[shakedown]

A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site.

The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code.

If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.

[bad_user]

Hi, I also live in Romania.

> relatively big web company in Romania

Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location?

For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;)

Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations.

Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work?

And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality?

This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate.

BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.

[shakedown]

To clarify, by 'big' i meant not just in size, but in number of highish profile clients.

Towards the end of me being there, they added a more senior developer/manager to the Romanian team -- his code was much better (i.e. not dreamweaver generated HTML/CSS) and was easier to communicate with, but still the code quality from the others on the team was very unmaintainable.

I apologize if it seemed as if I was generalizing the entire country of Romania's programming abilities -- definitely not what I intended. If all the developers were as good as the senior developer added on later, I'm sure it would have went much better.

My main point remains the same though, and I think is one that we can both agree on - that hiring inexpensive labor with only focusing on the front end user experience, without any respect or idea of how well the back end is being constructed is a bad idea. I'm sure outsourcing can work, but only with careful attention to the behind the scenes backend code quality, to ensure the project is not being held together by duct tape.

[gvb]

"...mess with tons of copying and pasting."

I call this "ransom note programming." http://images.google.com/images?q=ransom+note Nasty stuff, not even enough pride in their work to run an autoindent program on it.

[zaidf]

Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project.

I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.