111–120 of 350 posts
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".
Only for relatively simple situations with a relatively known process for solving - which is the opposite of most software dev, although that seems to be changing in some ways.
Isn't open source proof that you don't need buts in seats in the same office? If open source projects can do it, why can't most businesses? What's the limiting factor in business? Is it communication? Is it antiquated management practices? Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway
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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.
I had one positive consulting relationship. It was a longer-term project. I was the sole consultant and I was able to work closely with my client and explain tradeoffs between short-term deliverables and longer-term technical debt. My client was also instrumental of course and brought a very understanding approach to the table, and was able to understand the technical side of things.
But of course, that is almost never the case. Even with good intentions, that approach never seems to scale up. Not even a little bit.
Some consulting shops do try to bring a similar approach to the table in a scaled-up way. My current employer hired one of the better-known Ruby shops for a long-term engagement.
On the bright side, I would say that the consulting shop did try their best to manage technical debt and bring a good engineering approach. On the flip side, I would say that the end results were decidedly mixed.
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…
Well, that's task-dependent. For healthcare billing software, certainly.
But if you're hiring someone to implement the SVG spec in a web browser? Bézier curves are the same no matter where you are in the world.
Indeed, if knowledge of culture was the key wouldn't comparative advantage lead to low-cost-of-living countries' developers dominating technically pure, well-specified work like web browser design?
> Programming jobs are silly easy to move around and most of them can be done remotely. As long as you start with this hypothesis whatever analysis you do will be wrong. We do have problem coordinate between teams that share the same hall and the same boss, I cannot even imagine what would happen with complete remote team in Vietnam to save money. It would be just better to stop develop software ourselves. Now with C…
For example I find pinging off ideas off each other and explaining things much harder on remote due to a lack of a whiteboard or a notepad. No collaboration tool I tried was even remotely a good substitue.
I like the conversations I can have while taking a coffee. And going out for drinks with colleagues from time to time.
I hate working alone in my bubble all day long. I like having the possibility to do so from time to time, but not all the time.
As it was already mentioned in other comments time proximity is important. Managing things like pull requests or user tests over large time differences makes thing considerably slower.
The whole premise of full remote is only valid for a subset of projects and team compositions.
This is an assumption we have about the world, and it's a true assumption for competitive markets, where new companies/busiensses can freely enter, where barriers to entry are low. But, with software busineses, barriers to entry are extremely high and this results in businesses that are far less competitive on price and thus price of labor. The result is that many many of the biggest software companies are monopolies. Monopolies don't need to be competitive on the price of their labor.
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…
Business culture in the US is also quite authoritarian. There have been decades of strategic peeling away of labor rights to put labor in a more leveraged situation, leading to restricted freedoms. Sure, you can tell your manager/director/CIO/CTO their choice is idiotic but the fact is, you'll be fired instantly and depending on circumstances, you may be in a bad situation financially and future career wise. The very…
That should be obvious. Most people I've worked for can be challenged in private if you've actually got a point - even if you're shot down in the end. The ones who are still assholes when handled correctly are usually not worth working for. The best ones can handle a public challenge on the merits of course.
This is an odd analysis, because as it highlights, salaries are strongly correlated with wealth of the country. So the question really becomes, not why are salaries different, but "why is programming difficult to offshore". If programming was easy to import and export then either salaries would even out or, more likely, would be relocated to cheaper countries like many kinds of manufacturing. But software is difficul…