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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

#81

Post by kyuudou »

GordonS wrote: post #51
lgleason wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to…

> Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 peop…

>Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers.

You're by no means the only one. TCS and Infosys are 2 others that I've seen engage in exactly this kind of activity. "manage the config files" haha.. thanks for the laugh.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#82

Post by caymanjim »

GordonS wrote: post #66
entha_saava wrote: post #39

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 Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated.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 do…

> 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. I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cogniz…

You see this everywhere in the world. I've worked with a huge number of Americans who went to school for anything but computing, would rather be doing anything but computing, but realized that a six-week crash course in web development would literally quadruple their salary. Many of them go on to embrace computing, many of them turn out to be good developers, and some even become passionate, but they all start out by abandoning their dreams and chasing the quick buck.

Tech and finance eat all the smart people. There are unlimited tech jobs, but only so many jobs for physicists, chemists, professional musicians, teachers, lawyers, etc. And the vast majority of them pay a lot less than tech and finance.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#83

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

GordonS wrote: post #51
lgleason wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to…

> Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 peop…

I had to deal with people who couldn't grasp the concept of bitwise masking and shifts to pack/extract fields from an integer. This was for a wire protocol that needed to conserve space to minimize server costs. Their solution was to have all booleans in their own field which ended up burning five bytes each in our serialization format. I just gave up and let them do what they wanted since nobody on my side seemed to care.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#84

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

It was far much worse, now the major consultancies are on rapid re-skilling drive, also they have made significant changes to their pricing strategy to their clients and are not just based on head count.

But the criticism of technological obsolescence cannot be just levelled against these consultancies alone, much like how almost every electronics hardware was(is) is manufactured in China due to cheap labour costs, so was the reason behind extraordinary growth of Indian IT services and so it all comes down to 'What the client wants'.

But when their client suddenly wanted to catch up on the AI/ML/Analytics bandwagon, these consultancies understood the need to revamp their skilling strategy. That said, it's not like these consultancies never innovate they have dabbled with large in-house products ranging from cloud to automation and some have been fairly successful e.g. TCS ignio, their (AI in air-quotes) automation product[1].

End of the day, they get the job done for their clients which includes almost every major Bank, Retail, Pharmacy to even Aerospace industry like Boeing (Only green card holders/US citizens are employed), Automobile - Ferrari, Cyber Security etc. also saving huge amount of money for them in the process.

[1]https://digitate.com/ignio-aiops/ (Warning: Marketing fluff).

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#85

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

GordonS wrote: post #51
lgleason wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to…

> Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 peop…

Holy shit, this sums it up so well...

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#86

Post by nickff »

yalogin wrote: post #76
_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 p…

You're both describing a 'market for lemons'.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#87

Post by jorblumesea »

oneplane wrote: post #31
_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'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…

> Almost none of them had an upbringing, background or base passion for technology or IT in general.

> The bigger problem with this is that the IT systems are not as well defined or a closed system

This is the big issue. At the end of the day creating truly good usable software is both an art and a science. Data structures, algos and theory, but also thinking outside the box, asking inquisitive questions, challenging product and design.

This doesn't lend itself easily to mass export. Also, culturally, I've found that the West has a different way of thinking about things. In India, questioning your superiors is not something that is done often, but in the West it's common to challenge your boss on ideas.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#88

Post by GordonS »

caymanjim wrote: post #82
GordonS wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cogniz…

You see this everywhere in the world. I've worked with a huge number of Americans who went to school for anything but computing, would rather be doing anything but computing, but realized that a six-week crash course in web development would literally quadruple their salary. Many of them go on to embrace computing, many of them turn out to be good developers, and some even become passionate, but they all start out by…

Difference is, a lot of these people wouldn't get jobs as junior devs in the west, and if they did, there just wouldn't be so many "natural" opportunities to move into management. Whereas in India, the big outsourcing firms need such a large quantity of people every year, that thousands upon thousands are hired and placed in junior dev or test roles. And because these orgs are so large, there are many layers of middle management, and plenty of opportunities.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#90

Post by heisenbit »

runawaybottle wrote: post #7
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…

Here’s the thing, I honestly think these consultancies are going to be feasting for decades to come with all these enterprise companies shifting to the cloud. That is the very definition of ‘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 kind of lock-in at the enterprise level is a dream come true for th…

Absolutely. And don‘t underestimate the mountain range of legacy these baby boomers coded.
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