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Admin
Nooooooooo!!!!
Asking Telligent Systems to implement a spell checker is... well... too scary to think about.
Admin
you're right... what was I thinking :-)
Admin
I'm guessing the 'c-pound' references are pointed at an old post.
Admin
WTF!
One of the most entertaining things about TDWTF is how quickly the comments spin out of control, into totally irrelevant stuff. Like grammer and offshoring, health care and spelling.
I almost feel guilty posting my opinion that the WTF here is that nobody had a clue regarding test validation and QA in general. This statement is way too !OT (for those who need it, !OT = bang OT = not off topic).
Frankly, there are waaay too many alleged WTFs posted that do not nearly rise to true WTFisity. Most are just bad practice, based on bad policies. If I want that I can go back to almost every client for whom I have done worked.
I stopped reading Dilbert after approximately 2 days for the same reason. Droning on about the existence of cluelessness is boring. We need more juice and brillance.
Admin
WTF?!? You really believe a few keywords being in English makes it impossible for non-native speakers to write good code?
Admin
OK, I just don't understand all these people who are blaming bad or no QA for this WTF. QA is the last line of defense - writing solid code is the first line (or at least a line before the last line...)
Seriously, why in the world were these variables created static in the first place? What possible reason could there be for adding that? Has the outsourcing company ever written a web application before?
My employer has outsourced development work; 90% of it is done by cut-and-paste monkeys with seemingly little to no understanding of the code they are pasting, and with nary a nod to readability or maintainability. Forget about reusing similar blocks of code (it's faster to cut and paste and change a few words than to write a method.) They don't provide any QA, but being a half dozen time zones away it's slow at best for our in-house QA to communicate with them in any kind of interactive fashion.
stannius
Admin
Actually, it only depends on what browser it thinks you're posting with. Hence why I can trick it into not mangling my posts, despite the fact that I'm using Konqueror...
Admin
> Is there [sic] educational system decades ahead of the the one in the USA?
You'd have to hope so!
Admin
Muahahahahaaaaaa
Nice sabotage made by underpaid offshore developer.
What do you what ? To pay less and get the best developers? Sorry, that's impossible.
Same outsourcing compaties in my country pays salaris about $400/month for senior developer. So ... thay've got only students, no mentors, no one from who their personnel can learn some values. After a year students are unhappy and pissed off so thay go to other better compaty.
The profit for the outsourcing compaties come from number of people working for them. If there is person there is profit, if there is no person there is no profit. So thay tend to not fire anyone. Thay are full of crapy people. The other way to increase the profit is pay less to developer and give higer rates for rent of person. So you pay $1500 per person per month. They pay $400 to the person, have $100 expenses and got $1000 profit. That's how offsourcing works. All is about moneny. No quality.
Admin
Maybe not, but this does:
"a group of people that are too stupid to figure out how to have these things in their own countries are going to be brillant at writing software" [+o(]
"it's because they live in crappy countries "
Admin
When Lech Kaczynski was mayor of Warszawa, I asked my wife (she is Polish): How can such a person become mayor? And then that...
BTW, I guess you are from Krakowa? Because the radio-guide frequency is 89.0 in Warszawa...
Admin
At my last company, we needed to hire someone in a pinch. We ended up contracting a seemingly talented developer who recently immigrated from India. Anyways, he did a decent job, except for the Static Field in a web application problem. Fortunately, I found it during testing...
Admin
Good to hear :) Strangely enough I seem to have that effect on people on the 'net, dunno why...
Admin
Using Firefox too, never failed me when quoting... Ehm, not before this one, anyway...
Admin
I agree, we should all wholeheartedly encourage offshore outsourcing whenever we can.
(the rework will keep developers in work for YEARS) [6]
Admin
I've worked with code outsourced overseas. It's some of the most godawful stuff I've ever seen. I lost count of the number of times I actually had to walk away from my computer because of a couple lines. I don't think outsourcing is necessarily a problem, but I do agree that you lose control over quality very easily. You can't choose the level of expertise of developer put on a project. It's even near impossible to control basic coding standards. There are good developers in all parts of the world, but if you go overseas because it's cheap, then you get cheap software back. Simple as that.
Admin
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
FYI this is not the only time in history that industrialized countries have had to get by while other countries were competing for work.
Admin
sorry who's shore are we talking about here? I live in The Netherlands - am I an offshore worker? I hail from Australia where Jira was invented - are ozzi coders offshore? I've worked with many many programmers from India and, funny habit of shaking their head for yes and nodding for no aside, they have all been fantasticly clever. Is india offshore? Indian programmers worry about their jobs being taken by incarcerated americans who can be forced to work for less.
