Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway.
They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place.
Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.
> Many contracting firms are taking anywhere from 50-75%
The only firms I know of taking that kind of cut target governments, which carries a lot of risk and is very high-touch. They need a fancy office and a lot of overhead just to stay in the game. Perverse, I know, but the way things are.
The firms in question then charge very high rates to cover all this, and keep a large percentage of it, as you say. The contractors who actually do the work end up seeing about as much as they'd see in private practise (~$800-1000/day from a chargeout of maybe 1800-2200)
Source: friends working for this kind of company in Australia.
The highly branded companies (Accenture, PwC, IBM, etc) do take at least 50-75%. If the owner has a big name or a special in, they can still get 50%. It's a market that's ripe for disruption.
The reason this exists is fear. The project sponsor wants to be able to say, "Well, I hired the best," in case things go south.
I hope so. Currently, VC money is a horrible market distortion that encourages what is basically dumping - companies with good products and actual business models being starved of oxygen by cashed-up competitors who simply give products away for free. I'm not even sure of the economic term for it but wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal in a few years, after we've gotten more sophisticated.
A related argument had been made a lot lately about how "free" can lead to scummy business models like surveillance and manipulative black hat media tactics.
You can do free sustainably if your costs are low and if you have something a tier up you can sell. That's freemium and it can work for some things. But if your costs are high or if a paid tier does not materialize... Now you have a big problem. You own a liability, one purchased via massive investment and employing many people. You must find a way to make it pay, so you start looking at what you have a little differently. Your users... Now there's a product.
South Park parodied the grow-first-monetize-later gambit in the "underpants gnomes" episode:
1) collect underpants
2) ...?
3) profit!
Nobody knew the second step back then. Of course now companies like Facebook have shown us what step two is. It's:
Dumping is usually only illegal for foreign companies to do. The government doesn't care about two domestic firms competing with each other, what they are worried about is the Chinese government using it's vast resources to subsidise the dumping of millions of almost-free tablet computers onto the US market and putting Apple out of business.
It is also illegal for a domestic company to price below cost, if that company is a monopoly. Under the anti-trust laws, this is known as abusive pricing.
However, it is legal for a non-monopoly to price below cost. The assumption is that this behavior is self-regulating, because the company will eventually go out of business if it can't make a profit.
If otherwise-viable competitors are driven out of business in the meantime, that's simply collateral damage. The current thinking about antitrust laws is that they should protect competition, not competitors. Eventually, new companies will spring from the nuclear wasteland. (Google Reader and RSS comes to mind.)
Take a second to think about what you're saying. You're basically talking about prison revenge scenarios. Do you seriously think the real reasons are ever going to be admitted?
"Your honour, I didn't shank him because I hate hispanics, it's because he stole my dope!"
oh, I understand that. ...but saying it's due to the hate crime law is not the same thing as using that law as an excuse. My point is that it's being misused, not denying that it happens.
> 1. Apparently everyone in Santa Cruz goes to bed early and gets up early.
Probably some selection bias at work here. It's possible the type of person who's buying and wearing personal fitness monitors is also the type of person who gets up early.
> Maybe I'm the only one that sets my alarm on the hour
Probably my OCD coming out but I only set my alarm with minutes beginning 0-4 and ending with 8. I'm sure everyone has their own habits. On the hour seems so numerically boring!
If it was selection bias like that, the same would apply to people in other cities, so it wouldn't explain the difference in the graph. My guess is people in Santa Cruz on average have a longer commute.
2. People who are technical (or are interested in quantified life in general)
Technical people who commute from SC to Silicon Valley have far less bus options and routes than SF (SC has three each way for Google which ends at 9:25). That forces a lot of the number 2 people awake earlier than they otherwise would be.
I think SC is probably the same, if not average getting up later than other Bay Area places, due to the large student population and short walk/bike commute for those who work in the town.
I suppose it'd be better than being Boeing and going in front of your stockholders to explain why your marketshare is radically down because you refused to conform to the measurement system 95% of your customers are using.
It's a non-question anyway. Boeing planes already report fuel load in litres. Funnily enough, flight levels are internationally represented in feet (well, 100-feet) so there's a "win" for you. Also, ground speed is measured in knots!
The knot isn't quite as arbitrary as most imperial measures.
1 knot = 1 nautical mile/hour
1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation
Since navigation at sea was strongly dependent on the position of the sun and stars, it makes sense to use a unit of speed that makes your calculations easier.
Even for modern navigation it makes sense to use a unit of measurement based on the circumference of the great circle surrounding the Earth.
