Comment by TheRevoltingX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRevoltingX | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Heh, I feel bad for any products you spearhead. Your definition of good quality is poor.

I am a professional Android developer. Something like this wouldn't take more than a day. It's a piece of cake.

What I suspect happened here is that the project was outsourced. These silly people tried to save money by hiring a foreigner to talk to another foreigner developer and get the app developed. To work on and a deliver a product these foreigners know nothing about.

A little while ago I had a little financial situation and was forced to take some cheap freelance projects. I was quickly picked up by a foreign recruiter and I took a couple of jobs really cheap. At the rate the Indian developers would charge.

I had to work on an app that was commissioned by CAT. The app was a paving calculator that was to be used by their employees.

This was seriously some of the worse source code I have ever seen.

I took my own personal time to rewrite the project. I also redid all the calculations and found various mistakes everywhere. I asked them to send me all the docs and had to redo everything from the ground up because these people were plain incompetent.

For about a couple weeks work I charged $300 dollars. I didn't care about the money, I just didn't want any of our road workers using a shitty and potentially dangerous application.

Correct results are absolutely critical in any non-trivial application. Acceptance of incorrect results just shows how low the quality grade is.

FYI, I'm looking at the source, and it's pretty basic. Nothing a high school student couldn't write.

It looks like the company that made this was: http://pixelbitcreative.com/ also: http://erg.com/

Lol, they don't even have a real site yet they specialize in Web Development. What a joke.

Get off your high horse. Being American doesn't automatically make your code better. As a "foreigner", I recently had to deal indirectly with American developers (to integrate our product with theirs at the request of the client). They charge 100K USD for something that only needs 2 man days, didn't code to the specifications (set by themselves), and took forever to fix any problem on their end.

Bad developers exist everywhere.

Erm, what I mean is that foreigner as in not from the country the project is originating from.

To you, the American were foreigners which further enforces my point that working with foreigners in an issue.

I'm not saying that because I'm American my code is better. I'm saying that because I'm local and I care more I produce better quality.

BTW, in my story some of the most incompetent people were indeed American. The other developer did the best he could, and the recruiter too. The process was broken from the beginning. They wrote really bad documentation, and incorrect formulas. The source was bad, but it took much longer to get all the formulas properly documented and figured out.

Sorry, I missed the point about "caring more as a local". I concur with that.

I think your rant against foreign developers is completely out of place here.

There's no evidence to suggest that this application was off-shored, unless you've found something to the contrary. Quite clearly, the two companies you cite are located in Massachusetts and Virginia and both companies are staffed by developers in the US.

http://www.erg.com/careers/index.asp http://mkeefe.com/

My original point is that the process of bidding and having people who don't care about a project spear head it.

I suspected it was offshored because I smelled the rot, but looks like I was wrong. It was just the victim of the broken process.

That's what my rant is really about, not necessarily against foreigners. It's just that the process produces broken/poor software.

I'm not saying that it's true for every company, but it was true for CAT.

Oh my god, a good samaritan! I call that a slave... working in the US 'for about a couple weeks' and charge 300$. It makes out to... 3$ per hour? The art of underselling.

You should have contacted CAT directly and upsell them exposing their blatant mistake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com