What first comes to mind if someone mentions Mexico? Beautiful beaches in Cancun with loaded Margaritas and hardworking people working in the USA in construction, landscaping and other non-attractive jobs. What comes to mind when someone mentions Brazil? Football, Copacabana, and that girl from Ipanema.

I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine working for a Fortune 100 firm told me that they used to outsource software development to India, but now they switched to Mexican programmers. Why? Cheaper. Way to go, Mexico! Good for you!

Brazil is yet another emerging supplier of Java programmers.

But is it right to work with a country just because it offers the cheapest prices? I do not think so. The software development outsourcing may be efficient only if you cherry pick the best of the best as opposed to hiring teams for cheap. Work with individuals, not with teams!

Let ‘s apply the 80/20 rule for an offshore team of five that charges $100 a day for a programmer. The daily offshore payroll is $500. Such a team needs a local full-time manager here in the US, which makes, say $600 a day. We ‘ve got $1100 a day just for the payroll. Four out of five offshore programmers will definitely under-perform to say the least.

The better model is to hire one excellent offshore programmer for $150 a day, which will need two hours a day of the local manager ‘s time (another $200). In this case the daily payroll is $350, and the chances of delivering your project on time will dramatically increase.

This formula won ‘t work if your IT shop is run by a mediocre manager who does not won ‘t to innovate and goes by the flow working with the offshore partner given from above.