I am continually amazed at some projects I've been working with over the past few years. I meet some other company who is doing some programming work and think "damn, they must be really good, my code is going to look really amateur when they see it". And then I see while they may talk the talk, what comes out is not that good.

An example is a project where 99% of the code was to be written in India. Now they may be cheap, but the coding must take four times longer, and the project manager admitted he had wished he had paid up for UK developers because they are really slow. Also the entire project was supposed to be localised in a second phase (already priced up), but much of the coding wasn't written with this in mind, eg. pieces of text called "Label12" which will make no sense in the resource files. Also the project managers are given bonuses according to the project's profit, so they have an incentive to have the spec altered so it can be charged for, and an incentive to have defects accepted when they should be fixed.

A much more recent example is a project I am working on right now. I am doing a new website for a long-term customer in another area. They have just bought an expensive membership management system from a large general purpose software company. The software has a web-module which allows users to alter their addresses, pay their subs etc. Anyway, I was looking through the cookies that it drops when you log in, and yes, it seems that the UserID is set as a cookie and is the only thing used to subsequently authenticate the user..... now this will be a delight to report, because during the planning stages I was advising against certain things because I believe them to be an excessive amount of work and not in the client's interests - it was then suggested that it was because we weren't able to do it, I will certainly get great delight in reporting this flaw! (obviously I will do it carefully, I know this sort of thing can backfire easily)

Gareth