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Comment by raincom | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. Usually, they have a couple of guys who are really good in that team, along with lots of juniors who are there for billable hours.

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That's pretty much the model amongs most vendors. Just so recently we were implementing a new system. Our account is small,so obviously we don't get the level of people some big corp would do. A junior,yet capable, consultant was working on the majority of the project. However as soon as we started having some more serious technical issues, it was like 'emm, I'm not sure'. Then we end up on a conference call, 8 people in total. Bloody hell,I thought I'll pull all my hair at the end of the call. Absolutely no value or capabilities to explain how we get out of this situation. Eventually, after our CEO suggested we drop this thing all together, we did get some senior person involved. Honestly, if I'd ever had a business,I'd hire on spot.The ability to talk to different business people in a way they could understand, technical knowledge and business acumen was fantastic. Shame all companies only have one or two of these people...

They demo the skilled people and once they have the account they turn it over to the juniors...

But that probably works in most cases/places anyway.

Yeah, but so does every US-based consulting outfit I've ever seen... IBM, Oracle, Accenture. The knowledgable Senior Dev answering your questions during the bid goes away _quickly_ once you sign. They're off to convince the next sucker...

That's why you write the contract to the outsourcing company so that you lock in those experienced people for an extended period of time -- like years.

But then the price mysteriously increases to the point where you might as well have hired them on-shore and you're not saving any money.

So, do you want to save money by offshoring everything, or do you want to get good people to actually do the real work that needs to be done?

Accenture wont sign that. And those more experienced people might not like to work on your project for years and there is nothing you can do to stop them from leaving.

They got where they are by doing what they are doing. Spending years on your project is something else.

I'll bite. Plenty of reasons to do that, esp. on small to mid size gigs. Write the spec well, get thorough, detailed planning done by seniors, and then throw the day-laborer-coders at it as needed. Rope in a senior to look at it / poke / guide things every once in a while, and let it go.

I don't need to drag the building architects, master masons or master carpenters to help frame every wall of the house; ditto for code.

Sounds exactly like law firms.

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