Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence • Hacker News Board

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#231

Post by oa335 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #162

theflyinghorse wrote: post #97

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…

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.

It's much harder immigrating from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#232

Post by oa335 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #162

theflyinghorse wrote: post #97

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…

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.

It's much harder immigrating to U.S. from Pakistan than from India...more likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#233

Post by mavidser » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:10 AM 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 Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated.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…

These consulting companies are often referred to as "mass recruiters" in most engineering colleges. I went to one such school too, and the the qualifying test/interview was a couple of CS101 questions, and was the default option of employment for anyone who wasn't joining any other organization (this also included good mechanical, chemical and civil engineers with little to no CS background, but the market had slowed down at the time, and they had to resort to IT jobs).

This might not be the case for every firm or client, but I hear a lot of my friends complaining about there not being very little work, and if you're someone competent enough, you can complete a day's work in an hour and play Fortnite for the rest of the day.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#234

Post by GolDDranks » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:23 AM 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…

I work as a Software Engineer in Japan. We have a lot of "non-standard" abbreviations and phrasings too. Here's a few that come to mind:

MTG = meeting

MGR = manager

DL = download

expressing dates without separators: 2020/07/25 becomes 20200725 (of course, this is alwais in the Japanese field order which I find the most sensible one)

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#235

Post by rafiki6 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

erikerikson wrote: post #214

rafiki6 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth of the matter is for most organizations, IT is a cost center along with legal and finance. It is not their money maker. They have no interest in innovative IT/software "technology" until their competitor in the same industry as them has it. Price matters. Laying off people easily matter. Accurate and poignant. Having lived in the banks for a while, this will always be the case in industries. They don't gi…

Isn't this why a variety of industries such as banking are being or will be disrupted? For example in banking, I would love to set up income apportionment (i.e. x% here, y% there, ...) but for some reason I have to split out income deposits every once in a while via manual, external tools. Why is it again that we haven't set up two sided and payee specific authorizations so that we never hand out data that can be use…

Banks have moats. It's really hard to get past these moats. They are so central to the way that the financial system works, that it's really hard to "disrupt" them. Even the tech giants likely wouldn't succeed.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#236

Post by arbitrary_name » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:31 AM UTC

dejv wrote: post #117

BossingAround wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm... 20$ an hour, meaning 3200$ a month, would be quite a nice salary in a lot of Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, ...). You get people with BAs or MAs in comp science who have been developers for 2-5 years. While I'm sure some will say that 3.2k is ridiculous in country X, I personally met people in all of the above countries working for less while being more experienced.

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.

I've seen rate cards for quite a few bpo providers and major it body shops, and unless it's like an extreme case (Chennai and one or two other cities), the devs are getting slightly less than 10% of their billed rate, the rest being overhead.

Hell, I look at the delta between what my firm bills me out for and what I take home, and it's about 12% of my fully loaded day rate.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#237

Post by opportune » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

I think you can be successful outsourcing to WITCH or other consultancies IF you have an in-house, full-context software engineer managing the project and keeping people accountable.

You have to be careful because if you ask for someone who is "an expert in X technology", you'll definitely get someone, and they might be able to describe it at a high level, but may not even know how to compile a program or how to copy a file (yes I have literally seen this firsthand). You need to give people explicit instructions and be willing to help, and the in-house software developer almost definitely needs to provide things like architecture/spec. And you need to actively fight the need to increase the staffing for the project and prevent dumb/churn processes from taking over (example: writing 40 different scripts (separately!) to do something that could just as easily be done by one script with three parameters). And you need to manage the project into a position where maintenance/ownership can be transferred.

You also need to set them up for success by having a clearly defined scope and playing towards their skills (which means, don't give them work that needs a ML PhD math genius, do give them work like "write a PHP website that does this and looks kinda like that"). This is part of what I think the article is missing but also not really a fair expectation of what an outsourcing firm is. Consultancies are not meant to come up with 'killer apps', and you can try to pay them to do so and they'll be happy to take your money, but you shouldn't.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#238

Post by rememberlenny » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

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…

I had the same experience in Shanghai with a similar top tier agency. I was hired by a Fortune 500 apparel brand to be their digital project manager to handle the agency and Q/C deliverables.

It was 2013, but even then I was blown away by the extent to which the engineers on their end didn't use any modern version control. All of the deliverables were send over FTP updates, and zipped file directories.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#239

Post by shash » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

It’s easy to tar the entire Indian IT industry with the same brush, but it’s a much richer ecosystem than just the Big Five.

For example, I work in a small product based company in a niche segment where we’re among the very few people who can provide the solutions we can, and I’d happily pit my colleagues’ skills against the best of SV.

Keep in mind that this article is only about the Big Five. They have a certain business model, a value proposition and a set of clients whom they service. A particular niche that’s been very lucrative and productive for them. This, as the article says, may be drying up.

But that doesn’t mean that Indian IT as a whole, or even most of Indian IT is in trouble.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#240

Post by tdeck » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

afrojack123 wrote: post #229

kaiwenwang wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic from the thread, but was the sample size of GT students you've interacted only one, or greater? My intuition on well known public universities has been that they accept all the talented people at the cost of letting some who would struggle with the material while private universities accept only talented people at the cost of missing some people who would thrive.

Yes, my sample size was 1. Its not a big deal that he didn't know. Not everybody knows everything and with a background like that he can be taught. It requires some hand holding on my end but others have held my hand too so its just part of the job. Its a sad state of affairs for new grads in these consultancies. I have met Math majors from top Canadian universities, physics, and biomedical engineers. They were learn…

I've had colleagues with surprising blind spots as well, even at Google. Sometimes I've wondered "how was this person hired here and they don't know X" (e.g. how to use the command line, what a CPU architecture is, etc...). But then those people have ramped up and done excellent work.