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

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 money already in hand), I probably would've just told them "Then pay them 0.25 my hourly rate to cover their 10 minutes of work with a 50% bonus. Why are you wasting your time calling me?"

We were working on a program to manage a piece of industrial hardware, and the hardware was a handheld device. The contractor hired to build out the firmware put something like 16 people working 60 hour weeks on this. For about 12 weeks, they toiled away, and then we decided that they should join our demos and demo what they had.

Well, it was incredibly bad. They had basically just created some Qt templates. They had very little, if any, code written under the covers. The logic just wasn't there, but the interface was at least nice. It was pretty clear these guys had no idea what they were doing. Our director of development were all over these guys every day for weeks after that.

Eventually my internship ended, but I heard that they ultimately decided to drop the contractor and hire in house for it, and it eventually got released about 4 or 5 years after I left there.

I was transitioning between teams and needed something to do in the meantime, so I got put on a testing and validation team for an internal product. I was to collaborate with our overseas IT team and figure out why their tests weren't catching bugs in production.

After two weeks of wrangling, hand wringing, and bad vibes, I finally got them to send me their test automation code and a link to their Jenkins where they were running their tests.

The Jenkins was in a sorry state: disk overflowing with garbage, 10+ releases behind, and not tied into our corporate LDAP (it was using local admin-everything accounts instead). But that didn't hold a candle to the test automation code itself.

It didn't compile.

No seriously, I spent two more weeks just trying to get it to compile on my laptop, and I could not make it work. Mind you, this was a pretty bog-standard setup (Python unittest-based suite, Selenium for frontend testing, and an in-house [but not terribly unusual] integration test library written in lua).

I never once got it to compile, all the while their engineers insisting that I must be doing something wrong because it works fine on their Jenkins server, as evinced by their test reports being generated every night.

Turns out that wasn't true either, though: they had built a series of obfuscations such that the Jenkins job scanned the written tests, marked most of them as passing, and randomly failed the rest. This had been going on for over a year and a half and apparently no one had noticed. They were faking test results and slowing down developers because no one could figure out why tests were failing randomly.

The worst part is, when confronted with the problem, their defense was that they were worried no one was reading their reports, so they did it once a year ago and forgot to turn it off. Problem is that the report generation was fairly sophisticated with quite a few special clauses to handle specific tests which had to "pass" or "fail" in a particular way. So they clearly invested some time into it.

They finally admitted they were in too deep a couple weeks after that initial confrontation, and fired from our team. But because they're the favorite consultancy of another manager at the company, they continue to this day to consult for the company. It's really sad.

But this is outright fraud. This is the literal definition of negative value. Paying someone money to test, then those testers failing "random tests" wasting actual developer time on non-bugs.

(With that said, this is very weird an offshore team would own the unit tests for a project.. the developers should own it)

Predictably, the contractor that got the work created as many tickets as possible for resolving any given thing.

Years later, the agency now has no IT competency and they pay a lot more for much less service than before. They also have a lot less flexibility in what they do. They almost have no choice but to keep rewarding the contractor for poor quality service.

It's been interesting watching a situation where things keep getting worse and worse because the agency is basically too big to fail and will probably never run out of money.