A wrong approach to outsourcing and how corruption can earn a good place in business. Part #1

The last company i worked on, had a very wrong approach to outsourcing, apparently someone thought a good idea to send the project leaders on site, sometimes at the other side of the globe, in different time zones, while the developers and testers remained on our offices, this caused so many communication and trust issues that projects started to die all over the place.

A case i remember very vividly happened like this, we had to build a new installer our project, since we had just recently added a few components that required a windows restart and several modifications to the system, so i assigned a task to one of our guys, he started working on the installer, and while he was testing, he had to restart his own system each time he made big changes to the installer code, just because, you know, we didn’t have a testing machine, we only had our workstations for testing (yes, management was that cheap), so as it happens, our project leader goes online and sees our guy is offline, he immediately contacts me through IM and asks what’s going on, why isn’t he online? i explain the situation, he says, well OK, let me know when he will be back online as i need to know the status of that task.

After ending our chat, he goes and starts asking several team members about our guy, he goes even as far as saying that this guy hasn’t been on the office for two days or more, and that we are hiding his absence and helping in cheating our project leader, this was so comical, that we asked our guy to come online and end this situation, but of course that wasn’t enough, project leader simply said “you just got to the office didn’t you? you are going to get fired, you are lazy and have been missing because i have tried to contact you today and you didn’t show up”.

In a team where what the project leaders stated had to be taken as final, what chance we had to explain this was a mistake? the project leader was so disconnected from our team, that he didn’t even knew most of the new guys, and only through phone calls and chats we could get organized and have status meetings, which by the way, were awful, long and prone to mistakes and misunderstandings.

After a while, it became obvious this approach was terrible, so a few developers were tasked with local management  issues and as bridges between the ‘real management’ on site and the developers, this caused even more trouble, since we talked directly to our local ‘leaders’, which most of the time, could not actually understand the issues and in turn they delivered wrong status reports to the on site leaders, this caused trouble and people started to fight each other for any reason at all, projects started to fall behind, the client didn’t knew what was going on, as management had a policy of silence and what happens on our offices stays on our offices, at the end, management had another idea, instead of sending the project leader to the client site, they created a new position on our side, a project leader that was going to handle all development and testing activities, as well as talking to the developers for any personal issues, meanwhile, the ‘fake’ project leader on site was supposed to continue working with the client as if he actually was the project leader, this caused still more disconnection and lack of trust from the developers, as we felt we didn’t have a voice since there were many layers between the client and ourselves, and we “knew too much” so we weren’t allowed to talk directly to the client, less we would bring the truth out by mistake..

It has been almost a full year since i left, and from what i have heard from friends and coworkers, things are still the same, and the company is still being listed among the best places to work, and receiving awards and creating a very good name for itself, while on the dungeons someone does the dirty work, someone up there receives an award for an excellent leadership..

That goes to show that on this industry, eye candy will always be valued more than actual content or features, and so it goes the same for software than for PR and the clients.