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by virtuabhi 3212 days ago
Haha. The references to Indian developers were funny. But this joke works even if you replace Indians by other developers in US. Remember healthcare.gov fiasco?
2 comments

It doesn't really. That job was poorly done AND expensive.
The same is said about Indian outsourcing (expensive in the long run), right?

I think many people miss the fact that boring jobs with low wages will not attract talented programmers. Same holds true when you outsource jobs. Send interesting jobs and pay for good Indian programmers for quality results.

healthcare.gov was a clusterfuck not because it was complicated (a typical data integration task with a query layer) but because of the quality of programmers and managers working on it. Later after political and international embarrassment, a crack team of exceptional programmers was assembled (on leave from major tech companies) to fix that website.

But communication overhead and a wage that attracts talented programmers in India, will make development there just as costly as if you do it locally. So your manager outsources to cheap Indian shops, and then always gets frustrated with the quality.
I've met the people who were brought in to fix healthcare.gov after the storm of bad. They have some interesting war stories.