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I was a junior developer at a software house that did contract work for overseas clients, mostly mid-size businesses wanting custom internal tools or e-commerce platforms. I want to walk through this calmly, in a deadpan sort of way, because I genuinely believe the story is funnier told flat than told angry.
Every project started the same. Client sends requirements doc. We estimate timeline. Client agrees to timeline. Client then spends the entire project duration adding things not in the requirements doc while insisting, with a straight face, that the deadline "shouldn't move much." I worked on one project, a fairly standard inventory management tool, that started as a six week scope and ended, eleven months later, as something resembling a small ERP system, still billed under the original contract because renegotiating scope apparently required a level of assertiveness our account managers did not possess.
Standups were fifteen minutes on the calendar and never fifteen minutes in reality, because our project manager liked to use the standup as a venue for reading out client emails line by line and asking the team to react in real time, which is not what standups are for, but nobody told him that in three years, apparently, including me, because I valued my job.
The actual coding work was fine, I'll be fair. I learned a legitimate amount, the senior devs were technically sharp and patient when explaining things, and I walked away with real skills I use daily now. My gripe was never the code. My gripe was the culture of absorbing scope creep as if it were weather, an unavoidable natural phenomenon rather than a business problem someone should be managing on our behalf.
Overtime existed but was "flexible," meaning you'd work the extra hours and then, in theory, take time off later, except later never came because there was always another deadline crunching against the last one, so my time-off bank became a fictional currency, like Monopoly money, that I never once got to spend.
The lowest point, and this one still makes me laugh flatly rather than genuinely, was a Friday at 6pm when a client emailed asking for "just a small tweak" that turned out to require restructuring the database schema, and our manager forwarded it to the team with the message "should be quick, can someone jump on this tonight," no acknowledgment that it was Friday, 6pm, or that "small tweak" and "restructure the database schema" are not adjacent phrases in any universe.
I stayed almost two years, mostly for the learning curve, and left once I felt I'd extracted what I could technically and needed an environment where project scope meant something. Would not recommend, not because the tech work was bad, but because nobody upstream ever protected the team from clients who didn't understand, or didn't care, what a contract was supposed to mean. If you go into outsourcing work, ask directly in your interview how they handle scope changes. If the answer is vague, that vagueness is the actual job description.
Every project started the same. Client sends requirements doc. We estimate timeline. Client agrees to timeline. Client then spends the entire project duration adding things not in the requirements doc while insisting, with a straight face, that the deadline "shouldn't move much." I worked on one project, a fairly standard inventory management tool, that started as a six week scope and ended, eleven months later, as something resembling a small ERP system, still billed under the original contract because renegotiating scope apparently required a level of assertiveness our account managers did not possess.
Standups were fifteen minutes on the calendar and never fifteen minutes in reality, because our project manager liked to use the standup as a venue for reading out client emails line by line and asking the team to react in real time, which is not what standups are for, but nobody told him that in three years, apparently, including me, because I valued my job.
The actual coding work was fine, I'll be fair. I learned a legitimate amount, the senior devs were technically sharp and patient when explaining things, and I walked away with real skills I use daily now. My gripe was never the code. My gripe was the culture of absorbing scope creep as if it were weather, an unavoidable natural phenomenon rather than a business problem someone should be managing on our behalf.
Overtime existed but was "flexible," meaning you'd work the extra hours and then, in theory, take time off later, except later never came because there was always another deadline crunching against the last one, so my time-off bank became a fictional currency, like Monopoly money, that I never once got to spend.
The lowest point, and this one still makes me laugh flatly rather than genuinely, was a Friday at 6pm when a client emailed asking for "just a small tweak" that turned out to require restructuring the database schema, and our manager forwarded it to the team with the message "should be quick, can someone jump on this tonight," no acknowledgment that it was Friday, 6pm, or that "small tweak" and "restructure the database schema" are not adjacent phrases in any universe.
I stayed almost two years, mostly for the learning curve, and left once I felt I'd extracted what I could technically and needed an environment where project scope meant something. Would not recommend, not because the tech work was bad, but because nobody upstream ever protected the team from clients who didn't understand, or didn't care, what a contract was supposed to mean. If you go into outsourcing work, ask directly in your interview how they handle scope changes. If the answer is vague, that vagueness is the actual job description.
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