11–20 of 81 posts
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Not like that but I worked for a company and we were low on staff, one by one, each programmer quit without getting reinforcements even though this was stated many times. It wasn't until myself resigned, the last programmer on this particular project, that the people in charge woke up and hired several guys from another country less than 1 month before my last day at the company. I got told to train them in the appli…
In the first one, I got what I deserved. I underpaid developers from a poorer country who ended up being 'yes' men who continually checked in catastrophic, unmaintainable code for simple problems. It burned me over and over again but the rates were just so good it was hard to get off the sauce. We ended up paying for those savings many times over.
Another time I had the opposite problem. I paid premium prices for premium developers that required so much hand-holding and reassurance and clarification that I may as well have wrote it myself. I kept thinking that they'd get ramped up once they got used to our idioms and way of doing things but they never did.
Not like that but I worked for a company and we were low on staff, one by one, each programmer quit without getting reinforcements even though this was stated many times. It wasn't until myself resigned, the last programmer on this particular project, that the people in charge woke up and hired several guys from another country less than 1 month before my last day at the company. I got told to train them in the appli…
I've had a some outsourcing successes and failures. In the first one, I got what I deserved. I underpaid developers from a poorer country who ended up being 'yes' men who continually checked in catastrophic, unmaintainable code for simple problems. It burned me over and over again but the rates were just so good it was hard to get off the sauce. We ended up paying for those savings many times over. Another time I had…
What we did like about the code was that each developer in the offshore team had created an exception class based on their own name - so the application would report "There has been a XXX YYY Error" - where XXX YYY was the name of one of their developers.
[And after ~15 years I can still remember the relevant name for the first one of these I saw].
Similarly, I was running a digital agency and the performance of one of my first employees took a nose dive. After trying everything I could think of to help him turn things around I had to let him go. Shortly after, I got an Email from an unknown individual who said he knew the employee and asked if I could chat. Turns out, my employee was subbing out all of his work and stopped paying his sub, who then stopped deli…
Seems like he'd be a great fit. He knows what you're building, knows the codebase, and apparently works for less than you were paying for the same service before. He didn't "take part in a scheme", he was tricked into it the same way you were. He should have been getting a real pay check and not just the cut your employee was giving him.
So, while his skills were great and agree that the cost would have been reasonable, the ethical choice to willingly access the confidential information of a full-time employee and prop up someone with far less technical ability made hiring him a no go.
> My friend's first startup took a dive after spending $80,000 to work with a local development company. It turned out the development firm was just a front to outsource all of the work overseas and take a big cut. What I get from this story is your friend raised an inadequate amount of money to build a company that required a technical background that he/she didn't possess, though should have. 80k over 5 months is 1…
I can guess which way they went..
Probably the biggest "nightmare" we had was a local publisher, and this was back in around 2000, who wanted to put their magazines on the web. They were highly targeted "yellow pages" for tourist towns, so they really wanted to take their existing PDF artifacts that they send to the printer and make them available on the web as clickable hyperlinked things inside a web based viewer.
So we proposed making a proof of concept, we spent a few weeks working on splitting the multi-page PDF, making a viewer that would pre-cache pages, allow you to zoom and scroll, and defining the bounding boxes for some pages so that you could click and go to the homepage of the advert you were clicking on. We demoed it for them and they liked it, but they said they had decided to put that project on hold. I explicitly asked them if they were happy with what we had built and they said yes.
Around a year later I get a series of calls from them and from a new web development shop they have hired, saying that they wanted a refund because the work we did "our new consultant says they could have done in 10 minutes". My feeling from the conversations I had with them at this point was that the new developer was going to get paid out of the money they got back from us.
I don't remember what our final resolution was, we always worked very hard to make our clients happy. We really didn't like that they had said they were happy with what we had done, then a year later some third party called us telling us our work was crap and we should give a refund. And the whole "We could have done it in 10 minutes" was not a very good tactic, it just pissed us off.