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Why India outsourcing is doomed

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Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#31

Post by woah »

kamaal wrote: post #11

Some parts of this post are true, some are straight wrong. To let you know I worked for a Major Indian IT services firm for over 5 years. >>with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings. Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time. In fact if you are working with any moderately big outsourcing firm, they will likely…

I can't imagine the code is very good quality with the working conditions you describe

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#33

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I really should not be commenting on this - it feels like feedin the trolls. Ah well. So here is my "15 years of experience and no data points" commentary

Indian Outsourcing has a history that made it the way it is today - and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality or skill level of (averaged) developers. The article smacks horribly of what I call "loud old white manager of forty Indians" syndrome.

India in the 60s and 70s tried to cut itself off from the outside world and political strategy effectively strangled any native IT industry in it's crib. So Indian hackers did what hackers all over do - got round the problem, either by emigrating or by flying out to find clients. Outsourcing was for a while quite literally the only game in town for IT.

It worked really well - and therein lies the rub. If you want to maintain a good client relationship with a Fortune 500 company mostly you do it at the middle manager level.

Fast forward to 2014 - Now it is clear that software is eating the world, senior managers are going to replace middle managers with some combination of simplified process, automated decision making and "empowering" frontline workers. And yet those middle managers are the ones outsourcers have spent decades learning to work with.

This has left a mark on the Indian university system - with a lack of professors (remember the good ones left) the schooling was left to commercial companies - and it is only slowly recovering from this bias - "don't challenge the loud old white guy" and "learn Java" are two axioms that (good) universities would not teach but outsourcers have built in.

So there is innovation and hacker culture in India. But it is not as celebrated as "going to work, having a proper job and working for a named Fortune 500 company". Every hackers mother prefers the second one, and India has an unusual situation that the majority of IT education prefers it too.

Apart from this quirk of history Indian outsourcing and project management is down the line the same as every where else - gosh! Training at the expense of the client ! Rapid turnover on internal projects! Badly spec'd out projects with minimal business justification turn out badly!

This is not an Indian problem. This is our industry's problem - and treating it as anything else is ... Wrong

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#34

Post by lifeisstillgood »

quarterwave wrote: post #20

"Finding talent in Hi Tech centers like Bangalore is almost as hard as finding qualified people in Silicon Valley." This is a good point. A related question: Can more and better work be done by less people? If so, are 'two-dozen dev-ops' (a rhetorical number) adequate for all scenarios?

Yes, more and better work can be done by less people - it's axiomatic in software. It just takes longer - and often looks like people sitting around thinking and experimenting.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#35

Post by kamaal »

woah wrote: post #31
kamaal wrote: post #11

Some parts of this post are true, some are straight wrong. To let you know I worked for a Major Indian IT services firm for over 5 years. >>with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings. Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time. In fact if you are working with any moderately big outsourcing firm, they will likely…

I can't imagine the code is very good quality with the working conditions you describe

Code quality is largely dictated by the client. And at times people who basically 'sign off' your code, Pretty much every project will have their own checklist, there won't be a common checklist because of legal copyrights and contractual things preventing things getting shared out of your project. So it depends on what the client demands. But there are very strict SLA's though(Based on what the client wants). I never recall a single instance when we shipped anything without unit test cases, UAT's and elaborate regression testing.

Automation is a trendy and people get awarded prizes all the time for writing tools that save time and improve quality.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#36

Post by dagw »

codingdave wrote: post #13
neebz wrote: post #3

The most important point is of blended rate. Outsourcing industry has a huge conflict of interest with the customer. Customer wants minimum number of high-quality engineers to complete work in the minimum possible time. Outsourcing companies want the opposite. They don't hire high-quality engineers because a) they eat in to their profit margins because of high salaries b) they get things done quickly which reduces th…

I wish I could read the article, but it is asking me to log in, so I am skipping it. But your comments remind me of what I hear for a lot of Americans (and Indian expatriates) who tend to be negative about Indian workers, when often the root cause of their complaints are cultural differences, and the ways that it impacts the work. I have had great relationships with outsourced teams. But I did not get them just from…

For what it's worth you can just click cancel on the log in popup and get straight to the article.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#38

Post by r0h1n »

woah wrote: post #28
curiousDog wrote: post #24

Oh not this stupid argument again. Many problems he mentions aren't specific to India, you'll find them across all developing economies (We had most of the same issues contracting work to a Chinese and Brazilian company). At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. And some companies are clearly okay with said cheap work. There's a reason the IT industry in Hyderabad/B'lore is booming. Want solid contracting wor…

Your post contains more xenophobia than the article, "comrade"

How is that?

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#39

Post by IndianAstronaut »

perlgeek wrote: post #16

Did anybody else find it odd that every occurrence of the world "people" is a link? Is that some SEO link-building stuff? And if yes, do you consider that OK?

I think it's okay, but Google can easily catch on to stuff like that. Their Penguin algorithm is designed for that.

Re: Why India outsourcing is doomed

#40

Post by jeswin »

kamaal wrote: post #11

Some parts of this post are true, some are straight wrong. To let you know I worked for a Major Indian IT services firm for over 5 years. >>with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings. Most of the big IT services firms have very elaborate and very active community of people who innovate all the time. In fact if you are working with any moderately big outsourcing firm, they will likely…

I'll try to reply cautiously, but I don't think your picture of innovation is accurate. To start with, the big-5 IT majors find it very difficult to attract talent. Even back when I was in college ('98-), the IT majors were a fallback option for most people. In fact, the best students didn't even bother applying there. This has only gotten worse now, from what I hear.

It is also my opinion that there isn't a lot of innovation happening in these places. You could see some of the work being published (in their blogs) but the quality of work (or innovation) is nothing to write home about. Many of them are simply rehashed whitepapers on topics widely discussed on the internet.

Having said that, I don't think Indian IT is in any sort of danger, in fact things are getting better. Interesting work is happening, just not in large IT companies. There are way more talented, passionate, excited tech folks here than at any time before.

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