Our comic, Doubtsourcing, was recently featured in TechCrunch:

Something that you don’t often see a lot written about in new media is the strong trend by startups to outsource a lot of their work. Digg for example was originally designed by Kevin Rose outsourcing the job on elance, and sites such as Slideshare, illumobile.com have gone down a similar path.    

 This post lead to a 100+ comment debate about Indian IT.  Overall, the TechCrunch community had a lot of interesting things to say.   It’s clear that a significant percentage of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs have tried working with an Indian team.   While the results are mixed, most of the community agrees that, when managed well, the cost efficiencies and scale that a global team can bring are worth it. A few of my favorite comments from the post are below. 

Mr. Recycle tells people to get over the fear of getting their idea stolen: 

I’d say outsourcing (or offshoring) is more of a fortunate reality than an unfortunate one. And should you really care about the protection you get in third world countries? Do you think your idea is that original anyway? Guess what, it isn’t. It is your execution and vision as a business that matters, not your code base. You could hand Facebook’s codebase to 100 entrepreneurs today and you would probably get 100 failed start-ups.   

Fabio Rosati (CEO of eLance) talks about low bidders:

 A more appropriate generalization supported by our data, is that buyers who consistently hire the lowest bidders for a particular class of jobs tend to have lower success rates.   

Raza Imam stresses Fabio’s point about highvalue vs. low cost. 

Outsourcing is tricky, but it’s like anything else in life. It takes practice to get it right. Outsourcing is about high-value, not low cost. If you pay someone ten bucks an hour and expect great code, you’re kidding yourself.