Re: World's Cheapest Consultants

Steve,

No, I am not taking this personally and if this came
through as a cheap shot, please rest assured that it
was not meant to be one.  I have great respect for
your contributions to this list, and as someone who
has quite obviously traveled these paths before me. I
did not truncate your statement to manipulate it, only
as an indication of what I was objecting to. I am sick
and tired of people saying "what did you expect from a
25.00 $ an hour
programmer, in <insert a place of your choice> ?".

I guess that my question is :
"Do you think that things will be substantially
different in the "quality and deliverables"
department, if the coder in China or wherever were
paid 250$ an hour and given no specs ?"

There has never been a correlation demonstrated in the
software between the per-diem cost of labour and
quality of work. However there is a lot of
documentation out there that has studied and proven
that if you do not freeze development specifications (
or manage user expectations, or allow scope creep )
that quality of the produced work will suffer. That
has nothing to do with the fact that the programmer in
China is paid only 25.00$ an hour.

I would have quite agreed with what you said if your
statement was " I do not care what you pay the guy, if
you give him bad specs you will get crappy code,
wherever he is".

There is no reason why bad analysis will produce good
code, whatever you pay the "coder", wherever he is
globally located.

Narayanan R Pillai
Senior Technical Architect
American Medical & Life Insurance


> Narayanan:
>
> This is a cheap shot...I hope you aren't taking this
personally.  I respect  your opinion.  In fact, I
agree with many of the statements that you made in
this thread.
>
> You took my statement out of context.  It was
originally written as:
>
> <quote
> The old adage "you get what you pay for" is what
comes to mind.  And if you are paying a "coder" in
India, Russia, China, or wherever only $ 25.00 per
> hour or less to produce the work, you are probably
going to get crap code "if you don't have extremely
detail specifications and deliverables documented and
agreed upon in contractual form, with retainage or
penalties to guarantee that they stay on track.
> /quote>
>
> It is so convenient for you to manipulate _my_ words
and make them say what _you_ want them to say.
>
> I stand by my statement.
>
> Steve



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