India lost contact with their moon orbiter earlier. They site problems with both the orbiter’s power source and internal programming.
The last bit doesn’t surprise me one bit. We have two teams of contracted India programmers, and they both can barely put code together to save their jobs. In the end, I patch or send the seriously shitty code to another American programming team to fix. For all their programming “degrees,” India sure does suck at it.
I have used the Indian Contractors on almost all my projects and have had some issues. On the American side, there is always the 9-5 work ethic. The work takes longer and there is a lot of “day off because” “don’t fell good today BS” “vacation with no contact”, etc etc etc
What’s weird is that since giving a contract to Accenture (who hired all our India contractors), things take twice as long and we get excuses like, “Cannot be on to monitor the change taking place over the weekend because we don’t work weekends,” or, “Don’t call us during your day since it’s our night here, even if you can’t get our code to compile.”
Most of my American workers cover their own changes and fix them when broken, regardless of hour or weekend.
I could not agree more. I outsourced development of a simple project and spent more time fixing it than I would have had I just had my developers here program it from scratch. I, to this day, have never seen clean code developed in India. I hate to generalize, but even Indian programmers in the US, seem to suck. I have never kept one on staff. They all seem to be book smart, but they forget everything once they enter the real world. The fact that the “programming” was able to get the craft into space in the first place is just shocking to me. The worst part, though, is that some of my favorite professors in school were from India. I do not mean any disrespect to them, I just do not understand the discrepancy.
The discrepancy comes from there being so many programmers in India, that the work varies widely.
I would say that 10% of the programmers from India are actually very good and consistent. These are the 10% that we can actually put faces to because they have respectable jobs with good results.
The other 90% usually get through school by copying other students’ work and/or getting a degree at a questionable school in a questionable program. These programmers didn’t learn how to produce consistently and with quality.