

Outsourcing Is High Tech's Subprime-Mortgage Fiasco - bensummers
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/restoring-american-competitiveness/2009/10/outsourcing-is-high-techs-subprime.html

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Cinfraco
I agree the article title is misleading.

My 2 cents on outsourcing:

I have been working for 2 years now on 2 projects that were brought back from
outsourcing. I must say what a disaster. It has taken us almost the entire 2
years to get the project code maintainable. From what I have seen from
outsourced code is a fundamental lack of understanding of programming the
languages (one project C++, the other Java).

I fail to understand the reasons that most companies choose to outsource. The
company I work for was paying $3.7million per year to outsource these
projects. After bringing the projects back in they are spending less than
$800k per year to maintain 6 developers. Since insourcing the product has
become more stable and feature rich. In my opinion outsourcing is the kiss of
death for a software project.

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UsNThem
>>"Fundamental lack of understanding of programming the languages (one project
C++, the other Java)"

99.9% of the time , I doubt if engineering has a say - who takes the project.
The failure of the project according to me , is when biz guys decide which
firm/person gets the project depending on the cost !

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Cinfraco
I agree, I think that the problem is the Corp VP's making uninformed
decisions.

But when you see Java code like this:

StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();

if(buffer == null){

    
    
       //do something, in most cases i have seen return;
    

}

The problem here is in Java new will never return null. One of the worst ones
I saw was a point system for exception handling that most of the time crashed
the entire app. This is only a simple example of what I have seen. When the
entire application is spattered with code like that performance takes a major
hit.

My assumption is that the outsourcing company took a programmer that knew C++
and said you now write JAVA. Further reinforcing your point!

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UsNThem
The title is misleading, implying something to the high-tech arena , rather it
is generalized article.