There's a reason labour is cheaper outside the USA, Western Europe and Australia. And it's nothing to do with denial of basic services and abject poverty. Things just cost less, and so what to me seems like a pittance is quite a good wage for somone who's weekly expenses only amount to €20 per week. I lived in Bulgaria for a year and damnned if I could spend more than €50 euro per week.
Outsourcing, managed correctly, gives western corporations more bang for their buck, but what you sacrifice is quality due to the team's remoteness. It's nothing to do with the quality of the individuals at the other end. After all you still recruit these people and you can easily afford to pay 10% over the odds to get the best brains there. But it's hard to manage a team thousands of miles away, especially so when you work in a 'closed source' environment without awesome quality tools like checktyle and findbugs and tools like jira to manage your issue flows and so forth.
The blame for most outsourcing horror stories lies fair and square at the feed of the greedy, short sighted western corporation who didn't understand the first rule of software development which is involvement.
how do you have a scrum meeting when your team is miles away? how do you conduct JAD sessions or brainstorm? How do you allocate work and measure code quality? Most companies can't do that with their inhouse teams. Not because its hard but because their developers are lazy, ignorant SUV driving swill, it almost never happens despite a wealth of free tools.
You all seem to forget that the industialised countries got that way from the forced labour and plundered riches of africa, south-east asia and the sub-continent. complaining now that "theyr tkn our jaaawbs" is just being ungrateful.
almost all bad software can be traced back to poor requirements gathering. sure this site does expose some genuine WTF moments, but by and large employed programmers do know what they are doing, but often have to invent what it is they are supposed to do.
decents specs, a wiki, an issue tracker, a good build and deployment system, a source control system and a website to publish nightly build reports; as well as people who understand what the fuck is supposed to be being built; are all you need to manage a software team. having developers in-house makes communication easier, but having developers out-house is not in of iteself an excuse for a project to go so terribly wrong. did no-one do a single code-review? or run findbugs?
Admin
<FONT face=Verdana size=2>Ah yes the gifted and sagacious off-shore coders of India, China et al., one criticism and the tired, so tired epithet BIGOT is hurled; too bad fewer of us care than you might think.</FONT>
<FONT face=Verdana size=2>Shall we try facts? The microchip was created by... India? China? hmmmm I'd say the U.S. The personal computer as well as Windows, Unix, VAX, OS390, zOS, Mac OS, OS2 - Palo Alto Parc at Xerox created by one of these off-shore countries? Hmmm... Ethernet? Nope. C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, BASIC, C# etc created in Bangalore? Nope. The Internet the genius of Bangalore or U.S. DARPANet? Hmmm... Just exactly what innovation have the top coders from China or India created?</FONT>
<FONT face=Verdana size=2>Face it ... we send you our mindless grunt coding - anything requiring innovation or creativity stays here. That is not bigotry, it is simple history.</FONT>
Admin
You've purposely missed the point. The discussion was not about whether the United States could churn out innovation. There's no argument that it can. There is no argument whether other people in other countries can innovate either - the obvious first name that comes to mind is Sir Tim Burners-Lee.
The whole argument devolved to whether countries can provide quality programming, analysis and support. There have been many people, including the one I initially called a bigot (and he happily went on and confirmed it - it looks as though you have an equally sarcastic and angry position), who cannot comprehend that this can be so.
Admin
Since a lot of work for western companies is done in India, it's hard to tell which "American" or "European" innovations were really made there. Anyway, AFAIK our number system was invented in India, many thousand years ago; a lot of mathematics was developed in Arabic Countris, many hundred years ago. I think you know where the word "Algorithm" comes from; if not, ask Google. Without that, there would be no fundamentals to invent Unix, Windows, Ethernet or C#.
A final word: Currently there is a strong trend for innovative people to move to the US, though the original innovation was made elsewhere. That's because it's easier to get VC funding in the US than, say, in Europe. This probably makes the US look even more "innovative".
Admin
Quit trying to help this guy. He doesn't belong here. Sorry to be an a-hole, but he doesn't. It's two lines of code that are completely explained, or would take seconds on Google.
I guess we're running into the line that every technically saavy site that gets a rep encounters: the influx of wannabes.
This is a site for people that can actually program.
Admin
Bullshit, that's not bigotry.
Would it be bigoted of me to call the European Dark Ages a time of complete ignorance and backwardness imposed by a crushing religious oppression and dysfunctional economic system while China was superior? Doubt it.
Most third world countries have backward attitudes and cultures. Oppression of women, disruptive religious oppressions, insufficient general education, poor resource conservation, etc. There are dozens of aspects that cultures can be objectively measured upon, and don't pull this "imposing our value system crap". Women getting their clitorises "circumcised" is torture regardless of your "value system".
While it's annoying that everyone from Europe thinks they are superior to Americans, based on what I just pointed out, it's basically true.
