Be Excellent To Each Other

OFF-SHORE CONTRACTORS.

THAT IS ALL.

I feel your pain.

Are they doing the ol' "Start asking questions 3 days before a deadline that prove they have no idea what they're doing and have just been flailing about for the last 2 months but haven't told you" trick?

A friend of mine works for JP Morgan based in Glasgow. The entire team of developers he manages work in India so it's literally impossible to know for sure what they're doing or even to get hold of them for conversation during most of his working day. And most of them seem to be idiots as far as he can tell.

You couldn't fucking pay me enough.

Most of them probably are idiots - my mum was setting up a software office in Delhi and found it incredibly frustrating. Some would get their English-speaking mates to do the initial phone interview ("be able to speak English" being a requirement), others would take a job then never appear (she managed to get hold of one of these - he'd got a better-paying job between accepting the offer and the start date, didn't think it necessary to tell them), others would start then immediately demand 40% payrises or they were leaving...

Given all that kind of thing, any that are hired, turn up and stick around are probably somewhere towards the bottom end of "can program."

I don't know why there's any thought that outsourcing is a good idea.

Maybe we can help...

I've worked with a lot of off-shore contractors as part of my direct team, as staff reporting to me, and as people in other teams. You have good ones and bad ones. Some are as hard working and intelligent as any staff I've worked with on-site, others are clearly just marking up their CV.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with off-shoring work to contractors. I do think there's a problem with thinking you can take entire teams of people and replacing their jobs with teams in Mumbai, Manila, or even Texas without needing significant work done to ensure they are trained appropriately, and account is taken of difficulties like timezones and language barriers.

What can work is getting a team in a cheaper location to do the whole of delivery, with the acceptance that the cost savings will be impacted by a loss of efficiency and needing to deal with the cultural difference and time issues etc... (i.e. what craster said)
What doesn't work is shipping one element of a delivery to a different place, be it development, testing, BA, whatever...

The chat from my JP mates is that it's so massively cheaper per head to hire these guys that it offsets the time and money spent managing them and dealing with any issues that come out of it. While I accept this is probably true once you scale the savings up to the size of an organisation like that, the tester in me weeps for the quality of the software that's likely to get delivered. And, as I say, you couldn't pay me enough to manage that situation.

It isn't cheaper, it just costs less per day...

I think the guy we're dealing with is $75 a day. My daily rate (last time I looked) is £1,500, and that's assuming I don't have to do a site visit. No matter how much better I am at my job than him, I'm pretty sure I'd struggle to justify the difference to a third party

Depends on whether the steaming turds he serves up a company software cause people to not buy it/make mistakes.

You're making assumptions that for $75 a day he's shit. He may well be excellent - the question is more whether your organisation is capable of managing him (or a team of hims) doing a particular role.

The company I used to work for had the bright idea to pay two lots of developers to develop the same code project at the same time. Not half each you understand, the whole lot - twice. Then they were going to pick whichever result had the least show-stopping horrific problems and ship it. Not sure either outfit produced anything usable, but it was still cheap enough to shrug shoulders about and then start paying one bloke here Grim... levels of money to do it properly.

Well, yes, the implication was that the short term cost was the only thing the management were really looking at. I got the feeling that doing long-term analysis on TCO wasn't something they were very interested in...

Barring anything else, geographical differences make controlling development tricky.

£1500 day rate without a site visit...? Bloody hell, that's nearly £200/hour!

Professional engineers are very lucky to command a rate that's half that, especially in today's market. You're typically looking at £600/day for desktop study type stuff and that's for someone educated to engineering degree level and with at least 5 years' relevant experience, including the production of all manner of complex computer models, well written reports, specifications, drawings and all the rest.

Looks like I'm in the wrong job!

Software development is often money for old rope, in my most humble view. Outsourcing a company to do something, or paying a couple of hundred grand for a piece of software with expensive per user/concurrency licences (or even more expensive 'site-wide' licences), for a piece of shit bit of bollocks that a single, decent developer on £30k a year could replicate.

