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by maccard 1053 days ago
> I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you,

I hate this crap. Some of the absolute worst code I've seen in my career was written by US programmers working out of tech hubs, as is some of the best code.

> But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary.

You're assuming that all "genuinely talented developers" are motivated solely by money and will move away from home, friends and family for a "decent salary". A salary of £80k in the UK (ignoring london just for a moment), or $100k USD is reasonable for a senior level engineer in the UK, will give you a very comfortable standard of living, and is less than you'd pay a junior in many parts of the US.

> The Quality Control simply is not there

That's not because of an "outsourcing nation", it's because you paid for a shitty outsourcer. See healthcare.gov [0] for a textbook example. Similarly, I've worked with "outsourcing nations" via EPAM with contractors in Mexico, Belarus, California, Hyderabad Romania and Bangkok, and the quality of code has not been tied to the location, it's been tied to QC at the relationship level.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov

2 comments

>some of the worst

Sure, but code put out by US coders I’ve hired has been consistently better than code that has been outsourced outside of the US.

Obviously, there are “diamonds in the rough” occasionally, but skilled people tend to get snapped up by a recruiter willing to file an immigration form for them very quickly.

We were all that crappy developer at some point…
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that someone who has 5+ years professional experience writing C++ shouldn't be writing `auto buf = new std::vector<int>()` to avoid heap allocations.