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Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

economist.com

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Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#71

Post by Brajeshwar »

To set context, I'm Indian.

I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time.

So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes;

Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other individuals and teams. The Indian team in Singapore/Bangalore/San Francisco will called the Chennai/Other-Locale team as their outsource partner/team and are mis-treated. I was like, "I thought you guys were team!"

In another incident, I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes, send in pull request and not to email us zip files of their codes. Their head of something-something (too many senseless designations/titles) was not happy and in his mistake, sent a "Reply All" to the tune of, "Any email from Brajeshwar should not be replied immediately, call a meeting with the tech heads."

Well, I was kinda referred to someone who should be sent in when shits stars hitting the fan. ;-)

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#72

Post by gourabmi »

_the_inflator wrote: post #45
oneplane wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

"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." This sad…

You get what you pay for. That holds true everywhere.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#73

Post by newen »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #68
blocked_again wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right. India has a lot of Engineering students. There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Sw…

"As an Indian"

You can be Indian and still be wrong about aspects of your country. In GPs case, he was generalizing too much about Indian universities.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#74

Post by chris11 »

kumarski wrote: post #43

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ra…

> are used to working with onshore talent that has context

What do you mean by this? Context is really important in programming. I'd say offshore devs are at an actual disadvantage if the offshore team always has less context than the onsite devs.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#75

Post by la6471 »

This feeble attempts to generalize a whole nation or group of people will not succeed. Individuals differ from one another and Indians are the most diverse group in the world. Some of the engineers are good some are bad , just like everywhere else. The sooner humanity realizes the truth about individuality and discard the stereotypes attached to groups and aggregates the better it will be for the whole world. Amen.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#76

Post by yalogin »

_the_inflator wrote: post #15

It boils down to the Business Model. Having worked extensively with the major Indian vendors, with people from India in different settings, onsite and offshore, I observed that they simply focus on labor costs in Europe and elsewhere. Salespeople tried to sell us dozens of teams with “cheap” developers of every skillset we wanted. But that is not how software is done. I want outcomes not masses. I need creativity to…

I don't think that is how these companies see themselves. For them they are just a source of cheap labor and the only reason a company would engage with them is for their low cost. They think that the engineers and the talent is easily replaceable and they even think they do adequate work nothing earth shattering. So the company's only aim will be to out maneuver the other IT consulting companies by undercutting on price.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#77

Post by ramshanker »

TLDR of the article is American / European companies creating in-house Indian offices and moving away from "consultancies".

I whole heartedly agree to the huge advantages you get doing this. You have better control over hiring quality talent, more focused developers who develop institutional knowledge over time, much easier to scale up/down than the contracts with these consultancies and so on.....

Outside IT, I can confirm the same tree has been happening from my industry of Oil & Gas consultancy. Many American / European oil & gas consultancies now have Indian engineering centres employing chemical / mechanical / civil / electrical / instrumentation engineers.

It is easy to setup this over here. Everyone is welcome.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#78

Post by kyuudou »

mjohn wrote: post #5

I recently joined a company where my main task is to modernise a business critical application built and supported by Wipro over ten years ago. Everything is still on .Net 3.0 (first released in 2007), and despite hundreds of pages of documentation the developers seem to have little understanding of what the application actually does for the business. The impression I have is that their business model is geared towar…

>The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution. This is fine if you don't need the software to evolve, but most business applications do need to evolve even if slower than at a start-up or FAANG.

This, I think, is why companies like Wipro and TCS dominate in traditional financial companies like big banks where stability and security are emphasized more than innovation and feature development. I've seen Java apps running on RHEL5 as recently as 2 years ago.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#79

Post by jorblumesea »

Pretty much what everyone in the tech industry has been doing for years. Better to have your own overseas office where you can control the hiring bar and talent vs making consultancies rich. The big consultancies are more concerned with draining value from clients and treating them like cash cows instead of delivering value.

That being said, probably the real solution is SAAS.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#80

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

mjohn wrote: post #5

I recently joined a company where my main task is to modernise a business critical application built and supported by Wipro over ten years ago. Everything is still on .Net 3.0 (first released in 2007), and despite hundreds of pages of documentation the developers seem to have little understanding of what the application actually does for the business. The impression I have is that their business model is geared towar…

> outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology.

Internally, we consider outsourcing the same as pausing all forward momentum on the outsourced components.

It's just a reduction in current cost with an understanding that there will no new features and very little maintenance.

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