11–20 of 42 posts
TFA doesn't explain what prevents outsourcing django and ruby on rails. I think the answer may be... nothing. Personally my approach is to do the bulk of the webev yourself and outsource stuff like graphic design, research, maybe some simple press release writing.
Some bean counters will be tempted to take it a step further. Why not outsource Django and Ruby On Rails work to low skilled low price developers? Its not worth the risk.
TFA doesn't explain what prevents outsourcing django and ruby on rails. I think the answer may be... nothing. Personally my approach is to do the bulk of the webev yourself and outsource stuff like graphic design, research, maybe some simple press release writing.
Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…
And that's where most software projects fail. If there's one great thing about the agile development movement it's the involvement of customers in the process so that they get the software they actually want, not what they thought they wanted at the beginning.
How much does fully specifying a piece of software cost? Now compare that with a loose specification and an engineer who's in contact with the customer and refining the application as requirements are discovered.
Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…
That barrier will keep costs high because not many 2nd or 3rd world programmers have access to these tools.
All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?
Even if such statistics existed, they wouldn't be that helpful because it pretty much comes down to how successful each company is when they outsource development work. In my own experience, I've managed outsourced teams in China, Mexico, India and Argentina. While doing so, I've worked with some fabulous developers and also many not-so-fabulous developers. I've also hired more than my share of engineers in the US an…
Yep, that's it. It's not that the people are all that different. It's that a person twelve time zones away is a lot harder to communicate with than a person living next door. Especially if they're not from the same culture.
The cultural and distance barriers aren't impossible to overcome. But they are a handicap.
I used to work for a semiconductor company with a substantial factory in Malaysia. I'll never forget the first time I took the long, long flight to meet the engineers there. It was like removing a blindfold. You got into the factory with those folks and suddenly all their problems -- which had seemed so obscure over those damned conference calls -- became clear, and their personalities snapped into place, and you could start getting things done.
Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…
The author of the piece addresses this. He's not claiming that outsourced developers can't learn Ruby/Python, but that by hugely reducing the time/cost to build an application, an X% savings is much smaller than it would be in Java. So if you save less, it's not worth the risk of outsourcing.
I thought this notion was quashed a long time ago. The author seems to suffer from a form of myopia where the only development he can see is web development.
>"The same 100 hour project with all the filler code obfuscated by Django or Ruby On Rails now takes 20 hours."
Ruby is so awesome that it simply saves 80% of your time? Really? You can't be serious. Yes, I understand the argument: If you remove all the fluff, you end up with the core problem, but I just can't believe that it's true.
>"Saving $800 over a higher skilled, more reliable, and more creative $80 an hour developer.[...] Its not worth $800, be happy with the $6,200 saved."
You should at least compare the 800$ to the 1600$, which is a saving of 50% - the risk might be higher, but the core problem is also in the "regular" project and you had no problem sourcing that out.
Seriously, these made up numbers are not helping. Maybe there is a truth to this argument, maybe not. But declaring you can get the same product for 20% of the price if you'd just use the right language is just wrong.