What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.
To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it’s outright terrible by any number of measures.
Due to bad design, sloppy or opaque coding practices, non-scalability, and layers of ugly “temporary” patches, it’s often difficult to maintain, harder still to modify or upgrade, painful or impossible for a new person joining the dev team to understand, or (a different kind of problem) slow and inefficient. In short, a mess.
Of course there are many exceptions, but they’re just that: exceptions. In my experience, software is, almost as a rule, bad in one way or another. And lest I be accused of over-generalising: in more than 20 years I’ve done work for maybe a dozen companies, almost all of them in the banking industry and many of them household names.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...companies that outsource development try to keep QA in the US. 
...heavily regulated industries including FDA medical devices, FAA (military, commercial and private) avionics, military systems including weapons systems and various unregulated commercial fields. The regulated industries are much better but still don't always get it right. Sometimes that's due to thinking in a mostly linear fashion. Sometimes it's due to having requirements phrased poorly. Heavily regulated code is always very costly. In today's numbers regulated code, would average 20 lines per man-week including requirement development, coding, review, verification and QA. An average cost would be around $250 per line, more for some industries (DoD, DoE...) which require a government clearance. However, Dilbert always has his finger on the pulse of software development:
I'm currently contracting via my S-corp through a 3rd party. Everyone gets a cut. 
One place I worked for (process control system for medication manufacturing) doing QA and test work was very grateful when I pointed out that it's not a good thing to allow edits to the database architecture while data in being entered and retrieved. Of course they like my idea to use an Oracle like server to control write access but canned me just the same since the redevelopment with Oracle would take about 6-8 months and in the mean time they didn't need me.
I worked for this one shop for while as W-2 contracted to another client and I had an interest in going direct with the client. It never happened because the shop was greedy and wanted their commission of about $12k on top of the 30% markup they had been collecting for over a year.
bitter?? Of course not.
Have a good holiday.
