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Ask HN: How to work with bad contractors?
4 by neoburkian | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I recently joined a company on a team that had a significant software project outsourced to a team of contractors. The reason for the outsourcing is that we did't have the people at the time to ship the project, and the project required deep knowledge of a non-software field that they had and we didn't. The problem is that the contractors are just bad at writing code. The project that they have provided has all sorts of problems: functions that haven't been implemented are imported and passed as arguments through chains of functions 4-5 levels deep, every component is deeply coupled to all other components, the same operations have been reinvented in 4-5 times in different ways, etc. Whats more, the contractors seem to be convinced that the code they are shipping is pure genius. I've brought up one of these issues in the past with the frame "can you explain why you did it this way?" and the what I got back was a word salad. How do I work with these people? What approach should I take when I bring up these deep technical debt issues?

I recently joined a company on a team that had a significant software project outsourced to a team of contractors. The reason for the outsourcing is that we did't have the people at the time to ship the project, and the project required deep knowledge of a non-software field that they had and we didn't. The problem is that the contractors are just bad at writing code. The project that they have provided has all sorts of problems: functions that haven't been implemented are imported and passed as arguments through chains of functions 4-5 levels deep, every component is deeply coupled to all other components, the same operations have been reinvented in 4-5 times in different ways, etc. Whats more, the contractors seem to be convinced that the code they are shipping is pure genius. I've brought up one of these issues in the past with the frame "can you explain why you did it this way?" and the what I got back was a word salad. How do I work with these people? What approach should I take when I bring up these deep technical debt issues?