Admin
I'm not trying to start a flame war here. You totally misunderstood what I was saying. Do you speak english natively? I stated that they cannot be EXPECTED. That doesn't mean that they cannot. Of course they can. I was simply stating that it would be harder for someone who does not speak english natively.
Also, it's not just a few keywords. All keywords. English speaking programmers are bad enough as it is. Do you really think that someone who doesn't know english well will understand what the word static means, and why it was chosen for that matter? Having the benefit of speaking english natively enables people to achieve a higher level of understanding. It is because of this reason that other programming languages have been created to better facilitate non-english speakers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
Calm down dude.
Admin
No, onshore devs do make mistakes... but they debug them in 30 minutes rather than ignoring them for 6 months.
Admin
Sure they can be expected to understand them. I believe that they have human-level intelligence. This is not surprising considering that they are human.
Not knowing English does not make it impossible for them to learn what a number of symbols mean. Yes, it *might* be a bit harder, but in many areas of the world, knowing more than one language is a practical necessity. They might have an easier time of it than we do.
Given an explanation, yes, I think someone who does not speak English will understand. As to why it was chosen, that is not necessary in order to use the keyword.
OTOH, the baggage of knowing existing meanings for a word can cause confusion. Consider the NUL-NULL confusion.
That looks interesting. I will have to give it a thorough read tonight.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
Believe me, it's not, by any measurable degree. Language keywords are a trivial detail. What you'd need to worry about with people not speaking your language natively is getting the REQUIREMENTS (and all changes thereof) across intact.
Well, Java for example has 50 keywords, 2 of which are unused. That's nothing.
Nonsense. Programming languages are abstract constructs. Higher levels of understanding require you to read the language spec or a similar document. The keywords are a completely irrelevant and trivial part of it. Even someone who does not know English AT ALL could learn those with very little additional effort while learning the (programming) language."understand what the word static means"? Well, let's see: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/static
1 : exerting force by reason of weight alone without motion
2 : of or relating to bodies at rest or forces in equilibrium
3 : showing little change static population>
4 a : characterized by a lack of movement, animation, or progression b : producing an effect of repose or quiescence static design>
5 a : standing or fixed in one place : <font size="-1">STATIONARY</font> b of water : stored in a tank but not under pressure
6 : of, relating to, or producing stationary charges of electricity : <font size="-1">ELECTROSTATIC</font>
7 : of, relating to, or caused by radio static
Well, looking at that most strongly implies to me that it would mean a CONSTANT. Knowledge of English would be actually misleading in this case. Or can you explain how it would give "a higher level of understanding"?
Can you provide any evidence that any of these are more than failed experiments, feature list ticks or toy projects?
I'll bet you that by far the most widely-used non-English-based "programming language" were the localized worksheet functions and macros in non-English versions of Word and Excel. Guess what? Microsoft abolished those because they caused more confusion than they prevented.
Even if you don't know English, learning a couple of new words is by far the smallest problem in learning to program.
Admin
Lets test this. I'm having Opera identify itself as IE.
Admin
Ok, lets try identifying as Mozilla.
Admin
Nope. Looks like it's screwed up regardless.
Admin
Ah, yes, of course, everyone start flaming. Jebus.
Oh, of course. Because we all know that every chinese person that sees the line
Print $A
Will know that Print means to type, or something similar.
That does not mean constant. It means it DOESN'T MOVE.
Why should I have to? The fact that they ever existed in the first place proves my point.
I totally agree. Again, I was just stating that learning English words was yet another obstacle that programmers that are not English speakers have to overcome.
sight
This isn't a "I KNOW MORE THAN YOU!", "I'M BETTER THAN YOU!", "I CAN CODE THE BEST!", "I AM THE COOLEST BECAUSE I SAID THAT!" kind of forum. Many people try to make it like that though. I see it as a place that programmers can share their thoughts and insights on why things like this happen, and what can be done to stop them from happening again. Gene brought up some valid points, but he also missed the point I was trying to make... I really don't know why he even responded... Anyways... Can't we all just get along?
Admin
You know, while "educational system decades ahead" might not fit, the quality of education on many "third world" countries is way higher than USA's. Even in english grammar :)
Admin
>> Capitalism is the path of evil.
You're an idiot.
Now, if you said "Crony capitalism is evil", or "Facism and Socialism, even when disguised as capitalism, is evil", that would be a diferent story. The former is what we have in the States, the latter in Europe.
Admin
It's bigoted to say that India, China, Malaysia don't have certain infrastructure in certain places because the people are "too stupid" and not because those countries can't frigging afford it yet.
Admin
Smart people can be born anywhere.
But 1st world nation corporations keep sharking the smart ones from developing nations, leaving... just the stupid.
