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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Outsourcing to save money is a straw man.

There are countless stories of large scale failures involving non-consultants as well as very well paid consultants.

Software is hard and most developers aren't very good. As the complexity of software increases, the number of developers and teams that can manage it becomes vanishingly small; to a point where no amount of money can help.

The best chance for a project like this to succeed is to break it down and migrate over the course of years (which might not always be possible).

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I witnessed the outsourcing of 3000 IT in a large company in the mid 2000. The contract was great for the outsourcing company and signed off by a bunch of bozos who had no idea how IT runs.

The idea was to have tickets for everything and "golden" ones vichy cost a fortune but are super high priority.

IT was mad at being outsourced and played the game. "super important" thing coming? Ticket. "just a cable, man"? Ticket.

What the idiots in management discovered, is how THEIR company actually works. How important the human relationship is.

One of my colleagues in IT had the pleasure to tell a board member who came to be serviced right oway to fuck off (his words) and to open a ticket, if he knows what this is Then he picked up the phone as someone was calling and turned away.

> IT was mad at being outsourced and played the game.

This is called "work to rule", and anybody who doesn't know the risk and repercussions of such an event happening, should not be in business management in the XXI century. Unfortunately, a lot of people try to pretend that trade unions never existed, and in so doing they lose an excellent occasion to learn how workers actually think and act.

“One of my colleagues in IT had the pleasure to tell a board member who came to be serviced right oway to fuck off (his words) and to open a ticket, if he knows what this is Then he picked up the phone as someone was calling and turned away.”

This is great. Usually the board member would get preferential treatment and never experience how things really are.

Outsourcing to save money is a straw man.

There are countless stories of large scale failures involving non-consultants as well as very well paid consultants.

I wouldn't call it a straw man. There are more complex mechanics in outsourcing situations. Often outsourcing is not complete. They still keep a handful of inside workers supervising consultants. And often those inside workers are woefully incompetent, ruining the work of "well paid consultants". That happens because the outsourcing only saves those with good connections: the idiot relative of someone with power.

I've also heard many managers in the consulting firms telling us to never go out of our way to fix problems. If the customers want it fixed, they must pay more hours. Except of course when the customers get very upset and demand unpaid overtime to reach some arbitrary deadline.

On the "complex mechanics in outsourcing situations", this HN thread is my touchstone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831784

Every time someone I work with casually raises the possibility of outsourcing, I say I'm open to the idea. Then I share that link and ask them to review it before we meet to discuss our options.

Heh, I recognize each and every situation mentioned and could add a handful more.

> There are countless stories of large scale failures involving non-consultants as well as very well paid consultants.

this reminds me of https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_law...

This is accurate. I have unfortunately been involved in a situation very similar to the one the article describes. Release is signed off on, we go live and millions of records are suddenly corrupted affecting thousands of people and essentially shutting down an industry for a while. Engineers are only as good as the QA department and the QA department is only as good as the time and resources they are provided. This is compounded when a company has to deliver in order to get paid so they eventually reach a point; where hamstrung by a bad original contract, they are under massive pressure to deploy and just pull the trigger.

Software is very hard, many engineers are not sufficiently experienced at what they are doing and its hard even for those that are. Further complicating this is a cost issue, quite often large scale applications utilize resources that cost a lot of money on the production side and so to save money, utilize a considerably smaller data and infrastructure set and on the testing and development side. Queries are optimized against this smaller data set. The application goes live and suddenly an application tested against a cherry picked data set of x records is trying to handle 10,000 times the data. Then bad things happen.

> There are countless stories of large scale failures involving non-consultants as well as very well paid consultants.

Sure but there are undoubtedly more failures involving cost leaders doing the same job as highly paid consultants. It is foolish to suggest otherwise or that there isn't a correlation. Your diminishing returns example might be true, but also doesn't discount the original statement.

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