[Coco] Expert C programmer wanted

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 13:13 -0600, Allen Huffman wrote:
> Someone mentioned a $50,000 price tag to pay for a compiler these 
> days...  Of course, what we aren't considering is that any company 
> doing such as thing would probably outsource it to India for a fraction 
> of that ;-)

Not if you want a C compiler at the end of the day. Like any contract
job, you're most likely to be successful if:

1) Your project is specified down to the tiniest detail
2) You have a technical lead/project manager (not one that's part of the
outsourcing organization) ready to spend at least 2 or 3 hours a day
managing the contract programmers
3) The contract programmers are working on the platform they are used to
working on, on the type of apps they are used to working on, with a PM
who is used to managing programmers working on the type of app he's used
to managing them working on.

Trailblazing is not a good fit for contractors. They'll just run up a
bill and not come back with what you want. No one comes away happy.
Maintenance programming, and well specified database app development on
the other hand are pretty good fits for contractors.

Dimes to donuts an outsource-to-India 6809 C compiler development
project would fail miserably because we would probably violate all 3.
Although this is an extremely old platform, it's so old that
trailblazing would probably be the right word ;-)

Does anyone contract embedded projects to India? I would bet most of it
happens here.

Anyway Indians work cheaper but not for free. Divide $50,000 by 4 and
you still get $12,500. Cheaper, certainly, but affordable?

-- John.