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Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

economist.com

191–200 of 285 posts

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for…

> I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. I try to see it from the perspective of a non-native speaker trying to learn English. If I know no English, and pay for teachers to teach me English, I definitely do not want to be taught Indian English. Not because it's wrong, not because it's $whatever_adjective, but because it will sound incorrect to t…

It depends on the goal, though. What if you were a Spanish speaker trying to move to India, and didn't already speak any Indian language to a useful level? I'm guessing in that scenario you'd want to learn Indian English.

Same thing if you were a call center representative communicating in English with Indian audiences.

As for non-native English speakers, there are already some choices to make when deciding what to learn. If someone learns US English as a second language, they'll find it a lot harder to understand people from the UK, especially less globally common styles like those in Scotland and Northern Ireland. But if someone learns British English, they'll probably find those styles easier to understand than Louisiana or Newfoundland English, to name two less standard North American varieties. (Cockney is especially difficult to understand for non-native speakers of any kind, so I'm leaving it out of this.)

In this case, we're discussing an Indian commenter's choice to use their local dialect of English when discussing a topic about Indian tech companies with a global English-speaking audience.

Yes, I admit I thought "codes" was wrong when I first read the comment, but that's because I didn't know that aspect of Indian English, and I no longer view it as wrong. Anyway, it didn't detract from my interest in or respect for the commenter's substantive opinion.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that is the reason why there is interest in outsourcing to Eastern Europe. Case in point being EPAM Systems. Indian IT consultancies might have huge operations but they are not the only show in town.

Yes, and we collaborated with a few dozen EPAM developers on some projects at my last full-time corporate job, and all of the ones I worked with (both the in-person EPAM teammates and the remote ones) were very sharp people who definitely enjoy technological endeavors. As development firms such as EPAM gain traction, I expect some of the massive Indian firms will lose ground.

Right. I'm counting on that to happen. This should force the hands of the Indian firms to innovate or perish. That should be very interesting to watch.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#193

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.

I think either is ok depending on your intention: codes is to suggest the stuff is plural, countable etc, e.g. you have a Bash script, Makefile and Java project (full of files), this is a set of heterogeneous countable things, hence codes. Code is a "mass noun" implying countability or cardinality is irrelevant, e.g. push the code to github. That said I always remarked Indians says "maths" where I would say "math", a…

The full name of the subject is "mathematics"; a plural. "Maths" is a logical shortening of it. "Math" is actually weird.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#194
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 USD/hour is not what developer earns, but what you pay for developer time. Overhead (buildings, managers, computers, toilet paper), sales commissions, taxes, and off time and eats big big part of that money.

The rule of thumb used to be, total costs = what you pay them * 1.5 to cover that stuff. So 3200 becomes $4800 (or just under $57k a year) - that's still a good deal given what you'd get. I've worked with eastern and central European developers and some of them are phenomenal (the skill breakdown is about equivalent to UK devs as a pool maybe tending towards them been slightly better but there will be some element of…

I think you are misunderstanding what the $20 refer to. They are what the customer is paying to the company for a single billable hour. That money is not only used to pay the developer but usually the rest of the company too. Sales, marketing, accountants and other employees that aren't directly assigned to a project or are waiting for their next project will have to be paid from that billable hour as well. You can call them greedy or whatever but usually they get away with a 50% cut or sometimes more. Ok, now you are left with $10 which represents the labor cost + office space + equipment needed by the developer himself. So the employee gets paid $6.66 per hour before taxes but the customer is paying $20 for that.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Purchases are good in the short term. You can evaluate them and pick the most suitable. Once you have settled with one product and know what you want it may make sense to work on optimizing your business with a custom fit solution.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#196
post #86
post #76

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I don't think that is how these companies see themselves. For them they are just a source of cheap labor and the only reason a company would engage with them is for their low cost. They think that the engineers and the talent is easily replaceable and they even think they do adequate work nothing earth shattering. So the company's only aim will be to out maneuver the other IT consulting companies by undercutting on p…

You're both describing a 'market for lemons'.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Thank you for that article. I like to think that I keep up with what some call "Freakonomics" (not the book, but the concept), and I had never come across that succinct and well developed model. Again - thank you.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#197
post #53
post #19

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These firms specialized in digital transformation. But the digital transformation is over, now its the digital cleanup. The companies that understood the benefits of digital technology moved to it, and the majority of the others went out of business. In this new phase, your digital infrastructure allows you to move quickly, or you lose business to those that can move quickly. A lot of these old legacy applications, a…

> But the digital transformation is over "Digitalisation" has merely been replaced with "Industry 4.0". And after that hype train ends, they'll come up with some other nonsense.

Maybe in supply-chain, logistics and industrial manufacturing, but it is "Digital Therapeutics" in healthcare (in the US) in the age of Corona. Regardless, marketers have eternal unbounded opportunities to come up with new nonsense that sells, but doesn't deliver on those promises. "Somewhere, over the rainbow... a pot of gold!"

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#198
post #8

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The truest saying in software is that the highest value output of a project is an engineering team that understands your business. Past a certain point of size/complexity you can't buy one of those for any price, you have to make it. Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense.

Where to outsource is the right question. I could write a word processor, but my company just buys me Microsoft office. My company could buy the software I wrote from an outsourcer, but we consider it a competitive advantage to do it in house.

Buying a product is different than paying someone to make a product for you. Since your company is the only customer for that product there is no benefit in outsourcing it other than the ability to rent a developer (contracting might be a better option). Nobody else is going to buy that product.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

60k from tier one engineering colleges. It includes all branches. Not only CS students. Similar number to the number of students enrolled as undergrads in entire engineering colleges in USA.

The number of engineering students enrolled in India as undergrad is around 350k (It's not over half million. My bad).

So students from tier 1 colleges makes about 17%. That's not a small fraction that can be ignored.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#200

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…

May I ask what your going rates are for C# programmers? ($USD)
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