Offshore outsourcing is a great idea if you want quick and cost-effective solutions. But there is also another advantage to hiring global help: it is a way to stimulate creativity.
Outsourcing is a powerful cost-reduction strategy that can help you save time, money and effort. By outsourcing our processes we are putting them in the hands of experts instead of having to create a team from scratch.
Offshore outsourcing brings many benefits: it tends to require a smaller investment, the market pool is larger and the quality is excellent. That being said, there is something that is barely mentioned. Offshore outsourcing is also the perfect way to promote innovation.
Offshore developers have different visions and ideas, and when we embrace these alternatives, we open ourselves to change and promote growth, both personally and professionally. Why is that?
Semantic Fields
What do we mean by semantic field? This is a concept that was popularized by two sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, in their book The Social Construction of Reality.
According to his theory, a semantic field is a body of knowledge shared by a society, including, but not limited to, beliefs, behaviors, values, and expectations. To paraphrase, my work and understanding of a technical area is very rich and specific, while I have very limited knowledge of other areas, such as law.
In other words, knowledge is socially distributed, segregated by these semantic fields. This is common sense, no one knows everything. But the concept of semantic fields goes beyond the boundaries of occupational knowledge.
Two software developers can share knowledge about their occupation, but in very different semantic fields. Why? due to their context and culture. The customs of where we grew up have a profound impact on who we are and what we do.
Some forms of knowledge are universal, a linear regression model or a print('hello world') script in Python will produce the same results regardless of culture or context. But the hows and whys of using them can change drastically depending on who we ask.
Different semantic fields have different perspectives on the world. Take for example one of the biggest mistakes in the history of public relations. During the announcement of a mobile game, one of the developers at Blizzard Entertainment jokingly said “Don’t you guys have phones?” in response to public disapproval of a mobile game.
Let's take a look at the numbers: Currently, there are more than 6 billion smartphone users worldwide, and at least a third of those phones aren't powerful enough to run a high-end mobile game.
A question like this is perfectly reasonable in a semantic field where high-end smartphones are common, but when you take into account that smartphone performance varies greatly, well, things get a little more complicated.
The point here is that another person, from another semantic field, could have had a very different reaction. If you come from a country where smartphone prices are prohibitive for the majority of the population, you wouldn't think about having a smartphone or not.
Perspective shifts
Stagnation often comes from a lack of diversity, when we share a common semantic field it is very unlikely that anyone will think outside of that field. This way, assumptions remain unchallenged and continue consciously or unconsciously throughout our process.
Diversity breeds creativity. Put five people from different semantic fields in a safe place and give them openness to different worldviews and I can guarantee you will get something extraordinary.
It's not that our semantic field is wrong, but it is incomplete (remember, no one knows everything). So when someone challenges our worldview, we are forced to explain it, to chew it, to digest it, and this can reveal that we have been doing things out of habit and not because it is the best way to approach a problem. .
It's similar to what happens when we work with teammates who started their careers in different areas. For example, a data scientist who was a biologist or designer ended up working as a front-end developer.
In fact, they may lack in certain key areas of computer science, such as a deep understanding of algorithms or memory management. But they make up for it by bringing new ideas to the field.
For example, psychologists have very detailed training in how to measure human behavior and have tools to validate these methods, which provides an extra layer of depth to applications that measure what people do, for example an application to monitor KPIs.
In cultural terms, developers from other areas of the world have a different view on user experience, customer relationships and market intelligence. When we open our doors to offshore consultancy or development we are broadening our horizons.
Facial recognition: a case study
A colleague once asked me to evaluate a graduation project based on facial recognition. The undergraduate students created artificial intelligence capable of recognizing people's emotions and whether they were paying attention to videos.
The idea was to build an app that companies could use to measure people's responses to watching their commercials. A perfect idea and a very ambitious work for these young students.
What surprised me was that they only used the backend of the app to save information to a server. Everything from the facial recognition algorithm to the rating system was being done by the customer.
This is the kind of thing you typically want to avoid, as each client can have very different hardware, which in turn leads to unpredictability. Why not use services like AWS to handle all the calculations and just use the frontend to capture data from the camera?
When I raised my concerns, the students explained that their country had an extremely unreliable Internet infrastructure. With slow speeds and constant interruptions, it is not stable enough to transmit data to the backend. As such, they decided to keep most of the logic offline.
In that context, it was a great decision. They understood the limitations of their environment and worked around them, limitations that we may not be aware of in other areas of the world.
Reaching other markets
As we expand, it is clear that our area of influence is not limited to our communities. Globalization and the Internet have created bridges between countries and cultures, many of them with very different dynamics from ours.
To access these markets, we need perspective, and an inside view is precious in this sense. Developers from all over the world can give us ideas and alternatives that we would never have imagined otherwise.
If you want to reach a global market, you need to have global sensibilities, and diversity is fundamental in creating this type of framework.
Source: BairesDev