Certainly in the public sector, I.T.-ignorant management types draw a direct correlation between cost and perceived quality. The most recent IT bungle in the organisation for which I work involved paying in the region of £2m for payroll and purchasing software that didn't work, wasn't well integrated, wasn't maintained, and eventually junked after 18 months of hassle. Authorised, of course, by a higher-up with no fucking clue about anything. For a tenth of that you could have paid a team of 5 well-paid developers for a year to come up with something better and more bespoke. They never considered that, naturally.

This is then compounded when cuts come in forcing people who have worked here 30 years into redundancy.

Don't get me started on the super-mega-never-to-be-used NHS IT records system. Hundreds of millions pissed in all directions by an endless succession of know-nothings while a few people somewhere get extremely rich for doing very little, and ultimately providing nothing.

Heh, I assume that is what Grim... gets charged out at by his company, not what he gets to take home.

My daily rate is the same. I certainly don't make £1500 a day!

Yeah, I knew that mate.

By the way, if my earlier post sounded like sour grapes, it wasn't meant to. Shit, if I could charge my company services out at £1500/day, I most certainly would.

Ironically, there are certain circumstances where our hourly rates do significantly increase - when acting in litigation, as an Expert Witness, for example. It's ballsy work to be sure and you have to have an inch-thick hide so it's not for everyone, but I really enjoy it...

Oh man. I could weep.

Especially given my Corporation Tax bill that's due in a few months. So glad to know my sweat-stained, hard-earned tax dollar, and countless other 'productives' like myself also, isn't being utterly pissed away by wasteful, inept, profligate and above all, useless and unaccountable wankers.

The public sector is terrifying. If you have a conscience, working in the public sector should make you angry. The government talks about cutting waste but it can only do it in broad strokes against things it can perceive. The sheer amount of inefficiency in an average office... whether it's comissioning an IT system you don't need because you let technical decisions get made by 'managers' who can barely turn on their computer, or, in the case of my last office's director, printing out every email and document you receive because you 'don't like to read it on the screen'.

Don't get me started mate, I'm still serving my Probationary Period.

Suffice to say that nothing you mention surprises me in the least one bit. I've been saying this for years and years. Fuck me, it's depressing - 'Arrrrrrrgh' indeed.

I suppose my only comfort is in the knowledge that if I'm ever in a position to decide these things myself, I'll be telling you £1500/day developers to fuck off. I wouldn't pay that for anything, even if you could reliably shit gold.

The only good thing about a recession for a consumer is that everyone is badly in need of your business. You've go the luxury of haggling down a decent deal because if you won't, there are plenty of skilled independents that will. This naturally presupposes you have a manager that isn't a stupid fucknut.

SSSSSH you!

Sssshh...

Recessions are (and always have been) very good for the company I work for, due to larger clients realising how much money they spend with larger agencies and "down-sizing" to our level.

And if you think £1,500 per day is expensive, you should see what the network guys charge.

Oh God, so very much .

I work in the dedicated IT department for a government agency and over the years we've built many bespoke systems which were only as complex as they needed to be to meet the business requirements of the time (while still being scalable and extensible). All systems were delivered relatively quickly, relatively cheaply, to a high degree of quality and all integrate well with each other. Most importantly though we can support them well because they're only as complex as they need to be and we know how they work; having built them from the ground up.

