Unnecessarily mentioning a characteristic of an individual is a sign of selfish, biased, and/or malicious thinking. Do you mention "American programmer" whenever recounting their bugs? It appears you have an agenda of promoting negative stereotypes, presumably in your favor. This is lame. In the future, you'll appear more credible if you omit this bigotry from your comments.
I am certain there are thousands of programmers, male, female, gay, straight, onshore and offshore who are much better than you (or me.)
Hogwash. Haven't you ever read a novel or a news story or any kind of narrative? Details add color (uh-oh, I'm sure that'll get you riled up) and they help the listener understand context and picture the story in their head. How boring would life be if every time you read or heard anything negative about someone, it only referred to them as a human?
You can't solve prejudice and bias by pretending that people's race, gender, nationality, height, weight, shoe size, etc. don't exist. They do, they always will, get over it.
Sure, good stories have details, but a person's choice of detail reveals how they see the world. The comment's mention of "offshore" clearly serves no purpose beyond encouraging stereotype-based thinking. Knowing this programmer was offshore is as irrelevant as knowing their sex or their eye color. We've generally (and I think rightfully) exorcised this language in reference to other characteristics, why not this one?
In my experience, programmers who emphasize that "offshore" programmers are bad seem insecure about their own skills and job stability. The same is true of sexist men who go out of their way to mention when a mistake was made by a woman but never explicitly highlight when it was a man.
I understand what you're saying, but it's not bigotry if the "stereotype" is true.
"offshore" is synonymous with "cheap(er) labor" in the US programming world, and is an accurate statement since that's what it's generally used for ("let's send it to XXX and it will cost us 1/10 as much")...
How many times do you think outsourcing happens in the US because they are looking for higher-quality code? 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% of the time?
"cheap(er) labor" is also synonymous with a bad product/service, because you often get what you pay for.
Are there exceptions to all this? Yes. Sometimes you can't find good quality coders in the US, but I doubt this is why outsourcing happens most of the time.
He might have generalized by adding that detail ("offshore") but that's not biggotry IMO as much as it is a flavoring.
Offshore is, most of the times, about getting the same quality of work at cheaper cost. How is it cheaper? Not because it is shoddy work, but the economics in the other country work out that way. How can you equate cheaper price = lower quality. If you are looking for people in US alone, then cheaper = lower quality. Since another factor of the equation, the country, is changing, that is not the case.
> Offshore is, most of the times, about getting the same quality of work at cheaper cost.
I have yet to experience that joy.
Rather, offshore means lots of unnecessary documentation, train someone to do my job (promoting me to "lead"), watch them get it wrong, try to coach them onto the correct path, high turnover (so I have to train and coach again in a few months), do a complete rewrite at the 11th hour, then be blamed by the bean counters that I sabotaged the effort somehow.
No doubt the same thing happens in house. But with in house, if we find a good egg, we get to keep them, get some ROI back from the learning curve.
> Offshore is, most of the times, about getting the same quality of work at cheaper cost
The problem is that the person who evaluates quality has no real understanding of what is being evaluated. This leads to price being the deciding factor. Most of the code I've seen coming from price-driven software factories is awful.
Successful outsourcing stories are few and far between; stories of failures are a dime a dozen. The reason is exactly as you say: companies are not judged on the quality they deliver.
In fact, the same problem has plagued the IT industry since forever. Almost no company successfully competes on quality, because the customer chooses the cheapest offer in the majority of cases.
And here is the crux: define the quality of a delivered software project and put a number on how much higher quality would have saved the customer. Nigh impossible.
The only solution seems to be going into a specialty niche where high quality is required, so any incumbent competitor will fail, unless they deserve to win, because they deliver your level of quality.
And is that what happens? You get same quality code at cheaper prices? Like Wal-Mart gets cheaper made goods from China that last as long as their more expensive domestic counter-parts? Or how Dell has retained it's customer satisfaction ratings by using Indian call-centers?
I think it's been established that when you outsource for cost, you get back a product that cost you more in the long run.
Again, there are exceptions to this, but that's not what we are talking about.
No, it means that they went cheaper than they ought to.Of course, you get what you payed for. But the scale is different. Just because it is cheaper, it does not imply poor quality.
