Joel on Software

2000/07/24

A lot of people are talking these days about international software development: typically, that means that a US company builds a development center in India, where salaries are low and skills are high, to do programming.

I've heard a lot of rumours, and I've worked on one such team myself, but I've never seen a more general analysis of whether it can be made to work.

Have you worked on such a project, either from the US or from India? If so, I'd love to hear some details on whether it's working or not. Is it saving money? How much? What are the problems? What works well? Be brutally honest. This site is not known for pulling punches.

I'll write up an article about it in a couple of weeks.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, enlightened project management software for bug tracking, Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop support easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.