soledad penadés

Victor Martins via ps linked to an article by Matt Legend Gemell: What have you tried?

In the article, Matt performs an exhaustive analysis on the reasons for this recent phenomenon: asking directly for the solution instead of trying to solve the problem. He goes on for some paragraphs trying to convince readers and potential culprits of the benefits of developing true problem solving abilities, but it's all useless. And I'll tell you why:

They are outsourcers.

They don't care about problem solving, or learning their job, or appreciating the beauty in software engineering.

They aren't emotionally involved in the product they are developing. They don't care at all about it.

They just want to close the current bug they are working on and go to the next one that has been assigned to them.

They are probably paid by the number of closed bugs too, so there's no place for iterative refinement or slow, tedious and patient self-education here: all they want is to deliver their "work" back to the client and get paid (at a very cheap rate, by the way).

In a way, they are the sweatshops of software development.

And the reason I state this is because I know first hand about it. I worked in a London company where part of the development was outsourced to another company... which was technically and legally registered in Miami, but had its workers in Pakistan.

The quality of the code delivered by the outsourcers was terrible. It was a constant source of jokes amongst us. We couldn't believe someone could write something so bad and lousy and still get paid for it.

Out of curiosity, I found the details about the outsourcing company thanks to Uncle Google: the names of our Pakistani remote workmates led not only to the company website (an almost empty place holder, proudly announcing its Miami based address and little more), but also to several hundreds of forum and discussion group posts and blog comments where these "developers" asked for solutions to their problems, in the very same way and style that Matt describes in his article. That explained the "quality" of their deliverables.

And looking at the huge amount of questions in "Engrish" with the same pls-give-me-sample-code-or-entire-program-now attitude that one can find in pretty much every technical site nowadays, they are not the only ones doing it.

So the next time you stumble upon one of these questions in a forum/group/blog/etc, ask yourself: which western company is behind this guy? ;-)