Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

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When I worked with a large team for 2 years, including going over to run a week long training program .. I found just a general disinclination for efficiency, automation or time saving... which cynically wouldn't surprise you when you consider they are running a quantity/body shop.

The craziest conversation I had was trying to convince a guy who came in every morning and ran a script that he could put it on a timer/scheduler/cron/anything to just run the report so it was in his inbox every morning. It's not that he was incapable technically, or did not understand it. It was as if I was asking him to violate a religious oath. "Thou shall not reduce billable hours." His workflow remained - login to desktop, open IDE, open script, modify date, save, execute script, open FTP app, login to server, download file to desktop, open email app, create new email, attach file, email file to onshore. Solid 30min++ of work if you do it right.

Devils advocate: would he get paid any more to be more efficient? Or would he just get more work?

Sure but I can’t imagine that mindset from an onshore FTE dev, can you? Let me do stuff as slowly as possible so my boss doesn’t give me more work. Can be applied to any job.

Refusal to do obvious time saving tasks when instructed to would probably put you on the “does not meet” list next review cycle.

I agree but the reason for the difference is because the “offshore” folks have zero incentive to do so. There’s literally no point beyond keeping their job (and because of the incredibly low bar and compensation, it’s not at all difficult to find another one). They are there to fill seats and hours, not be productive or efficient.

Even if the client complains, the company won't fire the person. They can just move them to one of their many other projects.

And let me follow up by saying the problem with many of these offshoring firm arrangements is that the number of layers in between the person assigning tasks and person doing tasks.

Purposeful inefficiency is harder to sniff out because it’s not a manager-ic relationship. There’s often 2-3 hops inserted into the middle with the work going into a pool for the offshore team lead to manage. The offshore team lead is also consulting company so they have no efficiency incentives either.

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