Adventures in Outsourcing.

In his book The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss extols the benefits of outsourcing and, as an example, quotes Esquire editor AJ Jacobs describing his experience working with a virtual assistant named Honey, from one of the leading Indian outsourcing firms, Brickwork:

When I open Honey's file, I have this reaction: America is f*cked. There are charts. There are section headers

[...]

If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college. They're up against a hungry, polite, Excel-proficient army.

Apparently, they're not all like Honey. Here's my recent experience with this same firm. Last Thursday night, I requested a quote for a fairly simple project, the creation of a couple of spreadsheets of stock information. I got an e-mail back a few hours later, telling me they would get back to me by Sunday night with a quote. Still no word from them.

My guess is that Brickwork didn't have much bench strength, and when the inquiries came in from the readers of Ferriss's best-selling book (Brickwork's website asks if that's how you heard of them), the firm had to lower its standards in order to staff up.

Last Thursday I also contacted another Indian outsourcer Ferriss mentioned, Your Man in India. First I tried to request a quote via the "ask us" feature on the company's website, but got a server error, so I e-mailed the company instead. They referred me to their sister company, Get Friday, and someone from that company wrote back to say my request was beyond the scope of their abilities.

India is still in the running though, as I'm currently corresponding with an Indian individual about this project via Elance (in all, I received 5 proposals from India, 2 from North America, and 1 from Eastern Europe for this project).