Originally Posted by
BDAttitude
How true ... although my most recent experience with this matter is that it is no longer a financial thing. They have become expensive there in the recent years as well. IMHO it is more a cultural thing. Management enjoys the servility lack of resistance to bad decision and being pampered and being hommaged when on site there. Ain't no grey bearded pig headed wester engineers over there.
Yup, but you're correct that it's not just financial, a large part of this is lack of availability of suitably qualified software engineers . . . many people 'think' they can 'write code', very, very few can actually do it (in actuality) and even fewer work in environments which can create the required quality repeatably . . . so you cannot just go out and buy a high quality capable team, at all . . . the bean counters 'think' that 'anybody' can do software and so why pay more than 1/10th of that which is actually necessary . . . and boom . . .
If I had $0.01 for every time I've seen junk software, created offshore, which is killing the business that paid for it (and paid plenty for it, the unit cost may be $9/hr, but when you end up needing 10x the staff to meet the deadlines . . . - this is the offshore business model - sell people, not quality) I would be significantly wealthy.
Fundamentally people do not value software, it is very difficult for the largely ignorant layman (anybody outside of the 1% of the software industry that does high quality work) to understand why high quality software costs so much.
If I were the FDA I'd be pulling every single piece of software development evidence and documentation and reviewing it to see if any of it complies with the required processes . . . I'd bet good money that it doesn't . . .
How many times have I seen that ? - more times than I care to think about.