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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

#141

Post by zentiggr »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #83
GordonS wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I worked desktop support for a few years in a large US based corp. My worst day deploying a new machine was a laptop to a dev who came in and didn't understand what I meant when I asked him to unlock the machine so we could log him in. He wasn't even familiar with Ctrl-Alt-Del and the rest of the deployment went just as painfully.

I get task siloing and hiring green people and giving them a chance to ramp up but that just threw me for a loop.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#142

Post by BossingAround »

gourabmi wrote: post #135
BossingAround wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. I try to see it from the perspective of a non-native speaker trying to learn English. If I know no English, and pay for teachers to teach me English, I definitely do not want to be taught Indian English. Not because it's wrong, not because it's $whatever_adjective, but because it will sound incorrect to t…

I want to point out your claim about 'majority of English speakers'. The number of English speakers in the Indian subcontinent is much higher than anywhere else in the world, including US. Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s... If numbers decide what is the norm, Indian English should be it. However, I feel like there are other factors that you are using to determine the "correct" En…

> majority of English speakers

That's fair... That should have been "majority of native English speakers". Corrected.

You'll now argue who's a native speaker, won't you... :)

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#143

Post by marktangotango »

ethbro wrote: post #59
GordonS wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that is not how software is done. I want outcomes not masses. I need creativity to work on tools expressed through software not cheaper developers. Fully agree, but the people making the decisions at large corps are not developers, and are just as focused on costs as the Indian outsourcing firms pushing low cost devs. And in turn, those people are pushed by the board to make cost reductions, and board members u…

Non technical folks under-appreciate the cost and frequency of long-term technical debt. It's easy to save money on developers, yet very quickly produce a net-negative result for the company. Sadly, few companies have guardrails to prevent these sort of shortsighted choices. E.g. requiring parallel approval of projects by IT architects (whose existence admittedly carries its own hazard).

> Non technical folks under-appreciate the cost and frequency of long-term technical debt.

Undoubtedly this is true, but there's an implication here in this context that somehow on shore, or more well paid developers don't create such technical debt, when in fact they do. It amazes me that I see team after team of competent well intentioned developers create one ball of mud after another. It's striking really.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#144

Post by nogridbag »

klodolph wrote: post #92
random314 wrote: post #89

Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

I first came across this about 20 years ago when I was learning Java. There was no StackOverflow. Sun's Java forum (java.net?) was the place to go for beginners. I clicked into a thread "How to Send SMS" that had thousands of replies spanning several years and every reply had almost the same format:

"please send the codes!!! some@email.com"

All with Indian names and emails. I was pretty naive about the world then so I assumed it was some joke I was missing. I would check in every year or so and the thread kept growing until the forum was shut down when Oracle acquired Sun. I didn't realize until later that these were all university students doing the same Java SMS project year after year. There was some blog post years later about that epic thread but I doubt it's been archived.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#145

Post by Bombthecat »

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…

I completely agree with you.

Most managers can't even manage remote work from people in the same city, not to speak about same nation.

Those managers fall apart with people from offshore. Because they have no idea how to communicate and how important it is to document, document and document everything and set targets.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#147

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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 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.

People are fine. India has produced some very great intellectuals (see Ramanujan).

But the culture is rather rigid and stratified, with narrowly defined "walks of life", and the boundaries are strict. Everyone knows their place in the system, and there are disincentives to change, or challenge authority. Truth and wisdom always flow from top to bottom, never the other way around. That's cultural. Of course all that stuff would reflect upon the organizations.

TLDR: Let go of the rigid rules, and India would experience a MAJOR renaissance.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#148

Post by rafiki6 »

afrojack123 wrote: post #67

Indian IT consultancies have been struggling against technological obsolescence for 30 years. And they will continue to struggle for many more. This is an idiotic hit piece hit written by a journalist who needs to meet his quota. This journalist has never worked for one of these consultancies, a tech company, or been in C-suite of any org. I have worked in these "consultancies" so here is my take. There is a wide ran…

> The truth of the matter is for most organizations, IT is a cost center along with legal and finance. It is not their money maker. They have no interest in innovative IT/software "technology" until their competitor in the same industry as them has it. Price matters. Laying off people easily matter.

Accurate and poignant. Having lived in the banks for a while, this will always be the case in industries. They don't give a shit if you have a passion or about your career. They want you to be a "xyz developer with 50 years of experience". Sometimes I think we forget how the real world works when we are enamored with the cool things computers can do.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#149

Post by hogFeast »

afrojack123 wrote: post #105
hogFeast wrote: post #12

This is still very shallow thinking. Every company that views tech as a cost rather than a way to generate revenue will invest in these contracts/offshore centres, and that is the noose round their neck. In most cases, but not all, hiring consultants suggests you don't understand enough about your own business to manage it yourself ( insert image of senior executive trying to work out the Zoom so they can check their…

Forever employee spotted. Every company that uses Shopify instead of developing their own e-commerce site considers tech as a cost. Health care insurance companies are not interested in joining the advertising, SaaS, hardware tech biz. For them IT is a cost. A mandatory cost that supports the business in the same way legal and finance do. If you took away the insurance policies but only had IT, the business wouldn't…

You are thinking about cost like a middle manager. If you are using Shopify, that isn't a cost, it is an investment. It isn't like legal or finance, usually, because it is product-related and can be used to reduce prices/improve service.

Health care insurance (in the US) is, ironically although not surprisingly given your obvious ineptitude, one of the all-time best examples. US administration costs are larger than most countries public health budgets. Insurers in retail lines, although not in health care, picked this up very quickly because of distribution changes in the 90s. They invest heavily into tech, and the ones that have invested most heavily are seeing the fastest top-line.

It is great some people still think this way though. One of the great market inefficiencies of the last ten years was firms/investors being unable to distinguish between a cost and an investment.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#150

Post by RealityVoid »

marktangotango wrote: post #143
ethbro wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non technical folks under-appreciate the cost and frequency of long-term technical debt. It's easy to save money on developers, yet very quickly produce a net-negative result for the company. Sadly, few companies have guardrails to prevent these sort of shortsighted choices. E.g. requiring parallel approval of projects by IT architects (whose existence admittedly carries its own hazard).

> Non technical folks under-appreciate the cost and frequency of long-term technical debt. Undoubtedly this is true, but there's an implication here in this context that somehow on shore, or more well paid developers don't create such technical debt, when in fact they do. It amazes me that I see team after team of competent well intentioned developers create one ball of mud after another. It's striking really.

> It amazes me that I see team after team of competent well intentioned developers create one ball of mud after another. It's striking really.

It is! But I don't understand... how? How does that happen? You should put good people together and get something good. But it is not always so. Very puzzling to me.

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