Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence • Hacker News Board

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#181

Post by JAlexoid » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #70

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 developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually: Unfortunately, the list that follows describes the managers of literally every US-based company. If this is the requirement for successful offshore consultancy, then engineers here can rest assured their jobs will never actually be at stake. When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) und…

LOL!

No. Engineers should be afraid of offshoring, when they stop learning and take their job for granted.

Also - missing the "next big thing" is something that people do all the time.

One thing that one of my former colleagues told me - "Our job, as engineers, is to make our jobs obsolete in the end".

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#182

Post by JAlexoid » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #63

entha_saava wrote: post #39

As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this. Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor. The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses do…

Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right. India has a lot of Engineering students. There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Sw…

60k is about 4% of all CS related engineering students in India. So, the generalisation is accurate.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#183

Post by JAlexoid » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

the-dude wrote: post #4

There is little substance in the article. Biggest point made is that enterprise software is easier to administer and use. I feel they entirely missed the elephant in the room : SaaS.

They haven't. What do you think "cloud" is? (I'm a subscriber, I read the full article)

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#184

Post by marjann » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

I believe there is a bias towards the outsourcing, at least judging by the comments.

Let me tell you my side of the story. We are a software development company based in Macedonia - Emit Knowledge

From personal experience, we've refactored/rewritten code that was developed by development teams from USA, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, UK where the hourly rate is sky high compared to ours.

According to me the problem is not in the outsourcing itself, but rather in the company size and culture. Bigger companies tend to have stronger sales teams, getting whatever is in their way, closing deals without having expertise and know-how. The only driving factor is how to maximize profit. Hire less experience devs, leave the SRS so you can charge CRs and that kind of doctrine.

On the other hand, I can tell that we as a company have better processes than bigger companies: - having our own framework: https://signals.emitknowledge.com/ soon to be open sourced; - having multiple products, which you will find as rarity when it comes to agencies; - having an research and development; - before we start working with a client, the agreement is that it is a two sides stick, the client needs to be part of the development if success is expected; - regular communication is a must; - we discuss with the clients to reduce scopes if we identify that it will increase costs without providing a business value at the end;

The difference is in the culture. As a CEO I would like my client's business to succeed so we can work together as partners, long terms, instead of getting money from CRs and playing "you haven't specified this".

Be transparent guys. Stop playing games with your clients.

You need to give in order to get.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#185

Post by afrojack123 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

hogFeast wrote: post #149

afrojack123 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 for companies such as personalized car insurance or paperless but notice how this improves the core products features or cost.

"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."

No, just no. If I am Apple selling iPhones, no investment in Shopify or websites is going to help me make better iPhones. Shopify is not product-related. What you mention is a Mandatory marketing expense which is also a cost center. You either have your marketing team or you hire an external marketing agency.

You mention distribution. Marketing without a product to sell is useless. Hence, costs.

Insurance and other financial companies need marketing to sell. It is a mandatory expense for them. It is not their product but their product is stagnant so it matters very little.

However for Facebook, marketing is their product, profit center. There are other orgs who sell marketing automation software. There it is a profit center.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#186

Post by user5994461 » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

hogFeast wrote: post #42

DrJokepu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had extremely good experiences with opening a subsidiary office in Sofia, Bulgaria (not outsourcing, but legit part of the company.) Code quality went way up compared to what was developed in the US/UK, somewhat less expensive (but not that much, like you said), and most importantly and perhaps also the most surprisingly, the attitude of the young kids working there is way more positive and well-adjusted that what…

Yep, am in the UK. I have mainly outsourced design work (most to Belarus). Work is better, cheaper, faster, and the general attitude is better I would agree...I would even say they speak better English. In the UK, you will ask someone to do something, you wait a week, ask where it is, and they haven't started, need more information to start, and want more money. Jokes. I am not going to go on about it but, as a Brit,…

Where did you try to outsource in the UK?

I can't imagine trying to find an outsourcing firm in the UK. London can absorb all the good developers between tech companies, banks and startups. There is little reason to work as a freelancer trying to compete with Eastern Europe.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#187

Post by JAlexoid » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #23

zabil wrote: post #20

Major IT companies in India get a lot of revenue from maintainence projects and there is usually no scope for making major changes or innovating there. The time and material billing for these make it quite attractive from a revenue point vs fixed bid greenfield projects. I don't think that situation will change anytime time soon as along as these companies stick to services.

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.

> Thought, the Java is finally on decline on the backend.

There's not much decline of Java overall, just a shift. The pie is getting bigger.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#188

Post by Arnavion » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #116

klodolph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear: -- "please revert at the earliest" -- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard -- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by…

>-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard

To be clear, India does not use a 10000 grouping system; that's China's and Japan's system. India's system is that the first group is three digits, and subsequent ones are two digits. eg 10^9 is 1,00,00,00,000

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#189

Post by JAlexoid » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #32

geogra4 wrote: post #11

Well, at least from where I sit they're still getting plenty of business as with the apparent sun-setting of the H1-B program companies are just hiring offshoring firms instead.

> with the apparent sun-setting of the H1-B program companies are just hiring offshoring firms instead. Are you speculating here or have seen an actual trend out there?

The article mentions that big corporate tech departments are just moving their operations to Indie - like Walmart has Walmart Labs in India, despite having no retail business there.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#190

Post by imtringued » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

TriNetra wrote: post #95

_the_inflator wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." This sad…

if one is looking for $10-20 hourly developer, certainly the result will likely be what you've experienced. Big IT Indian firms usually will choose one or two highly talented developers for a project team and others just hop around them. Usually these projects aren't also very engineering-intensive and becomes boring once the base framework is created for creative folks. Good devs don't stay longer in a company at le…

When developing nations that are primarily known for their cheap products start creating competitive high quality products what happens is that they start charging just as much as every other developed nation. That same dynamic plays out with Indian software developers.

If they can deliver X amount of value they can also charge X for their service. This means if you hire an Indian for $10 an hour you're going to get value equivalent to $10.

Since productivity per member drops as you increase team size you can't just hire a bigger team to get yourself out of this problem. The true number of developers that your project needs is probably constant and quite low.

If you hire cheaper but less experienced developers then it might simply take 6 times longer to finish the project than if you had hired an Indian developer that charges $60 per hour. This is usually where the project fails. Managers expect the project to be done in 6 months but this estimate is based on competent developers with 3 years of experience, not beginners who are working on their first project and first need to gather 3 years of experience to adequately finish the project.

Really the only way you can get a real bargain is by hiring someone, letting them gain experience without giving them a raise. The difference between market rate and actual developer salary is where you save the most money. The tricky part is creating a environment in which people want to stay.