Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

blog.cerebralab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 350 posts

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#91

Post by danjac »

temuze wrote: post #68

I've worked with outsourced programmers before. Most of them are talented and a joy to work with. However, giving them work is often a form of programming... they will do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. For example, unless you describe the tests you want them to write, they may not write tests. If they see a possible refactor or optimization, they won't volunteer to do it. One of the frequent s…

Tbf, often contractor developers have tried to do the right thing (e.g. write tests) and been bitten ("I didn't pay for a test suite!"). Individual initiative in the contracting world usually goes unrewarded and is often punished, so you quickly learn to do what you are told, no more, no less. And you have gone the extra mile for deadbeat clients that have left you hanging with unpaid invoices, so why bother wasting potential billable hours?

Which is why I avoid contract work full stop, at either end of the table. It actively encourages mediocrity and decentivizes initiative and effort.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#92

Post by SuoDuanDao »

bluetomcat wrote: post #67
silvestrov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…

An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".

There is certainly a reason many cultures gravitate towards authoritarianism, focus is an important quality of productive teams and authoritarianism increases focus.

However, too much focus relative to the complexity of the task at hand is never good, because focus requires ignoring some things. I would theorize that the more complex the task a team is working on, the less authoritarian it can afford its culture to be.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#93

Post by secretsatan »

Interesting switzerland is mentioned, there does seem to be a shortage of programmers here, our company recruits a sizeable chunk from abroad. Also, if you search in a local language, especially german, there are a lot of open positions, where fluent command of the local language is required.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#94

Post by _bxg1 »

temuze wrote: post #68

I've worked with outsourced programmers before. Most of them are talented and a joy to work with. However, giving them work is often a form of programming... they will do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. For example, unless you describe the tests you want them to write, they may not write tests. If they see a possible refactor or optimization, they won't volunteer to do it. One of the frequent s…

I think what you're describing is a problem specific to contracted programmers, not foreign programmers. Those are different questions. Contracted software development has been shown time and again to be, well, crap. No matter where the contractors reside. And the reasons, like those you describe above, are fairly clear.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#95

Post by duxup »

I was a part of a few efforts to offshore some technical support type work across a couple companies. It was highly technical equipment so it wasn't your typical customer service or base level PC support, at the same time there was no reason it shouldn't have worked to offshore.

Every effort failed miserably.

The core of the issue was getting / maintaining talent / a real lack of professionalism in the folks we ended up with / lack of dedication to the job.

If there was any reasonable amount of saving money per workload, you just couldn't get a company to outsource to who actually kept their own workers around long enough to be productive. Anyone who was productive almost immediately proved their worth and left for a better job, or as we suspect the outsourcing companies actually moved them to clients that paid more (in the case of us hiring them directly, we knew they left).

The folks you did get would close cases randomly / played a sort of hardball metrics game where they really just upset customers / state side we'd end up cleaning up the mess. Lots of technically correct solutions / statements that really don't solve the problem... And in the meantime it all ate up a TON of upper and lower management time trying to get things right / set up... meanwhile there was a US, a European, and even in one case a Japan side support team that needed little interaction from management.

Another effort tried to establish a local presence offshore (a few companies already had resources there) ... same results.

The end result was all the effort and costs resulted in it being more expensive to offshore in many cases if you looked at the real numbers.

To be clear I'm sure there are plenty of professional folks out there to be hired (we had plenty of those folks employed FROM those places who were outstanding at their job) I suspect the larger issue was that the savings weren't really that apparent, and what quality / dedication you get for X price isn't always as apparent when someone says "Hey X resource is Y cheaper over there."

Quality and outcomes are hard to calculate / something being cheaper on a spreadsheet doesn't mean it really is.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#96

Post by contravariant »

matz1 wrote: post #46
crote wrote: post #13

It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…

This remind me of the recent Microsoft AI that can write code demo. You give the AI instruction and explanation in English, preferably as clear and as detailed as possible and you get back code. Essentially its very similar workflow when working with offshore developer, in the future you could in theory replace the offshore dev with AI, except with much less latency.

With a precise and clear enough description you could throw it at a python interpreter and run it.

Though things could get fun if AI can enable more flexible declarative programming.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#97

Post by runawaybottle »

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Embarrassment discount. The theoretical benefits of offshoring are obvious: get the same thing for less. The same goes for juniorization, find a young guy who can do the same thing for less (this worked out great one time in an HFT I worked for). Your problem is there's a chance -whether you offshored or not- that not only do you not get the same thing, you get a steaming pile that your boss will not appreciate. And…

Good point, I touched on that in another comment. Both ends of the spectrum are extremes, but one cannot deny that when you look to reduce costs that dramatically you are gambling. Why is something 80% cheaper?

‘Oh it’s because their country sucks’

Ah ok, and you found 30 geniuses in this crappy country?

‘Yep, these particular guys are all the cream of the crop’

Got it. Okay, let’s give it a gamble. I’m not making a real point, so don’t beat up my straw man, this is just my gut feeling.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#98

Post by viklove »

kakwa_ wrote: post #90
silvestrov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…

From an European perspective, this has not exactly been my experience working with an international team. The US collective mentality is sometime overly optimistic specially in public. This is sometimes a positive since it removes almost any inhibition regarding challenges, but it can lead to things blowing-up spectacularly, and then having to put in place hacks and brute force to make it kind of work relatively inef…

In my experience Americans are pretty blunt, and will not hesitate to point out flaws and make cynical jokes about them openly in the presence of their team.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#99

Post by vbtemp »

JohnBooty wrote: post #86
vbtemp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is programming difficult to offshore" Lack of professionalism and absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places you'd seek to outsource to save money. Doesn't mean that professionalism doesn't exist, it's just that the ones that have it are already busy with their own thing and not interested in being low-cost labor

Lack of professionalism and absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places you'd seek to outsource to save money. I think the "absence of a professional engineering culture in many of the places" results primarily from the nature of contracting itself. I see this in onshore contracting as well. Contract-based engineering is nearly always a recipe for technical debt. The team will nearly always fo…

I think you're absolutely correct. The whole model of contracting in general is entirely based around perverse incentives. And all the more so when going offshore for it.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#100

Post by teatree »

bitwize wrote: post #73
bluetomcat wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".

The problem with that is that dictators usually fail to be sufficiently enlightened or benevolent.

Somehow China has been an outlier to this norm, so far.
Post reply on HN