271–280 of 285 posts
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> 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.
There are design & engineering teams who deliver amazing value to their clients. These teams are nimble & specialised.
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OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and then she has to navigate the buereucracy writ…
I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and configured. I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and…
Edited: this was _not_ exclusively from Indian IT firms.
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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.
There is nothing wrong with Java. Modern Java is pretty nice to use, fairly fast, has an incredible amount of libraries and tooling to do just about anything you want to do and a vast pool of talent to draw from. At my current job I try to stick to Java for any new services because it's a great overall language.
Java has become an enterprise language and is associated strongly with many negative elements of enterprise culture, though. "Written in Java" may as well be "designed by committee" or something out of a Dilbert comic or Pentagon Wars chimera.
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I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and configured. I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and…
A couple of times in the past, I saw the pattern of one person as the VCS proxy for a whole team. Eventually I realized it was not because there were team members who didn't know how to use VCS. It was because individually-tracked commits would reveal that only one or two of the people contributed 90%+ of the work. Edited: this was _not_ exclusively from Indian IT firms.
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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)
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…
OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and then she has to navigate the buereucracy writ…
In the pursuing interview/talk, my response to how I can build a team meant for the web/app was -- design alone is pretty meaningless, so let's create a team that understands designers' creativity and the power of engineering.
He thinks I was crazy because I told him I code my designs. Some of his words;
- "Designers should be shielded from Engineers, so their creativity is not limited."
- "I have avoided the other team and kept to my design team, and when the deliverables are passed-on, my job is done."
Of course, I looked up the guy later and learned that he has steadily grown his career like a well-designed graph, from an intern designer to the head of a design team in about 20 years.
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 bu…
As long as customers still use SAP and Oracle it will be a long while.
The problem with enterprise software was never the technical details - it was getting archaic, inefficient business processes in systems that didn't support those processes.
This doesn't change with SaaS. Extension tools have gotten better but the core problem still exists. So many customers still use on-prem SAP hosted in the cloud. The end result is the same requirement for everything but sysops.
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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.
I can’t remember where I read it, but I was reading an article about a company’s experience with outsourcing. One quote stood out. “We outsourced all the profit, but none of the risk”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e9da/f5cc1c94c6e34e29095ca1...
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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.
That isn't sustainable - we will just see things equalise with Germany and then where is the competitive advantage? So cutting costs by pushing technical work to eastern EU isn't sustainable, at least in the 10 year time frame.
I am sure EPAM and the tech industry there will adapt to the shift but they will not be as the new Infosys.