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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

#161

Post by novok »

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've worked with good and bad offshored indian developers. Usually the good ones are hired directly by the company and they're great to work with and they have a passion for software.

I've also worked with clueless ones very early in my career and the cluelessness gap is stark. Working with local year 1 university students worked far better.

Also big timezone gaps are horrible for everyone involved.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#162

Post by novok »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #97
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…

Forgive my skepticism > 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 ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. SV is a hotbed for a ton of international talent, not just American. Indeed, SV pays the most out of anywhere on the planet and therefore has an in…

The good ones eventually end up in SV or work for the international offices of SV or work at local superstars like flipkart and such because of the pay differential. %40 of SV staff being some form of 'asian' is a testament to that.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#163

Post by kumarski »

demadog wrote: post #101
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…

You have great ideas on Twitter! Your website doesn't show any specific projects you've done, and I totally understand client NDAs, but is there anything you can share to help understand your perspective and experience? I'm genuinely curious and not trying to call you out, you seem brilliant and your team sounds like it, but it's hard to verify because there's no public projects from what I can see on your website or…

Financial institutions, hedge funds, family offices, and PE all have restrictive NDA's.

The blog will be updated at some point, I'm just busy.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#164

Post by kumarski »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #97
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…

Forgive my skepticism > 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 ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling. SV is a hotbed for a ton of international talent, not just American. Indeed, SV pays the most out of anywhere on the planet and therefore has an in…

Pakistan is on an FATF grey-list.

Every employee we work with is highly vetted.

The level of untapped talent and work ethic in Pakistan is extreme.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#165

Post by novok »

Bombthecat wrote: post #145
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.

That just sounds like employees that have a high management overhead compared to employees that do not require that. Which directly translates to organizational scaling cost and more management employee $$ cost.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#166

Post by kumarski »

woah wrote: post #93
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…

Your comment sounds very hyperbolic in the description of your team's skills, and yet you still focus mostly on how cheap your developers are, and the importance of your expert management. I don't think that I'd be able to write good code if my primary attribute was cheapness, regardless of whether or not it was good money for my location. I would be trying to do my time as a developer and work my way out of the disp…

My cofounder's expert management.*

I myself do not build or code outside of Matlab.

Developing talent and picking dark-horses is hard work.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#167

Post by kumarski »

chris_wot wrote: post #140
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…

The vast majority of comments here are from people with first hand experience of the level of incompetence from large I find consultancies. I have personally witnessed a major Indian IT consultancy cause problems with a file server migration. They had no idea that you needed to propagate permissions from the base folder. This took out production for 8 hours. In the end, an on-site employee took over and fixed the iss…

Recruiting is a skillset.

If you do it wrong, things will always go bad.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#168

Post by lifeisstillgood »

TheOperator wrote: post #151
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).

I've heard non-technical folks with their heads in the clouds expecting to run millions of dollars in transactions through an IT system, but cringed at my suggestion that they're likely to dump more than a couple hundred grand one-time into the scheme. Yet the same person doesn't blink at paying significantly more than that yearly maintaining existing low-tech systems, and has already spent millions on ERP projects.…

The difference is that an existing IT system is real and can be purchased for X amount. A potential future one cannot - and while devs are able to estimate (poorly) how long it will take others cannot and there is a real human bias - in fact one could say the future system is the fantasy

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#169

Post by novok »

theflyinghorse wrote: post #48
baybal2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one word to say — JAVA. It's pretty much, the one and only thing that keeps enterprisey software maintainance people occupied. Thought, the Java is finally on decline on the backend. Android is pulling Java devs from enterprise, and cheaper to use languages displace Java there.

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.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#170

Post by JAlexoid »

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).

That's literally the job of a CIO/CTO - manage technical capability of the company.

If you have a bad CIO/CTO - you're screwed long term.

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