• 8 hours for the same feature = £600
• Built right first time
• No management overhead
• Total: £600 and delivered in days

Which is actually cheaper? This is why I focus on keeping projects within budget through upfront transparency rather than hidden costs.

The clean-up cost

The projects I take on that have been offshore-developed are usually terrible. Just unravelling the mess can take significant time and money, and it's not fun work for me. I get lots of work from it, but it's not the enjoyable stuff. I'd rather we just start fresh on a good foot.

I've spent more time fixing offshore code than I would have spent building the entire project from scratch. The technical debt accumulated from poor offshore development can cripple a project for years.

My advice

If you're considering offshore development, tread carefully. Too many people have been burnt by this approach. You might have success stories from people who've been successful going offshore, but they're the exception, not the rule.

Consider the true costs:

• Your time managing the team
• The delays and miscommunications
• The poor quality and rework
• The opportunity cost of delayed launch
• The cleanup costs when it goes wrong

Often, paying more upfront for experienced local development saves money in the long run and gets you to market faster with a better product.

The choice is yours, but make it with full awareness of the risks and real costs involved.