| 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. |
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.