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Craigslist and looking for a web/php/postgresql guy



On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Dan Ritter <dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 12:35:46PM -0400, markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > I posted an ad on Craigslist and explicitly stated that U.S. citizenship
> > was required and then applicants MUST be on the Boston side of the rt-128
> > loop.
> >
> > I'm getting people from Pakistan, India, Russia, etc. answering the ad.
> >
> > The rates are insanely low. $12/hour!!!
> >
> > IMHO outsourcing is killing the software industry in the U.S. but how can
> > companies resist paying software developers McDonald's wages?
>
> Week 1: you do 80% of the work by writing the spec for the offshore
> developers to follow.
>
> Week 2: you are reassured by your Remote Project Manager at Offshore
> Software Development Corporation Inc  that everything is coming along
> just fine.
>
> Week 8: the first list of questions from the developers emerges.  Half of
> them are RTF-language-M trivia, and the other half don't make sense. You
> spend the week giving appropriate pointers.
>
> Week 12: Googling around, you trip over badly-worded ExpertsExchange
> questions with recognizable snippets of your pseudo-code.
>
> Week 13: Remote project manager says that the one bad egg has been fired
> and replaced. Everything is coming along just fine.
>
> Week 17: Project manager tells you the first release is ready for QA
> and acceptance. After thirty-four hours downloading, you have a 72MB
> ZIP file... corrupt.
>
> Week 22: Project manager inquires as to whether the spec can be changed
> to fix just one little issue. The proposed change completely defeats
> the purpose of the program in the first place.
>
> Week 25: A Linux programmer from Delhi announces an open-source project
> that solves most of what you wanted. Version 0.1 is at least as good as
> what you would have had after two weeks working on this yourself, and
> he wrote it last night. You cancel your contract with Offshore Software
> Development Corporation Inc and offer him a chunk of cash to finish it
> the way you'd like it.
>
> Week 27: The independent guy's code works pretty well. You give up on
> trying to recover any money from OSDC Inc and stop sending them
> checks.
>
> If you were a large corporation, multiply the above timeline by a factor
> of 2 or more, and the amount of money you spent by 10.  It's possibly that
> changing corporate priorities and reshuffles could delay the discovery
> that OSDC Inc doesn't do very much for years.
>
>
> Summary: if it's critical to your business, you cannot outsource
> it.
>
>
> -dsr-
>
> --
> http://tao.merseine.nu/~dsr/eula.html<http://tao.merseine.nu/%7Edsr/eula.html>is hereby incorporated by reference.
>

Years ago I worked for Verizon's VIP department and we were responsible for
creating the desktop images that got installed on 10's of thousands of
computers.  Each department would ask for a custom image with the
applications they wanted.  So to make things easy we took all the
applications like M$Office, Notes, etc and used a packaging software to make
them a one click install.  We also took all OS and app updates and packaged
them for remote installation.

Well upper management thought it would be a good idea to start outsourcing
this process to a company in India.  They figured we could get a 3 to 1
ratio on "talent".  Something that would take us 1 hour to package
litterally took them over 8 weeks.  We went as far as to teach them how to
use InstallShield and how to script and they still couldn't do it as fast as
us.  So management finally realized it was costing them more to outsource
keeping us and them paid, so they got rid of the outsourcing.



-- 
-matt






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