Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

I've talked with a lot of different Indian and similar 'offshore' engineers, developers and managers and most of them ended up in the place they did due to choices between being a farmer or being an IT person, being in a poor province vs. being in a less-poor province, and being able to support your parents. Almost none of them had an upbringing, background or base passion for technology or IT in general.

While you can in theory do your IT things with no passion at all, and kill all creativity and still be productive, it often ends up being just 'mass' like you describe, a transformed version of the classical western 'consultants' that usually end up being companies that focus on sales and billable hours and never really deliver what the people needed (referring to earlier HN posts about accenture and deloitte).

I get that at some point all companies converge on the same generic point of being in the business of making money at all costs, and making it 'measurable' via sales, hours and contracts. It doesn't matter if it's software, financial, legal etc. At least not to them at that point.

The bigger problem with this is that the IT systems are not as well defined or a closed system as the other examples might be. A ledger would be simple to verify in comparison: you apply a fixed set of rules to a fixed period of data and it must result in something within a known range. With software you can do a little bit of determining that the 'borders' of your 'box' of functionality would be, but to do an exhaustive verification is so far from profitable that it's only done in a few highly regulated systems like flight controllers.

So now we have a system where a lot of money and power vectors are involved that would (somewhat) work for legal and finance and the likes (i.e. the classical big ones that existed long before software did) and a constant attempt to apply it to IT and hide everything they don't like about getting the wrong results. It still eats resources like the other kinds of work, but doesn't produce the results you would expect for the resources that went in to it.

Software doesn't operate in a vacuum, disconnecting users, buyers, sellers, or stakeholders in general is bad for everyone and because of endless change and interaction the whole model of 'buying a product' hasn't been realistic since 2000, and with connected OT (think SCADA and the likes) it won't even apply to embedded systems anymore.

The ultimate take-away from "Mythical Man Month" is that the limit of adding people is not zero extra-work-per-additional-person, but unbounded negative extra-work-per-additional-person.

It's not where you outsource to its the mere fact of paying people who don't work for you or care for more than billable hours (at least the leadership if not the consultants too). You can get that down the street too, though it's easier to check up on what's going on. Having employees you vetted/hired overseas is way different than hiring some firm to provide bodies who are unknown to you and come/go all the time.

As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this.

Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor.

The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields. And quite some of them continue their relentless pursuit for a good "package" by grinding Hackerrank / leetcode. It is literally a rat race.

The same mindset will create an impression that being a manager is superior to being a programmer. Because you are "managing" people. These people do all kind of office politics to become manager, and spend rest of their life ruining someone else's life.

You can't expect these kind of people to love their job or even do it properly.

Hierarchy: Related to above point, in India, you don't oppose or even question an upper officer or elder's decision, because ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.

Lack of interest in improving education: In many Indian engineering colleges, one year is wasted teaching theoretical subjects like chemistry and physics. No computer science related subject except basic C Programming (Lol not even malloc() and free()) are taught. This appears to be purely done in order to provide jobs for people who had studied these subjects. While teaching these subjects may have marginal benefits, they are outweighed by pure rote learning oriented assesment sysem and wasting one year of CSE programme. That's a bad trade-off for someone interested in CS. All entrance exams are based on Math/Physics/Chemistry and we have learnt enough of that. STOP the old age tradition.

If the chemistry they teach in last two years of high school (called pre university here), which is quite high level, qualifies for entrance exams, Computer Science should too. No I am not telling this because it is a programmers forum. But CS taught in pre-uni (optional subject) is more essential and often more helpful than chemistry and half of physics taught to these grades. But chemistry is compulsory for some legacy reasons. There is no interest to change that.