Actually she has a decent idea for a web business so the plan is to get cracking on that. Seems she inherited her dad’s entrepreneurial spirit!

Great! But I was also thinking problem identification, as well as problem solving.

When they say "most IT projects fail" to me that translates to "Tech built the wrong thing. It worked. But ultimately it was the wrong solution." Clients never own that, do they?

Web agencies - at least the ones I've worked for - are notorious for giving the client what the client wants, not what the client needs. This ultimately, also effective translates to "the wrong solution."

If you're working remotely, the pound tanking is a good thing, isn't it?

It's sad that people are willing to sacrifice culture and sovereignty because they're scared of a temporarily weaker economy.

Author here. I linked to your post and there are comments on the blog (which you took advantage of). No need to be pissed off. I still disagree with this particular point (and I'm not sure why you say I took that quote out of context), despite your clarification. But overall I think you provide a lot of good and valuable advice that might be counterintuitive to younger devs entering the corporate world.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I agree with a lot of your points, but I don't think adding QA people addresses the same need as peer code review. QA can find bugs in the current code whereas code review is more about finding issues that may lead to bugs further down the road. Even when there are defects in the current code, they may be edge cases that QA is unlikely to unearth but that will come out in a thorough code review.

None of the techniques we have are exact drop in replacements of one another. But they are all techniques that improve quality. I've seen a good QA person in the right environment be 100x as valuable as all the unit tests and code review combined.

Thats why the answer is really heavily dependent on your team and your project. The key though is considering what you aren't doing because you are focusing so heavily on code review.

Fair point about setup costs, but the marginal cost (which is what really counts over the long term) is negligeable in both cases.

Things are improving as I say in the piece, but it's worth noting that here in the Czech Republic I still have to pay nearly $200 for a month of data roaming in the US with a 200Mb cap. And that's if I go to the trouble of signing up for a special roaming plan, otherwise I could easily spent 10x that.

You're right, I should have made it more explicit that I run a software contracting company (though it's not exactly hidden either). In my defense I did mention the timezone difference, and I agree that it is perhaps the biggest issue. But I stand by my thesis: it's far better to work with great remote developers, despite the drawbacks, than mediocre local developers.