Developer Rant

[SharkBait]

The company I work for recently had outsourced a small project to a web design company and I am disappointed in the service that they performed. Definitely not up to my standards.

 

The project was an online application where a customer would fill out various information about their company and then the information would be submitted via email to someone at my company.

 

Well after they said the project was complete I decided to test it out and I found a few things that irked me.

 

1) You can submit an empty form which is what we didn't want

2) The 'required' checkbox can be left unchecked when submitting the form

3) There is no error handling so if mail() was to fail, no one would be informed.

 

</rant>

 

Has anyone else had experiences like this where they hired an outside company to do a project for them, was informed it was complete and only to find out it was half-ass completed?

 

[GingerRobot]

I'm quite disappointed. I came here expecting a much bigger rant than that!

 

I hope you've not paid them for their crappy job.

[SharkBait]

Yea it wasn't that big of a rant, but I am disappointed that we paid someone to do such a lazy job.  I am assuming they paid them because my accounting department has come to me to fix the script that they paid hourly to have created for them because i was busy on another project.

 

 

[jcombs_31]

I don't understand why your company would outsource something as simple as a form. Seems like it could be created in house in a very short amount of time.  Of course I know nothing about your company, but if they have you and you know how to do it then outsourcing doesn't make sense at all.

[ober]

Umm... didn't you have a round of testing before the other company said they were done with it?  I find it hard to believe that it would go down like this:

 

"Here's the specs"

"It's done!"

"okedoke, thanks, here's your cash"

 

If this stuff wasn't caught during User Acceptance Testing, then shame on your company as well as the company that did the work.

[cmgmyr]

How come you didn't make the form? It seems simple enough to do...

 

I had one experience with an outsource company the I hired...I had this one project that was really just a pain in the ass and I didn't feel like working on it anymore, plus didn't have the time so I decided to look for someone to finish it. So I put an ad up through guru.com and found a company that sounded half way decent. In the project description I clearly put "This needs to be done within 1-2 weeks at the most...please do not bid if you can not complete this within that time frame" Simple right? Well after I got half the money in escrow (that day) I sent him more detailed information and told him to let me know it he needed anything else. After a week went by I finally heard back from him and he was asking simple/dumb questions, I answered those so he could move one. 2 weeks went by, 3 weeks went by...on the 5th week of bearly hearing from him my client despirately needed this project done. So I had to stay up all night (after working a regular 9 hour day) to finish this stupid project. Needless to say he didn't get paid.

 

moral of the story: just do it yourself, it's a lot easier, and NEVER pay anyone until you have a finished product that works like what was agreed to in the initial contract.

[Liquid Fire]

Yea, i have.  I work for a tour company that does all the business on the internet.  I work an in house developer but they also outsource some projects and man, some of them are bad.  We out source a project to a company for a somewhat community site were you could login in, post pictures/comment/etc.. about spring break stuff.  it took them 5-6 month and cost 10's of thousands of dollars and i ended up spending 3 weeks creating a very similar site with all functionality(well in fact more) and we use that instead of the outsourced code.  The only thing that they hove over my site is it is a little bit more flashy but the UI sucks anyways.  I mean it took me a 1/7 of the time and cost them about 1600 dollars(i only spent about 2 weeks of work on the site over the 3 week spand) to replace their crap.  This is also a company that does a lot of business for big companies.  Another thing this same company did what create a 3 tier drop down list(as drop1 determines drop2 options and so on).  They decided to do it in flash which meant when we wanted to change we could not, I ended up design the same thing use ajax so now it change when our data changes.

 

I just don't know how some companies can stay is business. 

[akitchin]

I just don't know how some companies can stay is business. 

 

i imagine because many companies are too lazy or stupid to make informed, smart decisions.  they'll often either go for the bottom-dollar bid, or take the first one that comes along that impresses them with sales techniques.  i'm also quite cynical, keep that as a grain of salt.

 

@cmgmyr: have you ever had a good experience with guru.com?  some of those projects i wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole, and i'm guessing it's the same from a project poster's point of view.

 

after all the disappointments online, i've become very about who i work with and more importantly, who i work FOR.  it'd be nice if somewhere we could develop a community of people we trust working with (where money is concerned, because beggars can't be choosers).  wait a minute..

[ober]

I've considered doing that... basically creating a site where you only become available to take projects when you've proven yourself to a set of peers.  I can think of a handful of people I'd take from here and then once you pass the peer approval, you'd also get rated by the customer.  People with less than 95% approval get booted.

 

Does anyone want to start a little venture with me?

[SharkBait]

I really haven't had time to do this form for them and I am the only one in the company that has the knowledge do to this and the account department wanted it right away so they got the approval to have it outsourced while I worked on something that was more important.

 

Now that I have time, I'm looking over the code and cleaning it up and adding in validation to it as well. I mean how many times does someone need to write out all of the states/provinces in North America? I just created an array and loop through it each time I need to reference them in a drop down

 

All the accounting department had to do was wait a couple more days and I would of had time to create their online form (credit application) and it would be more functional than the one they outsourced. Oh well I guess if my CEO can have 2 bentley's, we can afford to outsource for some half-ass work

 

 

[akitchin]

i wouldn't mind being part of a project like that, provided the client demand was there.  invite-only might work well, where not just any client can walk in off the interstreet and demand that someone make them a facebook clone for $400.

 

the reason i stipulate client demand is because a developer probably doesn't want to go through the "proving" process only to find out that there's no work.  i guess that's more of a marketing issue though.  word of mouth would certainly go a long way.

[cmgmyr]

@akitchin: I have 2 accounts through guru, one for a pro and one for an employer. Besides that one story I shared I've done pretty well on guru as an employer (I usually get flash stuff done through there), as a pro I've done very well. It's pretty much how I got my start. There has been a few not so good projects that have come my way, but I got through them. I haven't spent a lot of time on there recently because my really good clients want more of me now and I no longer need to look for projects or time fillers. Right now I have a ranking of 123 in the Website Design / Website Marketing category. But this used to be under 100 less then 6 months ago when I was on there alot. I would recommend guru to people who are starting out that need to get stuff in their portfolio fast. Plus you can actually get paid decently on there as opposed to scriptlance.com type places where people only want to pay $150 for myspace. Plus on that site you need to pay to bid if you get the project or not...not cool.

 

@ober: I'd be up for something like that

[ober]

But how do you invite clients unless we start with a client-base?  Maybe we set a minimum budget of $1000 per project.  That would weed out the losers for the most part.

[akitchin]

@ober:  shall we start a new topic in Misc to discuss this idea?  i really think it's something worth a thorough discussion.

 

@cmgmyr:  that's what i figure guru.com is best for - finding the good clients (or developers, from the other end) through the first projects, and working with them outside of guru afterward.  i've been on for a while as a basic member, and refuse to pay for a pro membership until i see proof-of-concept (ie. get a project).  of course, having a portfolio online somewhere would help.

[ober]

Let me do one better.... give me a few minutes to set something up.