Ask HN: Do you have a software consultant or outsourcing horror story? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by roel_v » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #26

everdev wrote: post #5

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…

"How did you do that?" "Oh, my wife wrote those.""

Haha yeah I have a similar one - I emailed a colleague once (on a Saturday) "hey, how are you on task xyz". He comes back to me less than an hour later "yeah my wife's almost done with it."

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

#62

Post by roel_v » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

whistlerbrk wrote: post #9

I understand that most major purchases have guidelines and ways to protect consumers but I just can't imagine spending 80k on something and not consistently demanding to see progress toward an end goal. When I was consulting I had a build pipeline to production up as my #1 task. Doing this kept me honest and prevented a month of "go to production" issues at the tail end of the project from surfacing but far more impo…

"When I was consulting I had a build pipeline to production up as my #1 task."

I used to cost that out as a separate item on my offers, but half of the time people would balk at paying for such things. No amount of explaining how it's better for all parties could convince some people. Now, that sort of prospect was someone you don't want as a customer anyway, but in the beginning you want to convert every prospect...

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

#63

Post by klekih » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:51 PM UTC

So I'm working on a project, within a product company, where 3 of the main components were written by an outsourcing company. From time to time I had to solve support tickets for those components.

Now I use this C# code I found there as "do-not"s. Let me give you few examples: classes with 24000 (yeah, 24 thousands) lines. Tens of classes in the same file. Methods with hundreds of lines. Switches in switch in while in while(true). Operations (push and pop) on same queue from different threads and lot of commented code with synchronizing logic which shows they just didn't understand how threads can share a bloody queue object. Copy-paste of logic because why do you have classes. Use statics, you dumb. And the most evil thing, the best and worst example is a class which uses an array[] with fixed size but behaves like a List with dynamic size. No generics. No use of .net classes.

I can't imagine how those projects were signed by the main architect while he asks, during usual code reviews, for nitpicks: change the name, move the property upper with a line, etc.

I think the time and money spent to fix various things within those componentes could have been greatly reduced if not that messy haywire code.

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

#64

Post by simonswords82 » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

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

- Requesting staged payments so he pays as phases are met and not prior to receiving any deliverables

- Checking the contract to ensure there's no mention of outsourcing. Did he even check the contract at all?

- Getting references from former customers to ensure the validity of any claims made by the development firm

- Searching online for feedback and reviews about the firm

- Just asking questions in general. "Where is my app going to be developed and who by?" seems like an obvious one before you spend nearly a hundred thousand dollars

Edit: Looking at your post history you seem to be associated with a software development company. Did you not speak with your friend about his decision to spend an extraordinary amount on a development project ahead of him getting in this mess?

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

#65

Post by Pr0ducer » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

Company I work for was recently acquired. Day 1: Everybody except the Sales team is on 90-days notice. This included the software development team. They have a whole process in place, with a catchy name: "Lift & Shift." During the next 90 days, they are doing "knowledge transfer" with their team, and I checked out individuals on github. Bangladesh, rural Russia, Vietnam, and Isreal, just to name a few of the various publicly stated locations. Does that count as Outsourcing?

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

#66

Post by adamqureshi » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

zshguru wrote: post #54

adamqureshi wrote: post #51

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…

Damn, those rates seem low to be honest. I live in a way cheaper city and my firm's rate ranges from $155 to $225 an hour. USD

Yup they are. I work from home. We have no office. When i need to meet a client i get a Breather office. I never did it for the money. I need the project money to fund my start up. :-)

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

#67

Post by vram22 » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 10:22 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #38

$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. I see a lot of outsourcing deals in my daily practice, 70% or so ends well, 20% ends with a lot of friction and 10% or so fails utterly leaving the contractor with a damaged reputation and the contract…

>$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 successful application of such techniques in real projects), I take an interest in this, and have come across multiple such cases in just reading the tech news - magazines, web sites, etc.

A couple of related links:

https://www.google.co.in/searchq=large+software+project+fail...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...

There are ways to overcome these failures, or rather prevent them, but they require disciplined use of techniques, from top to bottom of the team, which is not very common, for various reasons, either lack of knowledge of the techniques at all, disbelief that they are effective (if done right), or lack of political will to implement them, or penny-wise-pound-foolish mentality.

[1] There are people who are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capers_Jones

Quotes (from the above Wikipedia article):

"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."

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

#68

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 12:43 AM UTC

vram22 wrote: post #67

jacquesm wrote: post #38

$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. I see a lot of outsourcing deals in my daily practice, 70% or so ends well, 20% ends with a lot of friction and 10% or so fails utterly leaving the contractor with a damaged reputation and the contract…

>$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.

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

#69

Post by hunvreus » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 5:37 AM UTC

If you hire a team to get the job done:

1. Make sure you do a bit of research: talk to past clients, meet with the team... 2. Trust your gut feeling when it comes to the team lead. Ultimately, the team will only be as good as their leaders.

More importantly, if you're an early stage startup you should probably NOT hire an external team (and that's coming from a consultant).

Find a technical co-founder and go through the grind of building it on your own.

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

#70

Post by hunvreus » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

adamqureshi wrote: post #51

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.