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| Non-WTF Job: Software Developer at Rustici Software (Franklin, Tennessee) |
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| Non-WTF Job: Software Developer at Rustici Software (Franklin, Tennessee) |
| « Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers, Other Sensitive Data | Toppling the Stack » |
A little more than a year ago, Nathan T's company decided to outsource a large portion of certain project to a certain country many thousands of miles away. "Even if the code quality isn't as good," one manager would often say, "we'll just pay them to rewrite it and rewrite it again. It'll still be less expensive."
Extended that logic even further, management decided to not only outsource overseas, but outsource to the cheapest overseas firm they could find. Eventually, they'd end up with solid code, right?
As it turned out, each iteration of their code got more and more... interesting. The developers across the pond didn't quite grasp the basics of object-oriented programming (especially the whole "reference type" versus "value type" thing), and ended up writing a lot of "superstitious" code to make sure the compiler would do exactly what they wanted. Of course, being that the outsourcing firm delivered well over hundreds of thousands of lines of superstitious code, there's really only one way to represent it all:
int j = int.Parse(i.ToString()); // provides deep copy of j
At least that line worked... if only the other 99,999 lines would.
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Perhaps it was providing a copy to someone named Deep?
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Remember kids:
"Cheap Elbonian outsourcing companies suck because they are cheap outsourcing companies, not because they're Elbonians" </futile attempt to stop racism> |
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Just like the major antivirus company I used to work for, I pointed things like this out to a VP, and his response was that the off-shore (not contracted, they were employees..) had added over 500k lines of code. I tried to say that LOC/SLOC is no way to measure quality or progress, but that fell on deaf ears.
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that's not right!! it's not like u go online dating at, say _ MILLIONAIRELOVES.COM _ with the thought of if this girl doesn't work out, i can always find the next one! that's very possible and not that costly!!
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Re: Deep Copy
2008-04-16 13:58
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by
conservajerk
(unregistered)
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I think the point of the article is a company cannot simply outsource to the lowest bidder and expect quality. You know the lowest bidder will cut corners to make his profit. I'm sure that cutting corners includes hiring less than experienced people and expecting them to produce.
I've seen plenty of garbage like this in my career. Most of it was introduced by new grads/interns who were tasked with developing something beyond their abilities and experience by a company that wanted to save a couple bucks. The problem here is the belief by management that all programmers are created equal (ignoring experience) and that employee self-development/mentoring is not important. |
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