This post is a summary of vendor selection trip to China made for a purpose of s/w outsourcing initiative for a midsized product company. The main focus of the trip was “profiling” of the vendors that made on a short list after a rather involved RFP process.
Profiling involved in-depth interviews of employees ranging from Sr. PM to Jr. QA analysts. I had a chance to interview over 60 people, and I believe that I had a chance to work with a somewhat fair sampling. I would expect that if employees were selected for interview completely randomly I would have the same professional skills ratings but English skills ratings would be substantially lower.
The table below presents a summary of my view on the software teams I’ve seen during the trip. Professional skills are rated from 0 to 10; 0 means no knowledge of the key subjects, 10 means exact or above expectations for the position. English skills are rated from 0 to 10, 0 means no knowledge, 10 means fluent (strong accent, minor grammar mistakes, etc. acceptable).
| Position | Professional Skills | English Skills | Comments |
| Account Management | 5-8 | 6-9 | I did not interview AMs per se, I had a plenty of time to observe their work though. Skills / understanding of AM practices were not at all impressive. While the hospitality was truly commendable understanding of AM activities was far from what I would expect from professional AM / sales / presales team. In particular the ability to listen and concentrate on my needs versus out of the box presentations and sales pitches was not demonstrated. |
| Project Management. | 4-6 | 5-8 | I interviewed 2 PMs, 2 were dreadful, one good, the rest were semi-decent but junior. Most of the PMs had almost no theoretical knowledge and border-line acceptable hands-on skills; only one was PMP certified, unfortunately he needed an interpreter to communicate. Real hands-on PM experience was ranging from 2 to 6 years. Most of the PM in US terms could probably be ranked somewhere between a Project Coordinator and Junior PM. |
| Business Analysis. | 3-5 | 3-7 | Unacceptable. I interviewed at least 8 of them and the only one I would possibly consider was a junior Indian girl. Most of them had moderate English skills, but still far less than you would expect from a BA. Their skills in written English were notably better but they really straggled in spoken language; understanding them was a challenge as well. Their domain expertise was not impressive even for the projects they worked on. Functional skills such as ability to gather requirements were very poor. Technical skills such as data modeling skills were practically non-existent. |
| Junior Developers (“coders”). | 3-8 | 4-8 | Developers range from very bad to pretty good. Most of them offered very poor theoretical skills and narrow and shallow practical. Need to be hand-picked, but there is a large pool to draw from. I would expect a hit ratio of 1 out of 4. I saw great deal of desire to succeed and multitude of signs of superb work ethics. |
| Senior Developers (“architects”) | 3-6 | 3-5 | Very poor, most of them at best would qualify for mid-level developers. English skills are notably worse than juniors. The more senior the person is the more difficult s/he is to understand. The only good guy I met (would rate highly in Silicon Valley) required an interpreter. |
| Technical
Leads |
5-6 | 4-7 | Mediocre. Probably not self sufficient on tasks requiring dealing with complex technical issues. They seem to be generally a combination of a mid-level developer with a junior PM. I would say on both PM and technical accounts they are a notch lower than I would expect in the USA. On the other hand I saw a very strong drive / desire to succeed which could possibly compensate to some degree for the lack of knowledge. |
| Junior QA, Black Box | 6-9 | 5-10 | Testing skills ranging from good to very good. English at pretty decent level (most of them came from English studies or had lived in English speaking countries). Most of the QA analysts I interviewed seemed to have a great personality to position match. |
| Junior QA, Automation | 4-5 | 5-7 | Very small pool, most of them were mediocre at best with very limited exposure to tools. Typical “record and play back” skill set. Most of them had a career path of black box tester to an automation engineer (no development background). |
| Senior QA, Automation |
4-5 | 3-5 | Bad. I saw only four of them though; both skills and language were below mediocre. |
| QA Lead | 7-8 | 5-8 | I saw 9 QA leads and all were OK, nothing spectacular but very focused, detailed oriented, well organized, etc. Good grasp on QA process (very specific to the company’s process though). Understanding / grasp of QA automation at very basic level. |
| General Management | 5-10 | 6-10 | Very strong business leaders with outstanding work ethics and commendable drive. Mostly ex-pats / returnees from Western countries / Hong Kong / Singapore. However some of them were not professionally strong as they seem to be able to get the jobs on the raising wave of outsourcing mainly due to their western credentials. For example one of the execs I met was a Ph.D. in theoretical physics with no prior consulting / sales / software experience, very smart guy with very little experience / exposure / understanding… |
Hey Nick, great blog. Nice to see you putting your extensive knowledge on “paper” so that others can benefit. As one of those AMs who insisted on giving you a canned presentation, I’m glad to hear the hospitality was commendable ;)
Seriously, I think you nailed the capabilities in China. The business maturity is simply not there yet. China is a generation behind India. The only options are to wait a generation, or to substantially increase the number of expats delivering services from China.
I’m finding that Eastern Europe is much further along the maturity curve.