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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

#201

Post by gourabmi »

BossingAround wrote: post #142
gourabmi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to point out your claim about 'majority of English speakers'. The number of English speakers in the Indian subcontinent is much higher than anywhere else in the world, including US. Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s... If numbers decide what is the norm, Indian English should be it. However, I feel like there are other factors that you are using to determine the "correct" En…

> majority of English speakers That's fair... That should have been "majority of native English speakers". Corrected. You'll now argue who's a native speaker, won't you... :)

Of course, I would. :)

IMHO everything other than British English is a regional derivative. The software world has caught up to that fact and soon the popular language tests will follow. They would need to do the needful eventually. Lol.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#202

Post by yawaramin »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #71

To set context, I'm Indian. I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time. So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes; Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other i…

Can confirm, I worked for Publicis Sapient (formerly SapientRazorfish) for a bit and heard some horror stories about consultant firm software devs. (Ironically enough, SR/PS is a consulting firm too...)

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#203

Post by triceratops »

GordonS wrote: post #66
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 Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated.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…

> The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields. I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cogniz…

> everyone else just wanted to be "a manager"...I'd asked about this strangenes

It isn't strange in the slightest. If you look outside tech, you'll find this in every industry in every country. Everywhere in the world the person in charge is more respected and better-paid than the person doing the work. And it's always been this way. Tech, and software-heavy tech in particular, is the outlier.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#204

Post by triceratops »

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…

> ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.

I think it's because managers get paid more money and have more respect. People wanting to be manager (or chief, captain, general, shaman, headman, minister, consul, cardinal, king, nobleman, judge) isn't a unique feature of any single culture or organization. It's a universal drive across every culture throughout history.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#205

Post by D-Coder »

GordonS wrote: post #51
lgleason wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to…

> Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 peop…

I once dealt with offshore developers who decided to store some binary values ("feature on or off") as ASCII "1"s and "0"s. Yep — ASCII-encoded binary.

They could have at least used "Y" and "N".

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#206

Post by jackcosgrove »

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…

Regarding the lack of secondary level CS education, it is a problem everywhere. You have to be passionate about teaching CS because practicing it is so lucrative. There's a global shortage of CS teachers especially at the secondary level.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#208

Post by hnick »

oneplane wrote: post #31
_the_inflator wrote: post #15

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…

> The bigger problem with this is that the IT systems are not as well defined or a closed system as the other examples might be. A ledger would be simple to verify in comparison: you apply a fixed set of rules to a fixed period of data and it must result in something within a known range. With software you can do a little bit of determining that the 'borders' of your 'box' of functionality would be, but to do an exhaustive verification is so far from profitable that it's only done in a few highly regulated systems like flight controllers.

That's a really good point. We haven't even settled on how to weed out bad programmers through a formal structure yet, and we still sometimes hear about companies setting KPIs based on LoC or bugs fixed. I'm not sure if it's even possible to have an objective framework to evaluate an outsourced system apart from "meets the spec" which is usually not very helpful unless there is in-house expertise spending a mountain of effort building the spec in the first place.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#209

Post by renewiltord »

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.…

Well, we all know why that is the case: uncertainty. If I pay $100k for a thing, I'm actually paying $100k for a chance at the thing by the date. Most likely, I'm going to end up paying 2x for the thing by 2x the time. Happens everywhere.

And that's not because the guy making it is shit. It's because while he's making it, the market is moving and I'm watching it, and when it moves enough I have to come over to him and tell him to change things.

That's why slow, costly things overrun by more and are later. It's because the world changes, and fast+cheap things are superior because even if they're worse, they exist and can therefore be changed to what the world is.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#210

Post by caoilte »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #80
mjohn wrote: 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…

> outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology. Internally, we consider outsourcing the same as pausing all forward momentum on the outsourced components. It's just a reduction in current cost with an understanding that there will no new features and very little maintenance.

Yup. Very often. In fact every system I ever saw being outsourced was being done so in the knowledge that it was going to die. It's a face saving gesture that allows executives to sidestep the sunk cost write-off.

In a couple of large retail examples it was obvious that they knew their entire bricks and mortar business model only had a decade or so of life left in it and they figured their godawful legacy ERP solution would stumble on until then.

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