Admin
This is buIIsh!t. First of all, in the domain of computers, those English words more often than not mean something different than in real life. For example, in real life, a window is something to look through. Not something to look at, unless it's very dirty. Having an English word for those abstract concepts makes it easier for us to distinguish it from the real life meaning.
Second, a lot of those words are similar in many other language. "static" is "statisch" in German.
"abstract" is "abstrakt". "number" is "Nummer". Not a big difference. Third, quite a lot of people learn English years before they learn programing. Those few new keywords hardly pose a challenge. It's much more difficult (for everyone, including English native speakers) to understand the abstract concepts behind.
That said, I admit that transmitting a problem specification, which in many cases contains a lot of specific terms from the application domain, is much more likely to cause problems.
Admin
I guess that explains why Microsoft's most productive research groups are overseas.
Oh wait, it doesn't.
Admin
NOT EVERYONE HAS A ROMAN ALPHABET/LATIN BASED LANGUAGE AS THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE. These people did NOT understand what a static variable is! If they DID, then this WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. If they knew ANY english at ALL (even remotely close to english), then they would've been able to understand that what they were doing was very, very, very wrong. Again, in CHINA, JAPAN, TAIWAN, INDIA, and MANY MANY MANY OTHER PLACES, they do not have the native luxury of knowing the roman alphabet, let alone languages based upon said alphabet, etc...
Sometime I feel like people that post here post just to flame, and don't consider all extreme circumstances... If they did... *sigh*
Admin
I doubt it, considering how programming beginners with English as their first language often have trouble with concepts. Our alphabet is not a talisman against bad code. (We have this Website.)
Either the concepts are understood adequately, or they are not. All the English in the world will not help someone who just does not get it. Foreign words will not stop someone from getting the concepts.
China has Pinyin, an official Roman transliteration. Chinese take years of English in school. I saw a lot of Pinyin while I was in China. I also saw a lot of English.
Sometimes, they do, but big deal about the alphabet. It is much easier to learn than Chinese characters! 26 vs. thousands.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko / Chen Jin Bai
Admin
Well, loking at some Japanese video games, they use roman letters quite often, even if most of the text is written in Japanes letters. Obviously not a problem for them.
Admin
They even develop entire new programming languages. With English keywords. That become very popular all around the world.
Admin
Maybe. Or (IMO more likely) they were inexperienced programmers who intellectually know what static means and think it's a convenient way to have different objects share data without ever thinking about multithreading and different requests happening in parallel.
Utter, unmitigated nonsense.
Admin
sigh.... I didn't think I would get here, but fine...
TOTAL AND UTTER NONSENSE! Of course EVERYONE should be expected to be able to produce good code REGARDLESS of what their native language is! Their native language has NO INFLUENCE on how well they can code!
Admin
Oh yes, because in order to "afford" an infrastructure, they need help and handouts from the better countries, such as the USA. They sure aren't able to "afford" it on their own. You people really don't undestand the implications of what you are saying (that the countries can't afford it because obviously they don't have enough US dollars). And what you are implying is still quite biased And explain this use of the word "yet"? Aren't these countries centuries older than the USA?
Admin
Best troll ever. Or just fakin ignorant.
Admin
Obviously I can comprehend a whole lot more than you. You are just too narrow to see the actual point I was trying to make. You are the kind of person who (ironically), after deciding that you are superior in your open mindedness, world awareness, and overall holier-than-thouness, is unable to look deeper into any statement that might be different than your supposedly superior view. My point continues to fly over your head...
Admin
Who are you talking to?
Admin
No, it's actually true, having dealt with this personally dozens of times in the past twenty years and having heard others' experiences, off-shoring for software development and support simply does not provide a product with even minimal standards of quality.
What makes off-shoring inexpensive for general manufacture is different laws with respect to resouurce use, waste elimination, and trade. These don't frequently apply to software development, so there are no savings. Add that to the fact that too many off-shored teams suffer from a complete and total disconnect from the rest of the company and even their own product team adds an expense that should not reasonably be undertaken by the hiring company. Better to move the entire coompany and establish a US sales office.
But US execs don't want to live in Hyderabad, do they?
Admin
Perhaps the words British empire and slavery mean something to you? Help and handouts, no. The developing countries need free trade in areas where _they_ are strong, as opposed to free trade only in areas where the USA is strong. Slight difference.
Admin
I'm afraid it is you who doesn't understand things.
Not sure about Malaysia, but the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. Before that, they had a civil war, were partially occupied by Japan, and had been economically exploited by numerous of what you'd call "better countries" (do a google for "opium war"). The Republic of India was founded in 1947, again after a long time of occupation and economic exploitation. I assume the "yet" was meant to imply that if these countries manage to keep developing their economy as they are doing at the moment, without being torn apart by war or occupied and forced into unfavorable trade agreements, they will be able to afford improved infrastructure quite on their own.
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