this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
837 points (97.5% liked)
memes
10670 readers
2774 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've been on both sides of the contracting game. While I certainly have broad skills and a speedy comprehension, I've never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
I also can't help notice the deplorable state of documentation, at least in my corner of the O&G accounting software field. So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years. I get to play Inspector Gadget as I parse through miles of spagetti code, trying to run down why some obscure command has decided to produce a vague error.
Did the contractors know more about some niche javascript package than I did when the project started? Absolutely. Do the contractors care that I'm going to be the one shoring up this antiquated, sloppily implemented code injection until we retire the system? They do not. Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years? Yes.
You're not wrong. This falls on the managers heads as much as it falls anywhere.
I'm not blaming contractors for being contractors. A lot of these folks are straight out of college and new to their respective fields. It isn't there fault that Deloitte or Accenture or whomever spent six weeks teaching them to make power point presentations rather than giving them a proper six month seasoning in proper standard business practices. Even less so when the folks running my own company never bothered to learn how to do things properly themselves and don't appear to know who to ask.
But the consequences of the practice of hiring a flood of pricey contractors to do implementation and then leaving the maintenance to a bare-bones staff is misery for everyone involved.
Management doesn't know shit for shit about coding. The current team doesn't get to vet and approve the code that's released (as if we've got the time given our existing maintenance roles). They only get to handle the final product that's delivered. That is a central problem with the business model. Trust is invested in contractors that isn't earned or deserved. Meanwhile, the expectations of functionality are transferred to the skeleton crew staff once they leave.
I think you can't get to an environment of effective communication and consistent code dev/review standards if half your workforce evaporates at the end of the contract period. As it stands, we've got managers stacked six roles high while the actual applications have maybe 1-1.5 employees assigned to each. So who knows the systems well enough to review the other guy's code?
Having a mentor-mentee relationship on each app would be much preferable to a contractor-for-a-year/single-support-specialist-for-a-lifetime situation we're dealing with now.
I've had three major jobs in my last fifteen years, and these guys are the least worst. Also, the pay doesn't suck.