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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Trilogy also created a great deal of crap. They came to my engineering school in the late 1990s and handed our student society $500 just to give us a free lunch.

Many of my friends went to work in Texas for them, only to escape a while later after toiling away on projects for fortune 500 companies which were massively overbilled. Their formula was: hire new grads, pay them well and take them to parties, and soak big corps with dot com projects they neither needed nor understood.

The article is correct in pointing out that many Trilogy grads went on to do great things. But this was not Trilogy’s doing. It was because these people are smart and would have succeeded anyhow.

As for the new strategy of paying $15/hr for sweatshop C++ coders... I can only imagine the quality of that code. You get what you pay for.

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Just a note on wage:

$15/hr for C++ coders will get you a highly-talented coder from poor parts of the World who may rival your above-average C++ coder in developed countries.

$15/hr is still a very good wage in poor countries.

You probably never tried working with remote parties.

It's not that easy and you can bet that some hours are just doubled as well.

Adding to that: 15/hr is a decent wage in many countries, but you'll be paying at least 30 due to overhead and a middleman which will be the one really profiting.

And the middleman might bait and switch you on a 7/hr junior coder.

For $15/hr, you do not get top quality C++ developers from any corner of the world. I know - I've worked for companies that have tried. You tend to end up with a spaghetti code base utilizing crappy open source or shareware libraries that a cousin produced. Then, you try and scale, and need to bring people that actually know what they're doing.

2 years in at current job, where most of the work was done by offshore devs, company now has a team of onshore developers to fix all of the performance and stability problems.

I don’t agree with the false equivalency of open source or shareware meaning a lib is crap.

There is a lot of variance in $15/hr offshore developers. For example, you can buy a shirt for $10 in various places in the world, some of them will be total crap and some of them will be exquisitely tailored. The selection becomes the challenge and just because someone failed doesn’t mean someone else did.

And this company seems to have cracked the system for finding, training and managing those people. I suspect many poor offshoring examples fail because those processes were poor - and expensive.

$15/hr now . . . and $150/hr to fix it later.

No, dude, you're wrong. 15 an hour doesn't get you a skilled and experienced freelancer / contractor anywhere in the world. Good quality costs. Everywhere. It is cheaper than in the States, but not that much. If you're looking to hire someone good, expect to pay like 40 an hour, at least.

No way. I recently put together an off-shore dev team. We interviewed folks in Mexico, Poland, the Philippines, China, and India. The quality differed and the price differed, but not by huge amounts. No one charged $15/hr for a decent developer. $30-50/hr was the norm.

This comes up every time there's a talk about remote work. Why would a highly-talented coder accept this wage instead of looking for some other remote options?

I recall a friend back in the late `90's commenting negatively about Trilogy's recruitment activities. I have no doubt their workplace culture left a mark on Austin.

A skid mark.

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