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Comment by ahoka | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by outsourced?

He probably means work was sent offshore to offices with cheaper labor that's less skilled or less vested into delivering quality work. Though there's no proof of that yet, people just like to throw the blame on offshoring whoever $BIG_CORP fucks up, as if all programmers in the US are John Carmack and they can never cause catastrophic fuckups with their code or processes.

Not everyone in the US might be Carmack, but it's ridiculously nearsighted to assert that cultural differences don't play into people desire and ability to Do It Right.

It's not cultural differences that make the difference in output quality, it's pay and quality standards of the output set by the team/management, which is also mostly a function of pay, since underpaid and unhappy developers tend not to care at all beyond doing the bare minimum to not getting fired (#notmyjob, laying flat movement, etc).

You think everyone writing code in the US would give two shits about the quality of their output if they see the CEO pocketing another private jet while they can barley make big-city rent?

Hell, even well paid devs at top companies in the US can be careless and lazy if their company doesn't care about quality. Have you seen some of the vulnerabilities and bugs that make it into the Android source code and on Pixel devices? And guess what, that code was written by well paid developers in the US, hired at Google leetcode standards, yet would give far-east sweatshops a run for their money in terms of carelessness. It's what you get when you have a high barrier of entry but a low barrier of output quality where devs just care about "rest and vest".

I was talking about outsourcing (and not necessarily offshoring). Too many companies like CrowdStrike are run by managers who think that management, sales, and marketing are the important activities. Software development is just an unpleasant expense that needs to be minimized. Hence: outsourcing.

That said, I have had some experience with classic offshoring. Cultural differences make a huge difference!

My experience with "typical" programmers from India, China, et al is that they do exactly what they are told. Their boss makes the design decisions down to the last detail, and the "programmers" are little more than typists. I specifically remember one sweatshop where the boss looped continually among the desks, giving each person very specific instructions of what they were to do next. The individual programmers implemented his instructions literally, with zero thought and zero knowledge of the big picture.

Even if the boss was good enough to actually keep the big picture of a dozen simultaneous activities in his head, his non-thinking minions certainly made mistakes. I have no idea how this all got integrated and tested, and I probably don't want to know.

>That said, I have had some experience with classic offshoring. Cultural differences make a huge difference!

Sure but there's no proof yet that was the case here. That's just masive speculations based on anecdotes on your side. There's plenty of offshore devs that can run rings around western devs.

Staff trained at outsourcers have a different type of focus. My experience is more operational, and usually the training for those guys is about restoration to hit SLA, period. Makes root cause harder to ID sometimes.

It doesn’t mean ‘Murica better, just that the origin story of staff matter, especially if you don’t have good processes around things like rca.

Western slacker movements never came close to deadma or the dedicated indifference in the face of samsara. You seem to have a lot of experience with the former and little of the latter two, but what do I know.

Every stereotype exists for a reason.

Offshoring and outsourcing is very different. It would be also very hard to talk about offshoring at a company claiming to provider services in 170 countries.

It's probably just the common US-centric bias that external development teams, particularly those overseas, may deliver subpar software quality. This notion is often veiled under seemingly intellectual critiques to avoid overt xenophobic rhetoric like "They're taking our jobs!".

Alternatively, there might be a general assumption that lower development costs equate to inferior quality, which is a flawed yet prevalent human bias.

“You get what you pay for” is still a reasonable metric, even if it is more a relative scale than an absolute one.

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