A couple of years back we needed replacements for two very old legacy systems, plus the business wanted to beef up those functional areas and better integrate them with existing systems. Shall we go with our proven track records of building supportable bespoke systems that fit the business need? Oh God no, let's toss that idea in the fucking bin and buy in some off the shelf packages that we'll customise, with the 'assistance' of third party consultants naturally. Predictably, both projects were a fucking disaster. Both base systems were stupidly complex over-engineered pieces of shit that barely did what they were sold as doing; much less what we wanted them to do. Unbelievable amounts of money were spent and the result was that one system went live and literally fell over the same week due to terrible performance, while the second system only made it into production recently (about two years late) and is running in parallel with the legacy system it was intended to replace because we can't fully trust the replacement system yet. The one that fell over was yanked from live and we ended up kicking out the third party dev team so as to redo it ourself with the assistance of the actual vendor. To get the thing running at an acceptable pace we ripped out gobs of functionality and it's now a shadow of the design we were originally promised would work. Oh, and it constantly suffers from mystery performance issues where it'll slow to a crawl for random amount of time and the vendor themselves are blatantly running out of ideas as to what the cause is. The upshot of all this is many, many horrible headlines and our hitherto very good reputation flushed down the fucking toilet due to shite management decisions that we as a department had no input into.

So, a possibly worthwhile experiment from which surely we'll have learned some lessons eh? Surely, now that another of our core systems has reached end of life (it's running Oracle 8i!) we'll go back to our previous and very successful delivery model? No. Of course we fucking won't. Our senior management and the goverment department that have oversight on us want to buy in an off the shelf product and customise it. Gnnnnhhhh! *bangs head on desk*

Holy shit Bamba, I'm right there with you buddy.

Before I left my last job I had to deal with the central fucking IT team who was managed by a woman that knew nothing about IT. Managing the technical team. The team itself were naysaying cunts that enjoyed saying no to anything that required them to do anything, and used the same of feeble excuse of bullshit jargon that would put off anyone not IT literate. Since that wasn't me I spent a great deal of time sending emails back and forth demanding precisely, and in detailed terms, what they meant by 'security issue' as a reason for not installing a package I needed. Normally when the cunt-worthy team say no to something, you can escalate it to their manager and appeal for common sense. In this case the manager didn't know what the fuck I meant by 'server-side' and deferred, always, to the opinion of her team. WHATS THE FUCKING POINT OF SUCH A PERSON?

Anyway, after eventually escalating it to the head of Manchester fucking Computing, who eventually said 'If you can't actually say why you can't install it, please install it', these shitty fucking arseholes then insisted on a meeting in an effort to second-guess the entire way I was implementing my system, whereby this shitty-nosed little weasel on the IT team attempted to contradict everything I said. When I tried to point out there was a processing overhead executing php via a browser rather than the command line, he jumped up and shouted 'You're WRONG! You've got that absolute wrong! PHP doesn't run in a browser! A browser is client side! PHP is server side! That's totally wrong!'. I facepalm while the slack-jawed manager peon looks on thinking her 'staff' has made a really good point against me.

They'd gotten it into their mind to say no, for no good reason, and rather than back down they attempted ever-more i tenuous reasons for ignoring me. This was if you could get the lazy fucks to reply to a support ticket, of course. This went on for fucking months. In the end they took 7 months to provide a level of hosting and command-line access that any two-bit fucking shared hosting server could have given me in 10 minutes for £20. I said that, and I said a lot more besides, but they just sat back and ignored me utterly while churning out this 'We're very busy', and 'This is all very complicated' line, all the while being completely cognicent of just how full of shit they were. This, my friends, is public-fucking-sector.

I work for an outsourcing company. We are not all that bad.

Of course, IT issues are only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. See also: "everything else".

Dreadful top-down management where unemployable muppets such as you describe and who happen to have 20+ years service in one department or other, have been promoted by default over the years, who "cannot be got rid of" due to length of said service etc. etc. - instead of a modern, horizontal, empowered (and essentially Darwinian) management structure as used within the private sector for the last 20-30 years, by productive people with proven performance and knowledge. It's got much to answer for, but isn't the only problem of course; there are also the now massively powerful public sector unions as well, given succor and protection from 13 years of Labour government and who entirely uncoincidentally now closely resemble their 1970s industrial UK counterparts, who pretty much did for manufacturing in this country at that time.