I think the difference between the parent post and the grandparent post is experience with "outsourced to overseas" code.
Having worked extensively with outsourced code (4+ years) I can tell you without a doubt the vast majority is poor quality crap, more so than "insourced code" by far. But... Everyone produces bad, buggy code at times.
Please do read my comment. If you compare the pay in dollars, of course it is less. But the cost of living, the local economy, etc probably puts them at higher pay or equivalent to what people in US would get.
Really? Because based on the story edw519 gave, it sounds an awful lot like the offshore programmer had just made a silly little mistake while the "client" was the one who was actively incompetent/manipulative. If anything, his choice of details presents offshore programmers in a good light and American programmers in a bad light.
What makes you believe that the author of the parent post mentioned the "offshore" characteristic unnecessarily?
When interpreting the story, isn't it important that readers understand that the programmer who added the call to sleep was far removed from both the help desk and the end user of the software and was also unreachable at the time the call was discovered and thus that the author, who worked at the help desk, had to presume that the call was left in the code mistakenly? It's only later in the story that readers (and the author) learn about the ticket-submitter's unusual preferences for satisfying the end user. And it's only then that another possibility dawns upon readers: that, perhaps, the "offshore programmer" knew more about making the stakeholders look good than initially given credit for.
If the author of the parent post is not allowed to reveal that the programmer was working "offshore," how does the story get told at all?
Would "contractor" or "consultant" or "field tech" been unnecessary? Hardly. Offshore doesn't necessarily mean outsourced, it could just as easily mean a satellite office in Europe.
I've worked with good and bad programmers, both on-shore and off-shore. What seems to determine the quality is the standard you set when hiring. If cheap labor matters more than quality, the result is accordingly (and always ends up costing more in the long run).
I suspect the presumption that off-shore means lower quality comes from past experience working with an off-shore team selected based on their perceived lower cost. I've found that when you set the bar high for off-shore hires, regardless of cost, you end up with high-quality people.
"Competence is inversely proportional to distance." Or perhaps, /perceived/ competence is.
Offshore could imply a number of things. Let's be nice at first and pretend that this means "across the Bay," or maybe on Alcatraz.
My best guess: The offshore person does not have the development culture present in the "mother ship". Best practices are often stuff that you learn in the hallway, from casual conversation, or watching over someone's shoulder. Attachment to the product's quality is probably lessened, too -- distance does this, even in the days of ten-millisecond-scale pings to the other side of the planet -- and it's easier to "go to lunch" on a problem and worry about it later when a floor-full of engineers aren't actively crowding your cubical about a lame checkin.
Hell, I have enough problems getting two /adjacent buildings/ to talk to each other.
Now, add a time-zone difference that further impedes communication. Add siestas, and mismatching holidays, and language barriers. There are more.
Even before we add in a different country's culture, we have severe issues with the average offshore developer's perception of what's important and how to work effectively.
I'm not going to say "Indian / Pakistani / Kiwi programmers can't code their way out of a paper bag", but when you add the stereotypical stuff to all of this (bad management, poor hiring practices, general slap-it-together attitude), it's /bad/, and not unwarranted to mention, even in passing.
Personally, I didn't take it that way at all. My team interacts very often with another team based in India. It has nothing to do with outsourcing, that's another location of our global company. So, to me, the term "offshore" in this context brings to mind problems of location and time difference, but certainly not some image of a cheap outsourcing shop. The parent post could have just as well meant it this way; in fact, it seems likely.
I want a social norm against comments like yours, which say "you're engaging in crime-think pattern #122" instead of "you're wrong". I can't fathom why people fail to realize that such comments kill online discussions. How is one supposed to argue against an accusation of crime-think?
Unnecessarily mentioning a characteristic of an individual is a sign of selfish, biased, and/or malicious thinking. Do you mention "American programmer" whenever recounting their bugs? It appears you have an agenda of promoting negative stereotypes, presumably in your favor. This is lame. In the future, you'll appear more credible if you omit this bigotry from your comments.
I am certain there are thousands of programmers, male, female, gay, straight, onshore and offshore who are much better than you (or me.)