Re: gEDA-user: OT?: Altium (Protel) Relocates From Sydney Australia to Shanghai China

[gedau@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Sat, Apr 09, 2011 at 10:51:00AM -0400, Bob Paddock wrote:

<snip> 

> The developers always wanted to know "the fastest way" to do something
> and had no interest in learning "the best way" to do something.

Lately I had the chance to work together with professional software 
developers from multiple different western countries, and I have to tell 
you it is not china-specific. I think it's a generic big-company problem 
that you will see all around the world.

Those developers work for money, not for joy, so fastest way is the only 
way for them, especially combined with the pressure from the management 
to deliver at deadline _and_ save cost (do it with less developers).

> 
> In the end the company did ship Cellphones that some how did work.  Is
> that all that maters?  I hope not...
> Is this one company representative of all development in China?  I hope not...

because of the above, in that big-copmpany environment it's very common 
to use duct tape all around. If there is a requirement and some well 
defined method that will be used to tes if the requirement is met at the 
end, you can be almost sure the developer will implement something that 
will work only for that one test case and will ignore the general idea 
behind th erequirement or the test case. This how sleep(1) kind of 
"fixes" end up in network code.

I don't say it's because those developers are stupid or even 
inexperienced. It's more like the whole company culture. If you want to 
make things properly in such an environment, it will take more time and 
the feedback will not be "cool, you made some really robust, reusable 
code" but "next time please spend less on the golden knobs and 
concentrate on the task". Thus the best developers either leave after a 
while (either to other company or promoted to management) or they will 
start following the lazy methods knowing that it's not good, but "i have 
no choice".

> Hopefully  this will drive a lot more interest to gEDA and PCB.

Honestly, I doubt. At the end once the user got used to whichever tool, 
he won't switch easily even if quality starts to go down.

Regards,

Tibor


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