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Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

economist.com

171–180 of 285 posts

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#171

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…

You used example industries of legal and financial and even in those, passion and innovation are force multipliers. The domain-specific systems in these industries are every bit as ill-defined and open as software, it just looks very, very different. As a layperson to these industries, most people are only exposed to the pedestrian mainstream aspects, kind of like being exposed to only the teenager manning the Geek Squad desk and bringing them a WinPC to defrag to "speed up".

Dig not that many layers deep, and you'll expose the ill-defined and open systems in those industries. This is true nearly everywhere in nearly any human endeavor. This is why the Japanese kodawari concept (meticulous care in craftsmanship, design and service) is even feasible across an entire culture for centuries and counting. Once you really start caring about the customer, your entire center of gravity in your relationship with them changes, and you start stepping through the process through their eyes to anticipate their needs and empathize with how they likely feel through the process you set up for them to go through.

This is very different from the Western "attention to detail" concept. Personally for me, the Western concept has less of a connotation with focus upon caring and empathizing to "listen for" the details, and more upon a situational awareness to "watch for" the legalistic steps of a spelled-out procedure (perhaps rooted in an Industrial Age paradigm?).

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#172
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…

> The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution.

Like 99% of business is run like this. So... It's hardly surprising.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#173
I forget where I heard this quote but I think it summarizes the whole "outsourcing as a boondogle" scenario:

1. A good development team in the US/Europe costs $X

2. An equivalent team in not the US/Europe costs 75% of $X

3. A terrible team in not the US/Europe costs 25% of $X

Most outsourcing decisions instead of stopping at Option 2 and enjoying the 25% savings, got greedy and went full bore to Option 3 and thought themselves geniuses.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#174
Just judging from the title it sounds silly. Last I remember while working at one of the companies between 2006-2008, COBOL & mainframes was a good chunk of their work.

Obsolescence is their bread and butter. I do agree they do have a lot of wrong and toxic people running middle management along with short term thinking. But that is partly due to their business model, a business model that gave the best returns.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#175

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…

It's not a hit piece. The whole article lays out the issues with cost focused consultancies. (Please tell me that you're a subscriber and read the entirety of it, rather than the little bit that is available freely.)

The issue with lack of tech talent - is that today, more than ever, we realise that tech/engineering talent is what drives the world. You've seen how this pandemic forced conservative companies to turn to online retail, just to survive. There is no going back...

You may ask - how does that affect those consultancies? Well... Major service and COTS providers need less and less consultants at implementation phase. Companies that go for SaaS need specialists(tax, compliance, logistics, etc), that Indian engineering grads don't satisfy.

In the end the article is about how those companies need to address lower demand for their services.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#177
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).

Well we have more than a hundred languages in India. A lot of them look very different to each other if you are looking for skin color. There are east Indians as well who look Asians.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#178

Just judging from the title it sounds silly. Last I remember while working at one of the companies between 2006-2008, COBOL & mainframes was a good chunk of their work. Obsolescence is their bread and butter. I do agree they do have a lot of wrong and toxic people running middle management along with short term thinking. But that is partly due to their business model, a business model that gave the best returns.

Nail / head I think; a lot of western devs, especially the HN crowd, has the luxury of moving to the next 'cool' thing every couple of years. But they did write code, they laid the groundwork, and it has to be developed further on.

Billions of LOC of Java are lying around and there is a need for an army of developers to look after it.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Define "work ethic"? It's a highly subjective term.

And I'm 100% sure that a country of 212mil will have a lot of talent. But engineering isn't singing or contortion - you need appropriate education and right conditions.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#180
You can get very good developers from these companies, and you can get it in volume, you just need to insist on it.

When you ask for Sr.managers, 2xmanagers, 2x Asst. Managers, 2x Business Analyst (with MBAs). You are quickly adding up costs for non-functional heads. The only way to remedy that is to go cheap on developers and bloat their numbers to match the overhead.

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