71–80 of 81 posts
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…
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Done to save face. Dropping her would reflect poorly on the lab as it's basically admitting failure to properly vet candidates and/or mentor. She also had industry political connections which made booting her difficult for economic blow back reasons.
Nuts. Where do you live, roughly? I'm just an undergrad but I don't think political or industry (well -- maybe industry) connections do much at Canadian universities.
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>$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. Right. I'm not an expert in the study of this [1], but even just as a regular dev (and sometime manager or team leader, with some training and experience in software engineering techniques, including…
> High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership. That would be hilarious if it weren't the truth. But nobody actually wants to take the time to do it right so they end up doing it wrong and then taking a multiple of the time anyway.
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…
Alternate story: leadership wanted to switch to outsourcing the work. Created a poor experience for everyone and let the devs quit on their own. You were the last one out, so they ask you to train their new team.
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…
Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality standpoint, and had really great communication during the interview process. We spent a year trying to bring him up to speed, waiting through all sorts of excuses, and worse, all of his communications were terrible (bad spelling, inability or unwillingness to…
We are a small Design + Dev shop in NYC. We charge around $30k to build an MVP. One recent client said she found an outsource company who can build her site / web app for $1k. Im like ok so you don't like the work? whats the problem. Our rate is $125/hr PP. I told you that from the get-go. She said, no but i paid $30k for a site / web app and i see a bunch of other companies paid way less. Im like you drive a range r…
I'd say: work for enterprise clients. You get to learn how to build things at scale and they pay better. Startups and individuals always require way more education and ultimately want to squeeze every cent out of you.
I'm sorry but if your friend spent $80k on a development company and didn't do enough due dil to ensure that the company he was spending all of that money with wasn't outsourcing it - that's on him. There are a dozen basic things he could have done in order to ensure that he wasn't stiffed. Off the top of my head: - Visiting the offices meeting the team, including those people specifically assigned to his project - R…
They were the ones who advised he worked with said company, so he thought they knew what they were talking about. Long story short, a partner was friends with the owner of this 'development firm' that ultimately created this mess.
Just another example of how bad advice and bad investors can kill your startup before it even gets started.
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Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality standpoint, and had really great communication during the interview process. We spent a year trying to bring him up to speed, waiting through all sorts of excuses, and worse, all of his communications were terrible (bad spelling, inability or unwillingness to…
Should have hired his wife from the start
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I've been on the other side of that argument. In my case, a client had spent $50,000 on a pretty plain static brochure website. They're not tech-savvy, so they wanted to move to a CMS they could manage on their own. When I told them it'd be $2,500 to put their existing site into a new WordPress site, they thought I was joking. That was the day that I realized value pricing is a real thing. In your situation (with mon…
u "Should be able to do all this for about $2,500" dem "really? You must be joking" u "hehe, yea I have a funny sense of humor. I meant $25 thousand, not 25 hundred, har har" dem "oh ok, heres your money" u "thank you"