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Injection Rejection (2006)

Matthias Winkelmann's company decided to go the ole' outsourcing route and hand off all development work for a fixed-bid project to a certain overseas company. As it turned out, the hourly rate for certain overseas programmers were less than half that of the in-house folks, so management did the math and figured they could profit that much more. The in-house programmers were told to spend "only a little bit of time" on the project -- no technical advice, no coding assistance, and no even looking at the code. They were only to assist testers in "effectively communicating technical issues" to the overseas team. As it turned out, there were a lot of technical issues, and a lot of issues communicating the technical issues, so that job ended up taking quite a bit more than "only a little bit of time."

As it turned out, the hourly rate for certain overseas programmers were less than half that of the in-house folks, so management did the math and figured they could profit that much more. The in-house developers took a look and were baffled, too -- the system just seemed to hate certain test data, and especially the names Seth, Amanda, and George -- but now they had a chance to actually fix it. As it turned out, the overseas team had billed more than three times the estimated hours, so management instructed the in-house developers to fix it and all other bugs.

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