Outsourcing creates all sorts of new project planning and communication challenges that most companies are not accustomed to managing. Add in significant timezone offsets, language and cultural barriers, lower communication fidelity and often a tinge of resentment and you've got a recipe for low quality if the project is completed at all.

I don't think this has to be American to be true.

I think, for many of us, our only experience with offshore code is with the bottom dollar coding sweatshops, which are universally shitty.

I have no idea what % of offshore code work that represents compared to just a regular consulting firm that happens to be located overseas, or a branch office of a company located in another country.

I speak primarily from experience.

As an "offshore developer", I have worked on multiple US projects with low quality code written by US developers.

Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?

Not at all denying the existence of low quality programmers in the US, but generally it seems like there is a focus on quality that does not exist for the majority of offshore developers, just about churning out code as fast as possible.

I feel like I miss a part the meaning of "offshore" here, and I suspect it's more cultural than a linguistic problem. I mean, technically, German or Japanese developers working for US companies are "offshore" too, but I don't believe you're accusing them of "churning code without regard to code quality"?

Oh, and also, both the previous paragraph and your comments in the thread are (edited:)nationalist[1]. Not that it's not fun to use stereotypes and a few anecdotes to form an opinion, so don't mind me, just noting.

[1] Not sure if it's the correct word, I mean discrimination by ethnicity and nationality.

It is not, shockingly, racism does need to involve race.

Nor do I think my nation is the greatest, and all the others suck. So I don't think it counts as nationalism.

Yeah, sorry, I'm not actually well versed in these matters (of discrimination, never needed to be), I couldn't find the correct word.

Anyway, you do attribute certain characteristics to members of whole nations without any kind of proof (beyond what "everybody [in the field] knows"). I believe you shouldn't, and that it doesn't matter if the characteristics are positive or negative.

In reality, there are both good and bad programmers everywhere. That you ended up working with the bad - or maybe ill-incentivized due to some circumstances - programmers from here or there does not mean that there are no good programmers there or businesses that care for quality. It just means you didn't meet them.

> Yeah, sorry, I'm not actually well versed in these matters ...

Perhaps you should not be accusing others then if you aren't even certain what you're accusing them of.

> Anyway, you do attribute certain characteristics to members of whole nations without any kind of proof

Homogeneous groups of people often share similar attributes, I don't see what is incorrect or wrong about that.

You are correct though, I do not have proof, but it is something that I hear from and discuss with colleagues, as well as have observed myself.

> Perhaps you should not be accusing others

I said I'm sorry, and I edited the comment. This is, however, a detail - that you are unjustly discriminating, only on a basis other than race, I stand by.

> Homogeneous groups of people

Assuming homogeneity of any group of people is almost certainly wrong.

Why don't you substitute "black" or "Hispanic" or "Jewish" for "offshore" in your arguments and see what happens? Would you be able to leisurely write that, in your opinion, "black programmers are sloppy and only churn code as quickly as possible"?

Does this focus exist for the majority of US developers or is it about churning out code as fast as possible?

You can also hire the better part of offshore developers if you'll pay just a bit closer to US rates. I saw the situation "$15/h developer failed everything, help us $35/h developer!" quite a lot in Russian-speaking freelance communities.

this is not true. perhaps just bad luck. i've worked with developers in other countries that are at least as good as any american developers i've worked with.

> Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?

Yes. It usually is.

You could quite simply expand this to The vast majority of code is of very low quality

Are you including Canada in "offshore"? Europe?

That is implied, from the comment you replied to. You may need to rephrase.

The majority of offshore developers I have worked with have been from South America, India, and Eastern Europe.

Anecdotes are not data.

To be honest I thought it was common knowledge, but I assume there exists no such study of code quality between countries.