Ravi Mohan's Blog

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

FAQ (from my mail-box) #1 What are development costs in Bangalore?

[context] I get all sorts of questions in my email every day. I try to answer all my mail but I am getting tired of answering the same questions again and again. So I am going to post these common answers here and not answer by mail anymore [/context].

The minimum cost of a developer(aka a "coding body") in Bangalore is about 20-25 $/hour. This is the rough rate charged by Wipro/Tcs/other "outsourced enterprise" bottom feeder companies, for a "standard" development project. Of course most of these projects are seriously overstaffed, but that's a different issue. The hard part here is getting a good team who can deliver good code vs process documents or whatever, but at 20-25 $/hr you will get a pool of candidates.

If you need *really good* developers (the situation for folks who are trying to optimize time to market or trying to do something unusual, say a startup (vs crank out umpteen jsp pages or make minor bugfixes to a legacy app or whatever), the cost (in Bangalore) is 40 $ +. How much that "+" represents depends on a lot of factors. I've seen rates of upto 200$/hr for truly exceptional coders/projects, but that's (very very) rare. 40 $ is a good baseline.

It is VERY VERY hard to find good developers in Bangalore, just as is true elsewhere in the world. So the ability/willingness to pay the above rates does NOT guarantee you good developers. 95% of the software "industry" in Bangalore is staffed by people who shouldn't be coding. Think carefully before you spend your money in "outsourcing".

Bangalore is one of the most expensive cities (if not the most expensive city) in India. If you can find good developers in less expensive parts of India, like say Trivandrum or Bhubaneshwar you can expect to pay about 25$/hr for a really good developer and about 15$/hr for a "coding body" type. The density of good developers is much lower in such small cities, but if you can find good people, good for you.

Ok that's one question I don't have to answer by mail anymore.

2 comments:

Kaushik said...

"95% of the software "industry" in Bangalore is staffed by people who shouldn't be coding."

Ravi, i agree with you that a vast majority of people in bangalore should not be coding. But i think industry is becoming mature in sense lot more people are showing an interest towards learning 'real' programming.

Btw about the 95%, just curious to know what is that they are not able to do properly?

Ravi said...

"Btw about the 95%, just curious to know what is that they are not able to do properly?"

anything? ;-)