On average, how many hours are in your work week?

[Dinner]

If I don't get back to the India folks in the evening, they waste a whole day waiting around for a reply.

Not exactly self starters, eh?

[Docfeelgood]

I can't get more than 40 and no overtime period. Times are hard. Paycheck to paycheck.

[Asher]

We merged with a German company a year ago, but fortunately the time zone difference hasn't mattered much - they don't write any code for us, and the code I write for them doesn't need immediate feedback e.g. "Here's Class1, I'm going to work on Class2 and Class3 while you review it"

I have to review all of their designs and then once they're done, review their code. And inbetween answer a million questions.

I get back all kinds of brilliant code from them.

In the past few weeks they forgot the extra = in the equality comparison in an if statement twelve times in one commit (I assume they copied and pasted...).

They also have a nasty and inexplicable habit of double negatives. if(!!wide), etc. ****ing bizarre.

[loinburger]

Is outsourcing a net gain or a net loss for your company?

[loinburger]

My only real experience with globalization was the time I was a contractor for a Swedish company - half of their database keys were in Swedish and half were in English, often mixing and matching on the same table.

The code I'm currently writing is supposed to run in both the US and Germany, but that's easy - I'm only doing back-end work, so I just need to read in exception messages from a database so that the Germans get German exception strings. (Obviously my code would never throw an exception, but, just in case.)

[Asher]

Is outsourcing a net gain or a net loss for your company?

It's probably a net gain, considering how cheap they are. But only if used correctly.

For $50,000 we can buy 5 "senior" developers for 10 months. We a project management rule of thumb, we assume 33% productivity for each one of them vs a local developer. Plus they are only given tasks with clear, explicit requirements. Locally we handle more researchy or exploratory tasks, they handle the codemonkey work.

[Hauldren Collider]

I'll most likely be working for a defense contractor over the summers and when I graduate, since I don't plan on leaving the Washington DC/Northern Virginia region, so I doubt I'm going to have to deal with much outsourcing.

[loinburger]

They also have a nasty and inexplicable habit of double negatives. if(!!wide), etc. ****ing bizarre.

Back when I worked as a TA I kept running to
if(bool1 == false)
return false;
else if(bool1 == true)
return true;

loin: Why don't you just return the boolean?
Student: I can do that???

[Asher]

I'll most likely be working for a defense contractor over the summers and when I graduate, since I don't plan on leaving the Washington DC/Northern Virginia region, so I doubt I'm going to have to deal with much outsourcing.

The big plus about working for defense contractors is you get to go home at the end of the day knowing that you made a difference in this world: contributing to the deaths of others. And there's really no better feeling, is there?

[giblets]

The big plus about working for defense contractors is you get to go home at the end of the day knowing that you made a difference in this world: contributing to the deaths of others. And there's really no better feeling, is there?

Sure beats leaving the DC area. Gosh what an inconvenience!

[Hauldren Collider]

The big plus about working for defense contractors is you get to go home at the end of the day knowing that you made a difference in this world: contributing to the deaths of others. And there's really no better feeling, is there?

*shrug*

I'm not the one who decided to buy the stuff. I'm not going to move away when I can find perfectly good work at decent pay. I also totally understand that the industry as a whole is much larger than it should be, and would not vote or lobby to keep it the size it is.

[loinburger]

I used to work for the air force research laboratory, but I slept well at night knowing that everything I did was worthless.

General Warmonger: So, what have you been working on?
loin: A compiler!
GW: What does it do?
loin: It... ummm.. compiles the enemy to death!
GW: Awesome

[Hauldren Collider]

I wouldn't work for the government directly. Also, the contractors I've worked for so far by the way did mainly civilian projects. The defense contractor I worked for two summers ago did a lot of work for oceanic research groups at universities as well as work on navy submarines.

[Hot Mustard]

'bout 50 now. Used to be more, and will probably go back up when my kids are older and don't want to spend as much time with me.

I spend about 7 hours a day during "normal" business hours and 2-4 hours off-hours, either just working late on things I prefer to do without distraction, but also making myself available for different timezones (China, Germany, eastern U.S.). Sounds like my situation is similar to Asher, but in my case it isn't so much babysitting less-skilled folks as it is co-ordinating efforts across multiple teams/products/components - there are precious few folks I can rely on to keep the "big picture" in mind all the time.

[-Jrabbit]

50-60 hours, sometimes more. Self-employed.

Varies with client demand and my mood. In the evenings, I do a fair amount of "hang out with the fam watching TV, but laptop is on and some emails are answered and/or occasional work gets done," so it's hard to put an exact number on this.