Still, it's good to know that they're all on massively unaffordable and entirely undeserved final salary pension schemes, as paid for by the hapless taxpayer. I was reading the other day that the typical cost of an ordinary teacher's pension pot who has done 30 years service is around £600k.

Can't be arsed, except to day this does not closely reflect my experience of the public sector, I encountered just as many feckless cunts in private industry. But then I would say that because I'm obviously a useless cretin who can't cut it in the "real world" just like everyone else ever who ever worked in the public sector.

To be fair, that wasn't what was being said at all, Mark. Gnomes and I are talking about management, not everyone full stop (and to be fair, in his case, from direct first hand knowledge).

I have no doubt this is true and my rant isn't intended to support the argument that private sector = brilliant and public sector = terrible. I work with many very good people and many very bad people as I imagine everyone does in every job. Indeed the experience of loads of the people I know who have flitted between my organisation and JP Morgan reveal that there are just as many jaw-dropping horror stories to come out of the private sector; albeit for different reasons. The thing that does seem to be true though is that people can get to a certain position and become essentially unassailable despite being blatantly obstructive and terrible at their job. For some reason there's a mentality of working round people, or just accepting that they're awful, rather than actually holding them accountable no matter how well known their shortcomings are and that is a constant source of frustration to me.

I dunno, I'm assuming here that in the private sector such things would get dealt with--that, for example, someone would simply not be allowed to hold up entire deliveries due to laziness and idiocy--but maybe it's not the Darwinian paradise people make out? Having worked where I am for a very long time I can't really say for sure.

The next time the missus is banging on at me to get a better job, I'm going to show her this thread.

Well, it certainly would in my experience, at anywhere that I have worked (less still owned), in almost 30 years of working exclusively in the private sector, at perhaps 8 different companies, ranging from tiny outfits like mine to perhaps 300+ engineers.

That said, I am certainly not saying that the private sector is some universal 'Darwinian paradise' - far from it. There are many dreadfully run firms, but there again, these tend to go bust eventually.

Feex!

As long as she knew about management, that's not an issue at all. The issue is with the lazy IT people she employed.

In fact, it's often preferable to have an IT clueless manager of IT staff, if they're good IT staff - because then they might actually listen to the staff who know what they're doing.

Also, they won't spend their time doing IT.

Of course you could have a manager who thinks they know about IT and frequently embarrass their staff with their 'knowledge'

An IT manager needs to know what IT can do, not how to do it.

Or SAP!

EDIT! or IBM and then they still run everything from India.

Oh man, I totally disagree. How can someone effectively manage a department - make critical decisions about something they themselves know absolutely bugger all about? (Note I am not talking about an admin/office manager type here, but someone who is actually responsible for deciding whether to develop System A or buy in System B etc., with *huge* financial and other implications either way).

This very sentiment, for me, explains much about why we are so shit at managing anything in the UK; in Japan they have engineers managing engineers, doctors managing doctors etc., and the CEO of Toyota or wherever started on the shop floor; he/she isn't some useless bullshitter, they *know* their shit and the people/business they work for/with.

Anyway, according to Gnomes, it's not as though these managers even *did* listen to their expert staff or took any account of what worked perfectly well previously (i.e. the development of modest, bespoke systems) - they bought in something off the shelf against all advice, at massive costs and with appalling, unaccountable failure? And are now doing it again?

The technical staff give that person all the information they need on the relative technical merits of A and B, and they then use their managerial skills to weigh those technical merits against the costing and staffing implications of both.

Or they read Wikipedia like everyone... Oh no!

Yes, I know the theory mate. However, if you know nothing about the subject matter in hand, you're going to give equal weighting (or possibly even inverse weighting) to one proposal or another, whereas knowledge would allow informed filtering, weighting of this information - discernment.

It really does seem like common sense to me, I must say. The UK has an appalling management record, and this is why. We think any fool - usually from the right university or wherever - can manage, whereas elsewhere in the world like Japan, Korea etc., they know otherwise.