• SolePurposeOfVisit (unregistered)

    Two WTFs here. One pointy-haired, one data-mining.

    "This manager also believed that anything that could be explained could be implemented more cheaply offshore."

    Absolutely true, though you'd still have to find the right offshore team to implement it. And I'm going to ignore complications like "maintenance."

    The WTF here is that the manager in question believes he is competent to explain the problem in sufficient detail and with sufficient precision. I've never met a PHB like that. Have you?

    Second WTF: the problem clearly falls within the domain of NLP. You do not solve NLP problems with regexps, let alone with a straight string lookup on a database.

    All the rest of the implementation is irrelevant once you've recognized the two huge elephants in the room.

  • craftworkgames (unregistered)

    I'm so disappointed that the first comment wasn't..

    fInternal Revenue Servicet

  • (cs) in reply to craftworkgames

    It's too late to fix it now. But you're right, it would have Doctoramatically improved the thread. I'm so sorry.

  • testwithus (unregistered) in reply to balazs

    SWIFT Interview questions on

    http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/swift.htm

    For selenium solution visit http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/blog-page.html

    QTP Interview Questions. http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/qtp-questions.html

    www.searchyourpolicy.com
  • testwithus (unregistered) in reply to Dogsworth

    SWIFT Interview questions on

    http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/swift.htm

    For selenium solution visit http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/blog-page.html

    QTP Interview Questions. http://testwithus.blogspot.in/p/qtp-questions.html

    www.searchyourpolicy.com
  • (cs)

    TRWTF is SQL injection.

  • urza9814 (unregistered) in reply to lucidfox
    lucidfox:
    TRWTF is SQL injection.

    Not familiar with the concept of prepared statements I take it?

  • urza9814 (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    As I understand it, it's a cultural thing. Book knowledge and following instructions is looked highly up, while out-of-the-box thinking and doing things on your own is not. Many years ago on a WTF that I can't remember there was a comment from an Indian national living in India who explained this notion, that looking for exact solutions to problems is good, but doing your own research or looking at documentation to find the answer is not considered acceptable.

    Anecdotal for sure, but there might be something to this. I had an Indian guy working for me, but whenever he got a problem his immediate reaction was to ask somebody else for the answer (typically by calling tech support). He seems completely devoid of any impulse to try and solve a problem himself.

    One time he asked me how to do something (by e-mail) which I didn't know exactly how to do off-hand myself. I e-mailed him back and said "here's the top three Google results, they look promising."

    According to the book I was asked to read when hired by this Indian consulting firm (in the US -- they recently expanded into North America and have been hiring here like crazy) that is indeed a cultural thing in India. Book was called "Speaking of India" I believe.

    Essentially the reasoning for that was that they're a VERY communal culture, which tends to discourage individual thought. It's all about what is best for the whole, which generally ends up meaning what is best for those socially above you. Which generally means you defer to a higher authority if you have even the slightest doubt, rather than trying to figure it out yourself. Because it's not about what you think will work, it's about giving them what they want from you.

  • Kay (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi

    I wouldn't generalize and stereotype Indians or anybody. Most offshore projects with small budget typically gets students that are either intern'ing or just graduated (possibly from non-computer science background). They have as much clue as to what to do as what you provide them as requirements documentation. However I strongly feel that even this may not be the case. Try telling your aging dad on how to use your MBP to use skype and then see if he could do (figure) something else on his own like check the mail you sent him. Alternately much of the big startups and the biggest tech companies got a big core of "Indian" talent that are crucial and as intelligible. Context changes everything.

  • Buddy (unregistered)

    For anyone considering this: You hire two people to independently manually review and edit each entry. At the end of each day, do a machine compare and spit out any discrepancies to be re-reviewed the next day. And from experience, randomly change a small percentage of the input so that persons one and two have slightly different inputs some of the time. [I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader as to what this is for.]

  • NetR (unregistered)

    This is the picture at offshore: Contracting companies hire fresh out graduates in masses, give them a minimal 2~3 months training on the ins and outs of coding, tools etc; then they hire a senior developer to oversee these kids, for every 15~20 kids there is one senior lead (who might have started out like them), the senior developer is invisible to the customer, he is overtasked with looking over many projects. The end result: the contracting company extracts more money from the client, pays peanuts to these kids, the stressed senior developer leaves, the code is pure crap.

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