Whenever offshoring comes up I'm reminded of my experience trying out an Indian development firm some years back. I decided to give it a try with an extremely

Whenever offshoring comes up I'm reminded of my experience trying out an Indian development firm some years back. I decided to give it a try with an extremely simple feature for autotempest.com, just opening up a modal window with some advanced search features. Specified what exactly should be included, and it was nice and encapsulated so I figured it would be a perfect test. To summarize, the results were literally comically bad. All kinds of hand massaged spacing using nbsp's and weird off by one pixel issues and such—things that to do wrong as they did must have taken an order of magnitude longer than it would have to do them correctly. So, I went through several rounds of pointing out really obvious issues and asking for revisions. They would apologize profusely and say essentially that the person who had been working on it previously had been a junior developer, but they'll put someone much more senior on it now. Never really made a difference. But here's the one that really blew my mind. The site color scheme at the time was greens and whites. For some reason though they decided that the heading of the modal box should have a thick orange underline. How did they create this ~4px underline? By embedding an enormous image of a sunset and cropping it to a 4px orange line. No exaggeration. This was like a 2560x1440px image of a sunset, which they'd cropped to a sliver in the top corner to show an orange line. I have to assume the developer(s) got sick of my nitpicking and decided to do something so ridiculous I'd just go away. It worked.