Please Outsource Your Programming

By ian

That’s right. Every single interactive agency should outsource programming. Here’s a quick process to follow:

1. First go to somebody who knows what they’re doing and make an insultingly low demand for pricing.
2. Leave meeting indignantly and call the expert a hack.
3. Have your website built by the lowest bidder in Romania or India.
4. Watch you project go way over budget and miss every deadline.
5. Enjoy the glory of your broken, incomplete site for a few months.
6. Come to me and pay me 3 times my original price to dig you out of the hole you just made.

Ask just about anybody, this is the most common course of events that comes from outsourcing work to shady off-shore companies. I’m currently neck deep in bad code that saved somebody a few bucks 3 years ago and is now on the verge of crippling a company. Any change requires complete rebuilds and major changes that often result in even more unstable code.

Unless you have the cash to pay somebody like me a bunch of money, outsourcing is a stupid plan. In reality, I almost never take on a project that was made in India or Romania, and if I do, I charge double. That’s not to say that their aren’t some damn good developers in those countries. However, it’s safe to say that shady outsourcing companies aren’t exactly hiring the top people in the field.