Outsourced

At work, as regular readers already know, we outsourced the management of one of the company websites out to a bunch of clowns company in India. This was because they professed to be experts in the Open Source Content Management System ( CMS ) that it had been decided to migrate the site too. Oh, and of course they were cheap, too. The CMS was Mambo, which I personally loathe with a passion – I was fairly convinced already that it was shit, but I’m now certain of it. Therefore I was happy to see this project outsourced to The Boys from Bangalore™. Hey, they want to do it, that’s great – it’ll save me a shitload of hassle and frustration.

Oh, how wrong I was. The Boys from Bangalore™ are – to put it bluntly – fuckwits of the first order. Mambo is a hacked-up piece of crap at the best of times, and they’ve then hacked it up even more in order to make it work, as well as putting in some other hacked-up pieces of crap that have had to be beaten to within an inch of their lives in order to work at all. It’s a nightmare hunk of user-hostile unintuitive shite. And that’s just on its good days.

The other problem, as I said to colleagues at work today, is that just because a company is cheap, that doesn’t actually equate with having any fucking clue what they’re actually doing. We have a two-server set-up for this website – a development server and a web server. The Boys from Bangalore™ have had great problems understanding this kind of set-up, and keep insisting that the problems that we’re having with this site are because it’s (and I quote) “spread over two servers”, and nothing we say will disabuse them of this notion. I’ve explained it to them six times now, and it’s still not sinking in.

Outsourcing – it’s not as great as it’s knocked up to be…