[onewhippedpuppy]

Originally Posted by legion

In some cases, that is true. In some cases, it is an illusion.

My company can get two programmers in India for the price of me. I can tell you from experience that when I get code back from India, it takes me twice as long to rewrite it because it generally doesn't follow standards, let alone work. So if it would have taken me 1X time to do it, it takes a guy offshore twice as long to do the same thing, then me twice as long to bring it up to standards and make it work. That essentially works out to 0.5(2X) + 2X. So it ended up costing 3 times as much and taking four times as long to send the code offshore.

I've honestly just taken to throwing away whatever code I get from offshore and just writing it from scratch as it saves me time over trying to debug non-standard spaghetti code. 0.5(2X) + 1X. I'm saving the company money by it only taking three times as long and costing twice as much in labor.

Funny, that sounds exactly like our experience with an Indian engineering contractor. It gives our management a warm fuzzy because the rates are low, but when they have to do the same job 3-4 times because they keep getting it wrong....... Not to mention that in order for them to actually do anything, we have to spend so much time outlining the task that it would be quicker to just do it ourselves. Fortunately our management is starting to catch on.