Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely

Re:Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most em... by voidlogic on Monday June 12, 2017 @11:57AM (#14538282)

Maybe he does... BUT I used to work for a consulting firm that would sometimes bid against far east outsourced providers when local firms had projects.

This is anecdotal but over and over again, this was the scenario:

  1. local firm collects bids
  2. As courtesy firm tells us we were 2-5x more expensive than winner, winner is in far east.
  3. 1,2,3 years latter firm returns to us asking if we can re-submit but on a more shorter timeline (maybe the project would have been 2-3 engineers for 6 mo)
  4. We come back with a new bid that is 8-12x more, has a bigger team than we would have used orgiinally, less favorable risk analysis..
  5. They paid us to take them on! Often-times we had to throw away almost everything their Bangladesh contractors had been working on for years (fundamentally bad schema, no unit tests, bad bad code)...

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Re:Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most em... by fpoling on Monday June 12, 2017 @12:51PM (#14538735)

I have similar anecdotal evidence from Norway. A bank outsourced running IT systems to a company from India. A year later they hired a local company to fix/redesign things.

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Re:Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most em... by seanp2k2 on Monday June 12, 2017 @02:49PM (#14539883)

Yep, many people who have been in the industry have heard this one before and/or inherited the project-from-hell that has been touched by half a dozen offshore dev firms and basically needs to be scrapped. There's a reason why we aren't all jobless while other countries take all our tech jobs; it's highly-skilled labor, which means that the quality of the end product is directly influenced by the skill of the workers. The time differences and language / cultural barriers (I forget the name for it, but IIRC there was something in Indian culture around ~"my part is done" which is part of why e.g. There's so much trash in the cities -- basically it's not your problem -- please correct me if I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting this) certainly don't help set up these situations for success.

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