Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Skimping on dev dollars is disastrous

This is going to be a full on "rant" so stand back. I have been looking around on Elance lately for freelance dev jobs, plenty of stuff around as are developers from Russia and India. Not only developers, entire "teams/companies" with 100's of thousands of escrowed dev dollars to their name. The hourly rates are pretty affordable $12 or so max, but the quality of goods delivered I cannot speak about - unless of course I shell out some cash and get something done.

A cheap non-working implementation is the Vodafone India online payment site. Why couldn't they have cloned or reused the perfectly working Australian one. None of the features on this site work - not the the credit card payment nor the bill viewing, not even the complaints section so that I can give feedback on stuff not working. Come on Indian devs make me respect you and build something that works.

When I first wanted to use it I had to call up the "yes the callcenter" (hate callcenter jokes about me out here). The guy promised to send me an activation SMS in 2 hours - it did not come in 2 months. I had to storm into the shop and demand some answers, then the SMS was delivered in the next 2 hours. Vodafone should really do something about their service out there - not that Australian telcos are any better.

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