this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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[–] SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de -4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.

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.

Bring in contractors for a codebase 10+ years old? Yeah, the current team is not working properly from management perspective. So either the manager doesn't understand what they do, or the team is incapable of communicating to management what they do, or the team is shit.

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

So management and current team let in garbage code, that means there is no working review process. If the team didn't establish a review process they don't know how to work with modern methods, if management prevented it they are just incompetent.

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?

I don't think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything. And contractors can't magically fix your broken org.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.

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.

So management and current team let in garbage code

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 don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything.

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.

[–] SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

Why are you still there?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

I've had three major jobs in my last fifteen years, and these guys are the least worst. Also, the pay doesn't suck.