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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I work on boring tax software for a megacorp, and our software development velocity would actually improve if we fired our entire offshore team (based in India). We would need a small transition period (due to them apparently intentionally siloing important information) but currently they cause more issues than they fix. As a small example, one of the third party tax accounting softwares that we integrate added a new authentication method in late 2022 or early 2023, I can't recall. I spent an hour or so to add support for it to the API client wrapper that I maintain (that gets used by all of our products for integration with this third party software). The only changes required on the part of the other products using my wrapper is a ~5 line code change, a new column in the database to track if customers are using the new or old authentication method, and updating an existing form (where users enter their API credentials) to allow users to choose the type of authentication they want to use. The data required by the new auth method is actually a subset of the data required by the old method, so the form needs hardly any modifications.

In spite of this, my offshore coworkers have spent almost a year and a half having regular meetings about implementing these changes, planning, "technical discussions," etc. And I've had to attend the vast majority of them, wasting mountains of my time. Oh and I'm not allowed to implement these changes myself in the 30 minutes or so it would take to do them, they're very protective of the things they work on and actively inhibit and block anyone who tries to improve their shitty code. And they refuse to read the documentation that I've written.

So basically my offshore coworkers have wasted 10+ hours of my time over something that should have taken a single dev 30 minutes (plus a change request to our DB admins I guess). And this for over a year and a half now.