Outsourceing SL software

Should LL out source the client and server side coding?
Having it done in India or Europe.. or anywhere eles ya can get good coders cheap

O and why do you think it should be or shouldnt be if ya wana say that is lol

No, but they may want to consider making better use of the Open Sourcing of the client, at least.

It seems there are plenty of people who can be of value already in the community starting with Nicholaz, but LL doesn't seem to pay enough attention to them

Yesh. Why LL seems to hate using the patches they get, I dunno. I think someone there is unclear on the concept.

Many of us marvel at all the technical problems of Second Life.

I'm not convinced that the Second Life technical problems have anything to do with the unavailability of good coders.

It seems more likely to me that many of the Second Life problems have to do with poor management of the coders.

The management philosophy of Linden Labs is not to manage, but let staff decide the projects on which they would like to work. Given that management philosophy, one would expect to see what we get with Second Life: a mis-match of some great technical acheivements, scattered between some mind-boggling glitches that are never addressed.

I'm not so sure that the technical people who work for Linden Labs can't get the job done. Without direction, they are just doing what you might naturally expect any worker to do given absolute freedom- pick the fun jobs, ignore the critical but tediuos jobs. It's up to management to make sure that someone is working on the critical but tedious jobs. That's why I see many of the technical problems with Second Life as a management failure.

Speaking as someone who works in RL for a corporation that regularly outsources large amounts of coding and other "grunt work" to India... No. In fact, H*** NO!

If you think you have support problems and quality control issues now, just imagine when critical parts of the coding team are half a world away, don't have the vocabulary to express or comprehend complex concepts clearly in a common language, and are getting paid pennies for work that they know others get paid far more for.

I've had to work with coders and techs in India, where my employer had them doing outsourced work. Beleive me, the result is substandard. I've had to explain the same thing to the same tech 5 times or more, each time breaking it down to simpler and simpler language, until it was like talking to a three year old. And getting just about as coherant a response.

Outsourcing to coding or tech support India, or to other developing countries, looks great on an accountant's books, but is a nightmare for the customers and the people who have to integrate that work into the product.

I've seen some really good coding come out of europe and india thats why I was wondering that and they dont use the patches from the open source guys they just get kinda blowen off.

To bad the cant out source managment lol

I think Nick said once that he was told that they wouldn't use one of his patches because it shouldn't have fixed the problem and LL couldn't figure out why it did, or something along those lines.

While there certainly are good individual coders and good software development companies in India, in my experience, the GOOD ones don't hire out on the cheap as outsourced help. What you get from most outsourcing arrangements are individuals with barely enough skills to qualify, and who are trying to improve their skills with English enough to get a better job... sad, but this is what I have observed.

It's just like what you find in a lot of telemarketing call centers. Lots of barely capable people, striving to use this terrible job as a step up to a better job. Qualified people don't take that kind of work. Not for the low wages many companies pay...

"Good" and "cheap" tend to be mutually exclusive when it comes to outsourcing.


Usually, companies can get away with outsourcing things that never touch the customer (non-mission critical assets and "fluff" objects to pad out quantity), but they tend to take a significant hit when they outsource things the customers actually see.

The biggest mistakes being outsourcing your UI (bad), support (worse), or full systems to third parties (outright suicidal), because the customers will see that and you WILL take the negative PR hit for doing so.



That being said, LL is already a distributed company in some respects. And their efforts don't scale quite as well as they used to due to bringing more servers on board than can be individually policed.


As a software company, given the overhead, I'd say they're doing "okay" so far. Not terrific, not woeful, but right around the mark of mediocrity that characterizes a mature product.