5 ms·
Analogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer
by z92 7y ago
Analogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer, who hires some college kids that actually do the job.
- tyingq 7y agoI've seen this. Not common, but it happens.
- coldcode 7y agoLast employer before I started wanted 3 iOS apps built to copy the in house android apps, they hired ATT for some reason, who outsourced it to an Indian firm, who outsourced it to three random teams of people they found. $400,000 later, they got 3 crappy apps that took twice as long as estimated to be finished. I wound up rewriting most of the most important one. All 3 apps seemed to have been derived from a common ancestor and then disconnected and given to three teams; the code mutated separately from the common ancestor, so fixing things was like hunting down Ebola variants.
- arethuza 7y agoI've seen UK company -> US company -> German company -> Ukrainian company Although I worked for the UK company I did actually get to speak to one of the chaps from the Ukraine and they seemed a good team - though they had no idea who we were or why they were making the changes they were implementing. The Ukrainian team eventually disappeared though and this being 2014 we did wonder....
- sjg007 7y agoUkrainian and Russian programmers are all very good. You usually have to go through Germany though to get to them though.
- helpPeople 7y agoSay you are a vp/director at a fortune 500 company, and you need to create a complex platform for users. It's not the primary use, but to be competitive you must add this hardware/software. In-house means hiring the best of best and learning from scratch. Suppliers already make this for other companies but suppliers do exactly what you claim. What is best? The longer I live, I'm inclined to believe that from scratch with best of best engineers is best. But I worry about gaps in security and tech debt.
- ericol 7y ago> who hires some college kids that actually do the job Sounds about right, except that > hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death the job was actually not done, but faked. The last developer from India that my company hired (2009 or so) left us with some sub par script, which had some 500+ lines of code for some data validation that was actually never executed. We then switched to people from the Eastern Block, and we never looked back.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago*bloc
- ericol 7y agocheers
- delinka 7y ago> the value of the contract had fallen Why would I, Middleman Hitmeister, tell the marksman I'd hired about taking a cut and passing the job on? "They hired me for $500K to get this done. I'll pay you $250K to get this done." Now I risk the guy killing me to take the full $500K for the contract. Amateurs.
- inovica 7y agoWe did the same.
- _jal 7y agoExcept in this case, recursive outsourcing proved to be socially beneficial. Perhaps we should encourage criminals to act more like professionals?
- coding123 7y agoWhich happens, and it's a very bad practice if things are not transparent.
- analog31 7y agoDuring the outsourcing craze, I came up with a business idea, to create a fake job shop in India, but actually have the work done by programmers in the US.