stories/joel-letter-000725.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 10 Feb 2001 11:53:10 GMT
From: William StClair
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 7:32 AM
To: 'spolsky@panix.com'
Cc: William StClair
Subject: International Software Development

Joel,

I work for Shaker Computer . We sell COINS, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting system for large construction firms. We've been working for a couple of years with SoftServe , a software contracting firm in the Ukraine. Their offices are in Lviv, just across the border from Warsaw, Poland.

I am not involved in company finances, but we pay about half as much per hour to them as it costs us for our own salaried employees. It takes a little more time to communicate across 7 time zones than it does in-house, but I believe we still save money. SoftServe's engineers are very bright, and produce good quality designs and code. Their written English is good enough to work with and most of them also speak good English.

We work mostly with a small team within their company, doing Progress 4GL , Java, and XML development. They learn quickly. I went there to visit last March and was impressed with the team.

I can't generalize since Shaker has worked with no other offshore firm except SoftServe, but it is working well for us.

-Bill St. Clair
wws@shakercom.com

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