Skip to main content

Michael Responds to Kevin PRICE-QUALUTY

(a side note: a true sign that blogs are taking over instead of using forums as a means of expression and communication)

Kevin Ragsdale posted a few days ago about how he was concerned that FoxPro advisor was showing FoxPro programmers being available for $12/hr and how he thought that quality was going to be cut.

Now, Michael Kopjan jumps in to give the other side of the story: $12/hr IS a very good rate in some areas of the world.

My own thoughts on this are documented in the Fox Show #15 - but Michael, Kevin is right on this count - you DO get what you pay for - and the thing American and European developers have to be aware of is that while their cost of living is high up there and thus what they have to pay for is likely huge compared to what other countries pay for the same goods, with the same quality.

But the quality bar changes drastically with cost. Would you say that all $5 steaks are going to be the same quality as, say , as $10 steaks? In most cases, no, but if you can find it, it's certainly possible. This is something I was reminded of on one of the GrapeRadio shows - while cost should not be the ONLY factor of judging quality, it should be used as a yardstick to make a decision process easier. Might you find a $10/hr programmer who produces amazing work? Absolutely (hence the idea that programmers get burned out over time and thus, the best companies hire the young ones, burn them out and then turn them over to the second best companies, and so on). But in the process of finding that programmer with that same $10, you may go through 30 programmers (from every country) who fail to make the grade.

I've used both off-shore and local resources for FoxPro development - either way, they ALL have to be managed in order to get quality out of them. The difference? One you can do in person - the other via email.

Just as you can't expect to bring in a new developer and have them "get" all of the tools you use (see my post here), you have to be prepared to do more stringent code reviews and more.

Michael's advice to Kevin is classic - "why aren't you hiring these people?"

PRICE-QUALUTY

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .
4 comments
Read more

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...
8 comments
Read more