>When I worked for Oracle's custom development group >I worked on a large >conversion project that employed about 350 >consultants (150 from Oracle). >They had a number of foreign consultants on the >project. About 1 in 10 had >technical skills that were above mediocre, but they >worked cheap. The code >they produced was a mess and we at Oracle wondered >how much time / money >would have to be spent after the fact to clean up >what the company got on >the cheap. You get what you pay for. I have dealt >with offshore technical >Oracle staff and have found them to be cheap in >cost but very poor overall >in the quality of what they delivered. Companies >will wake up to this >sooner or later. > >Ken
I basically think like you but I don't believe that offshore programmers are *inherently* worse than onshore programmers. I have lately been reviewing European as well as Indian code and in all honesty it was harder to tell which one was worse than the other; the 1 in 10 ratio you mention is more like a general rule. Productivity may be different though, but I hardly think positively of churning out bad code faster. I rather attribute the poor quality of some offshore developments to two factors, and in this order : 1 - It's dreadfully difficult to produce good code when you are far from your end-users. Specs are rarely perfect, and when all of your energy is absorbed by trying to make sense of what you are coding, quality comes a distant second. 2 - Cultural factors make it difficult for somebody raised in Asia and working in Asia to improve on the sometimes shoddy specs provided. Language can be a barrier, pseudo-code is slavishly turned into actual code (hmmm all those nice PL/SQL cursor loops), and if the management asks for something then it must be followed - you cannot make management lose face. I have recently seen a (grossly) grammatically incorrect error message in the specs popping up exactly the same in the code. Regards, Stephane Faroult Oriole -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Stephane Faroult INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
