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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

Outsourced work is generally pretty crappy - maintaining legacy code, writing dull line-of-business apps, etc. There are two kinds of people who do this kind of work. The original, in-house programmers who are well paid to compensate for the crapness of the work. Or outsourced programmers who can’t get any other sort of work so will do it cheaply.

There are plenty of good programmers of Indian ethnicity. But regardless of ethnicity, noone who is any good works in outsourcing.

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I'm currently working with a client that needed more capacity than I could offer, so they hired an offshore team to take on some contracting work. The offshore team has been professional, knowledgeable, and able to produce high-quality, well-tested, well-commented code.

The difference is that they're several times more expensive than the "bottom of the barrel" cheapest coders you can find in their country, while still being a bargain by US standards. Meanwhile I've worked with lowest-bid, US-based contractors in the past, and their work has been reliably bad.

So I'd put forward that the tendency to "cheap out" is the culprit behind poor quality, rather than outsourcing. Practically, the two often go hand-in-hand since the cheapest developers are often abroad, but the two needn't be conflated, and recognizing the nuance opens up the door to working with a high-quality, international pool of talent.

A large majority of all software could be called "dull line-of-business apps" and statistically this is what most software developers do. These jobs are stable, safe, and pay a good salary. It's awfully elitist to frame this as a bad job.

I’m not intending to be elitist here, as I say those jobs are well paid when in-house. But if management is looking to cut costs and no other considerations, then they will go for the cheapest option. Again, this is nothing to do with anyone’s ethnicity.

These jobs aren't well paid, because they're usually nothing but a cost to the business. Well paid software is usually where the software is the product, or directly enables income, so is seen as an investment not just a necessary cost.

The jobs I'm talking about are the median software development job. According to Payscale, these developers make about $70k in the United States. This is over twice the median individual income, so yes they are well paid.

https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Too often on HN we focus on and glamourize the flashy Silicon Valley jobs and we think this is what our industry looks like. It doesn't. The Google, Facebook, and Amazon of the world are the 95th-99th percentile jobs, the very top of our industry in terms of salary and prestige. They do not represent the typical software developer.

There is a difference between working as part of a non-software company's IT department, and working for a company that makes "dull line-of-business apps".

Google maintains a large array of line-of-business apps. You probably have one open in another tab right now. Email, calendar, others. In these cases, the software (or software as a service) is the product, it's just not a direct-to-consumer product.

>You probably have one open in another tab right now. Damn you, google.

I learned early on that there are two roles that the software development team can play in a company: a cost center, or a profit center. Company life is far better when your department is a profit center.

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