• Joe (unregistered) in reply to QJo

    You can say what you want about this "business model" but from personal experience I've seen it cost companies millions of dollars. Not only is the work not being completed, but the relationships with the customers is GONE. No one wants to try to deal with some person from some far-flung shanty town who can barely speak English and is rude and unhelpful. Cheap? Yes. Good for the company? Not at all. You have to look at the total cost and not just the cheap labour cost.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    You can say what you want about this "business model" but from personal experience I've seen it cost companies millions of dollars. Not only is the work not being completed, but the relationships with the customers is GONE. No one wants to try to deal with some person from some far-flung shanty town who can barely speak English and is rude and unhelpful. Cheap? Yes. Good for the company? Not at all. You have to look at the total cost and not just the cheap labour cost.

    Well, with that insultingly racist attitude I can see your company going down the tubes very quickly.

    I suppose there's no arguing with this sort of terminal stupidity. Dunning-Kruger rides supreme.

  • (cs) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    It appears that your own undertstanding of "offshoring" is in fact what I would define as "outsourcing", which under my own understanding means "using a third party".

    "Outsourcing" is a different business altogether, and needs its own management style.

    You know, I think you're right. Now that you've reminded me of the word, I realise now that the mental translation dictionary I have to apply to everything my bosses say has an entry "Offshoring: outsourcing". Of course, it also has the entry "Backend: administrator UI", so it's not exactly useful in a more general context.

    On the other hand the encyclopaedia article does say "the practice of outsourcing operations overseas..." and cites cheaper labour as one reason it may be done. The overlap between "offshore outsourcing" and "outsourcing" may depend on the size of the domestic economy and the number of contiguous land borders your country possesses (do U.S. companies count Mexico as "offshore"? I wouldn't know); it may be difficult to outsource something without going offshore.

    On the gripping hand, remaining domestic would defeat much of the purpose of outsourcing: "lower labour costs, more lenient environmental regulations, less stringent labour regulations, favourable tax conditions, and proximity to raw materials". Except maybe the last one.

  • nmclean (unregistered) in reply to Old Man
    Old Man:
    pjt33:
    TRWTF is working out which notifications haven't been sent by comparing dates rather than by using a Boolean (ok, bit) column which is updated by the notification sender.

    This, not

    anon:
    I'd rather have the client send in the ID of the last message it successfully processed.

    this.

    You assume that every message up to the last, single ID sent in was successfully processed. That is a wrong (and sometimes dangerous) assumption!

    But you're assuming as well -- that the client cares or wants this. Maybe outdated information would only be a distraction (even if it had failed to be received in the past). There's no sense going into database design when you can just write a one-liner to get the most recent entries if that's all they wanted in the first place.

  • (cs)

    outsourcing

    the managerial decision to only care about the cost of a product, not the quality.

  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Like you said "If you do the job properly it works well". I've never seen the job done properly the first time.

    Iteration 1: Send specs to India (wait 12 hours for results because of timezone difference) Iteration 2: Code is totally fucked up. Send emails to outsourcing company. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 3: Still not working. Send emails to outsourcing company. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 4: Still not working. Send emails to outsourcing company. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 5: Still not working. Send emails to outsourcing company. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 6: Still not working. Send nasty emails to outsourcing company. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 7: Still not working. Send emails to outsourcing company telling them to use senior developers instead of monkeys. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 8: Still not working. Send emails to outsourcing company threatening lawsuit. (wait 12 hours) Iteration 9: Still not working. Just fucking give up at this point (wait 10 days)

    Oh it finally works! Wow it saved the company sooooo much money

    Fast, good, cheap. Pick two.
  • tragomaskhalos (unregistered)

    No WTF here - sensible practice to abstract away the current date so that you can TEST YOUR CODE without your test data being dependent on the calendar date - just swap out the view for an equivalent that selects a date of your choosing. Sheesh people.

  • Valued Service (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    Joe:
    You can say what you want about this "business model" but from personal experience I've seen it cost companies millions of dollars. Not only is the work not being completed, but the relationships with the customers is GONE. No one wants to try to deal with some person from some far-flung shanty town who can barely speak English and is rude and unhelpful. Cheap? Yes. Good for the company? Not at all. You have to look at the total cost and not just the cheap labour cost.

    Well, with that insultingly racist attitude I can see your company going down the tubes very quickly.

    I suppose there's no arguing with this sort of terminal stupidity. Dunning-Kruger rides supreme.

    1. From my personal experience, I've seen it cost companies millions of dollars.

    Starting off with "from my personal experience" is indicating that this isn't a broad range problem. The OP is tackling the thought "offshore outsourcing is always good". From his personal experience it isn't always good.

    1. Work not completed.

    Again, from his experience. It is legitimate, then. And it's not just HIS experience. I've seen it too, and so has many of my colleagues.

    1. Relationships with the customers is GONE.

    True. Absolutely true. If you outsource your customer service, you lose that avenue to gain relationships.

    1. No one wants to try to deal with .. shanty town... barely speak english... rude and unhelpful.

    This is frustration talking. Shanty town is an insult, but that's not racist. India is a culture group, not a race. I've had completely different experiences when working with an Indian locally.

    Barely speak English. Often true. It is difficult to understand them, and not just because of the accent. The phone connection is often weak.

    Rude and unhelpful. This I disagree with. I get the same percentages of unhelpfulness regardless of the call center location.

    1. You have to look at the total cost and not just the cheap labor cost.

    True. You can't attribute this to racism.

    So, I don't think this is racism talking. I think this is countless personal experience dealing with offshored call centers talking. Regardless of race, the cultural differences, the weak phone connections, the thick accents, and the lack of context all contribute to creating poor relationships with clients.

    You cannot dismiss his frustrating experiences just because you find one or two statements to be distasteful.

  • (cs) in reply to tragomaskhalos
    tragomaskhalos:
    No WTF here - sensible practice to abstract away the current date so that you can TEST YOUR CODE without your test data being dependent on the calendar date - just swap out the view for an equivalent that selects a date of your choosing. Sheesh people.

    Because a view is much more sensible than @DebugDate DATETIME = NULL that simply uses GETDATE() when NULL.

  • (cs)

    Just saw this podcast, haven't listened to it yet, but the title is definitely relevant.

    http://freakonomics.com/2012/06/14/a-cheap-employee-is-%E2%80%A6-a-cheap-employee-a-new-marketplace-podcast/

  • Barf 4Eva (unregistered)

    yes, I totally agree that this is obfuscation here! BUT... What if... The permissions for views are more lax than other db objects at this company and the authors of said view wanted to expose the db server's current date to people who would only be able to read this value via permissions given to the view.

    Regardless, it would still be obfuscation in respect to using the view on this function for something so trivial.

  • RJ (unregistered)

    Let me get this straight - Mr. JH reviewed some code and marked it FAILED. A lot of commenters went through it and mentioned that, in fact its not a bad approach.

    Now slowly the discussion has turned to monkeys and their 'failed offshoring' for no apparent reason and it has no connection to the original post. Remember that according to a lot of commenters, the code is fine and that indirectly proves that Mr. JH is the one who jumped the gun.

  • Rambo (unregistered)

    Reminds me of the infamous India interview. I really wish that guy would post a recording of the actual phone call (it seems like he has one?).

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