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Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#31

Post by Shanerostad »

everdev wrote: post #16
mabbo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, he wasn't tricked. He knew that he was performing the entire work for a full-time employee, which violates that employee's contract. My employee propositioned him and he agreed to do it. 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…

That's slick. I can't say that I never thought about outsourcing work I was tasked with in the past as an intern. It was so tempting to pay someone and just watch youtube all day. (I didn't end up doing it)

I imagine there's a whole lot of that going on these days at companies who would never think to check for it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#32

Post by MartinCron »

roel_v wrote: post #28

Not my ass on the line and not a major burn, but still: I got an email many years ago from a guy who said essentially 'I got your email address from , are you interested in picking up some side work and if so, can we meet'. I say okay and when we meet, he explains that they had this SaaS idea (an industry-specific collaboration/data sharing tool essentially; this company did other work in this industry, they weren't…

I have seen permutations of this scenario multiple times. I have some sympathy for organizations in this situation, but it is entirely self-inflicted.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#33

Post by MartinCron »

rhacker wrote: post #22

I am taking over a codebase that was written by an outsourced team in Pakistan. The code is in a total chaotic copy-pasta state. I swear the main thing you'll find in outsourced code is the inability to refactor or re-use code for similar features. One recent thing I just found is a view that has about 8 source HTML files, all of which is quite complicated angular1 code. Then when the team was asked to have a slightl…

I swear some projects are outsourced to a whole different universe, one where people haven’t yet figured out that copy/paste is not a good idea.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#34

Post by matte_black »

I was having a conversation with someone I vaguely knew about their startup and what they were trying to get developed. He told me about his challenges and deadlines, and how hard it was to find a good development agency overseas.

I told him he should hire me to get it done, but naturally like most guys like this, he was blown away by my San Francisco rate.

He put a finger in my face and asked why would he hire me when he could hire an agency from Russia or Pakistan for a fraction of the cost? No thanks, he said. No thanks.

After a long time I asked a mutual acquaintance whatever became of this guy and his startup. He told me that guy was a bit of a lunatic, but had eventually spent about $250k with some local agency and ended up with a broken product that did not do what he asked, he had got a refund for $100k but was suing to get the other $150k back. Don’t know if he ever did get it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#35

Post by gandhium »

arethuza wrote: post #15
clavalle wrote: post #13

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…

Many years ago the startup I had co-founded outsourced a chunk of development work because an investor wanted us to - what was produced was pretty much "catastrophic, unmaintainable" code that took a few developers on our side to rework (probably rather more than it would have taken to write the code from scratch ). What we did like about the code was that each developer in the offshore team had created an exception…

> each developer in the offshore team had created an exception class based on their own name

This is wonderful! Did they honor their work hierarchy, i.e. exceptions from junior developers will always extend exceptions from senior ones?

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#36

Post by jpindar »

roel_v wrote: post #28

Not my ass on the line and not a major burn, but still: I got an email many years ago from a guy who said essentially 'I got your email address from , are you interested in picking up some side work and if so, can we meet'. I say okay and when we meet, he explains that they had this SaaS idea (an industry-specific collaboration/data sharing tool essentially; this company did other work in this industry, they weren't…

>I never quite understand how companies think they can completely outsource the whole workings of a product they intend to offer, without even having someone on their own team who understands that product.

Happens all the time with embedded systems.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#37

Post by reboog711 »

MartinCron wrote: post #32
roel_v wrote: post #28

Not my ass on the line and not a major burn, but still: I got an email many years ago from a guy who said essentially 'I got your email address from , are you interested in picking up some side work and if so, can we meet'. I say okay and when we meet, he explains that they had this SaaS idea (an industry-specific collaboration/data sharing tool essentially; this company did other work in this industry, they weren't…

I have seen permutations of this scenario multiple times. I have some sympathy for organizations in this situation, but it is entirely self-inflicted.

At one point, a lot of my consulting business was figuring out code like that, that others have written.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#38

Post by jacquesm »

$80K? That's peanuts. Government projects that are outsourced run in the 10's or in some rare cases even 100's of millions of $/E/YourFavoriteCurrency and get cancelled because of non-delivery with alarming regularity.

I see a lot of outsourcing deals in my daily practice, 70% or so ends well, 20% ends with a lot of friction and 10% or so fails utterly leaving the contractor with a damaged reputation and the contracting party out a lot of money. It's not rare to see these end up in court.

You really need to do research on any company that you want to outsource part of your development work to. Talk to their other customers, get to know the people in the team that will do the actual work, in other words: do your homework.

If you don't you're going to end up in trouble, more or less guaranteed.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#39

Post by badwork »

I've been on the other end of this a fair few times (hence the anonymous account).

The first time I was working on an app, most of our pair programming with a much more experienced dev. I needed to keep the job to keep my visa. When the more experienced developers quit I couldn't get anything done. I strung things out as long as possible but eventually people cottoned on to the fact that I wasn't productive.

The next time I had pushed really hard to get the job. "Fake it till you make it" they told me. I spent two months at the job and I didn't even manage to get the development environment set up. I used to hide in the toilets crying from the stress. I was let go at the end of my probation period.

I just wanted to let people know what it's like on the other side. Not everyone is some bad guy trying to screw you over. Sometimes it's just a normal guy trying to get by and not managing.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story?

#40

Post by ratsimihah »

edent wrote: post #30

Ooooh yes! A few years ago I was working for a large company. We needed some help building an app and a back-end service. Our team could have built this - but we were stretched a bit thin with other work. So we found a great technology partner. They'd helped us in the past, and they could take care of everything. After a few weeks, it turns out that they'd over-sold their abilities as a back-end provider. They could…

"No, you misunderstand,"

This must've been funny!

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