Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence • Hacker News Board

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#211

Post by caoilte » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 12:27 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #169

theflyinghorse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with Java. Modern Java is pretty nice to use, fairly fast, has an incredible amount of libraries and tooling to do just about anything you want to do and a vast pool of talent to draw from. At my current job I try to stick to Java for any new services because it's a great overall language.

People don't like Java for the same reasons they don't like Jira. It's all the culture surrounding it.

The JIRA culture would be fine if the software wasn't a total piece of crap.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#212

Post by api » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

From what I've heard, programmers that are as good as domestic (US/EU) programmers can absolutely be hired in India and lots of other places.

Problem is they are not significantly cheaper than domestic programmers once you add management overhead and then compare the result against equally skilled domestic programmers in lower cost of living places in the US/EU. It's more practical and may be no more expensive to hire someone good in West Virginia, Kentucky, or Michigan where rent or mortgage payments and many other expenses are quite a bit lower than they are in big coastal cities.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#213

Post by hogFeast » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 12:40 AM UTC

afrojack123 wrote: post #185

hogFeast wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Legal, finance, Shopify are all useless without a product to sell. Hence, costs. Your business acumen is messed up. If your product is stagnant like most financial products, importance shifts to other things like marketing, cross-selling, etc. Don't get confused between the profit center and the cost center that occurs when products are stagnant. Yes, some tech has improved things like better analytics and tracking f…

How does this weird chicken-and-egg situation make sense to you? You seem to have this weird notion of which things come from other things??? It is very odd. Why are you posing a situation in which someone is using Shopify without a product?

Financial products aren't stagnant. This is a wild non sequitir generalisation which doesn't really indicate careful thought (they aren't stagnant, duh). And yes, as I said, tech is used to improve the product...it is an investment...that is why you can capitalise development costs.

And yes, just yes. Again, you seem to (somehow) have picked the worst possible example for your argument. Have you been to an Apple store? Is it just a IPhone lying on the ground? No, the stores are product-related. Literally, you picked the company in the world that has specialised most heavily in trying to added product value through their stores. They are not a cost, they are an investment (even companies that have a low-cost store format...that is a reflection of their product/brand/etc. and again, this will keep coming up, some of these costs are literally capitalised and literally investments on the balance sheet).

Again, another bizarre point about which things come from other things...a distinction which presumably makes sense to you. Again though, marketing is an investment, it is how consumer staples companies have built up brands (again, it is something that some investors also capitalise onto the balance sheet). Marketing is also not regarded as a "cost center" in any business...at this point, I can only assume/hope you are trolling...but just read any financial report of a consumer-facing company. Any.

These rigid groups you have in your mind are very weird too. X is cost center, Y is marketing, Z is a cost...it has been fun for me but...this isn't how the real world works.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#214

Post by erikerikson » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

rafiki6 wrote: post #148

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 gi…

Isn't this why a variety of industries such as banking are being or will be disrupted?

For example in banking, I would love to set up income apportionment (i.e. x% here, y% there, ...) but for some reason I have to split out income deposits every once in a while via manual, external tools. Why is it again that we haven't set up two sided and payee specific authorizations so that we never hand out data that can be used to steal from us and we could be notified if a payee tries to bump the bill? I've suggested these and other things to banks and credit unions for years...

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#215

Post by ajo_mathew » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 12:59 AM UTC

yawaramin wrote: post #202

Brajeshwar wrote: post #71

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 i…

Can confirm, I worked for Publicis Sapient (formerly SapientRazorfish) for a bit and heard some horror stories about consultant firm software devs. (Ironically enough, SR/PS is a consulting firm too...)

Depends on managers and who pulls for what work.

Western companies take all the great work and push down to Indian firms not interesting work, some dumb enough managers will bow to client( bootlicker ) without much of know how take that job and come to us.

I worked in MNC and Startups seen my fair share of so called types of projects/managers.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#216

Post by el-salvador » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #108

gourabmi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Umm... 20$ an hour, meaning 3200$ a month, would be quite a nice salary in a lot of Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, ...). You get people with BAs or MAs in comp science who have been developers for 2-5 years. While I'm sure some will say that 3.2k is ridiculous in country X, I personally met people in all of the above countries working for less while being more experienced.

Definitely! I'd love to earn $3200 a month here...

I don't mind much about the wage gap between countries when I do local work, but it gets ackward when working with remote teams.

Like I may earn $20k/yr here for what my teammates abroad would be making $100k/yr.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#217

Post by mahastore » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

goatforce5 wrote: post #104

la6471 wrote: post #75

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.

> and Indians are the most diverse group in the world What metric(s) are you using to measure that diversity? I live in Toronto, Canada, and approximately 50% of residents here were born overseas. Toronto likes to boast it is one of the most diverse cities in the world (based on that metric, at least).

Diverse in terms of religion food habits culture race and of course language. Over the course of human history India has been a melting pot of people coming from all over the world.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#218

Post by afrojack123 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

hogFeast wrote: post #213

afrojack123 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal, finance, Shopify are all useless without a product to sell. Hence, costs. Your business acumen is messed up. If your product is stagnant like most financial products, importance shifts to other things like marketing, cross-selling, etc. Don't get confused between the profit center and the cost center that occurs when products are stagnant. Yes, some tech has improved things like better analytics and tracking f…

How does this weird chicken-and-egg situation make sense to you? You seem to have this weird notion of which things come from other things??? It is very odd. Why are you posing a situation in which someone is using Shopify without a product? Financial products aren't stagnant. This is a wild non sequitir generalisation which doesn't really indicate careful thought (they aren't stagnant, duh). And yes, as I said, tech…

You sound like a multi-level marketing person who tells you to join calling it an investment.

I pose the situation of using Shopify without a product to prove my point. Shopify isn't a valid expense with a product but you can have a product without Shopify. You might have to some really inefficient selling like door-to-door and leave money on the table but the point is you could do it.

Yes, financial products are stagnant. Insurance companies stat tables don't change that much. Credit cards from Capital One's perspective have not changed that much. Maybe from Visa's perspective it is considered profit center and have to change but thats because they make the credit cards and do the processing.

Profit center and cost center classification is important because it tells you what the business really cares about.

Yes marketing is important for companies and even more so for companies that are distributors and don't make their own products. Walmart does not make its own products but it doesn't need so much marketing because there is only a few players. Capital One is also a distributor but it puts a heavy emphasis on marketing because the selling credit cards is very competitive.

I'll give you a point. For distributors in a competitive space like selling credit cards, marketing is the profit center because a good marketing campaign is how they win.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#219

Post by pyuser583 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:17 AM UTC

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…

It sounds like a description of the Indian caste system. If I recall one person would wash dishes, and another dry then, because of caste imposed rules.

Except it’s now applied to programming languages.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#220

Post by andrekandre » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:20 AM UTC

zentiggr wrote: post #141

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

one thing i notice about a lot of companies is, they just dont invest into growing and improving the knowledge and skills of "green people" or they stop short at very basic stuff

i understand there are costs, but i think its eventually self-defeating.. maybe there is something i am missing...