Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence • Hacker News Board

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#281

Post by northern-lights » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 11:38 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.

Indeed. The starting salaries of fresh grads in (Wipro/Infosys/TCS/etc.) has been stagnant at INR 300,000 to INR 350,000 / year for the last 10-15 years. Converted to USD this is: ~ 4000 - 4700 / year.

20 USD / hour * 8 h/day * 21 days/month * 12 months = ~ 40,000 USD / year.

Of course, experienced ones don't receive that might higher salary either. About 5 years of experience would probably get you around double to triple the starting salary.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#282

Post by krasicki » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #150

marktangotango wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Non technical folks under-appreciate the cost and frequency of long-term technical debt. Undoubtedly this is true, but there's an implication here in this context that somehow on shore, or more well paid developers don't create such technical debt, when in fact they do. It amazes me that I see team after team of competent well intentioned developers create one ball of mud after another. It's striking really.

> It amazes me that I see team after team of competent well intentioned developers create one ball of mud after another. It's striking really. It is! But I don't understand... how? How does that happen? You should put good people together and get something good. But it is not always so. Very puzzling to me.

Oh, look, the answer is easy. Manage these projects with SAFE. SAFE is a corporate friendly Agile methodology that essentially says, "Fuck that agile stuff. Use the Agile vernacular to keep being as unproductive as you always were."

This is like heroin to these corporations. They use Jira and Rally to create a cult of numerology games that reduce tasks to filling time-boxed, random things- to-do. Be sure the Agile coach is drilled in the game and clueless about "technical-things". Add an equally clueless Product Owner whose background is Word and Excel and you'll create the best Big Ball 'O Mud anybody ever wished for.

And if you're running late, add a dozen or so new inexpensive -cough- "developers" from your favorite outsourcing firm.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#283

Post by krasicki » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

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…

This is contagious since many IT outsource firms actually "wag the dog". In the hands of idiots [usually 'little-Hitler' "delivery managers"], something like DEV/OPS has become a new operations career when all it has to be is automation. And version control is something they are still looking for a Rosetta Stone to figure out. It's enough to make older Software Engineers want to cry. The number of layers of ignorance [billable hours for pseudo-technicians who do a hair's width more than nothing] is astonishing.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#284

Post by iceman2654 » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

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…

As a former Accenture Consultant I do have to point out we rarely used hourly billing. Fixed fees were preferred and I think it actually works better as it forces everyone to keep talking about scope. That being said, the worse part of Accenture was working with the offshore developers. The only way to move a project forward was hand holding these guys. I ended up working around the clock to catch our Hydrabaud team at the beginning of their day and at the end of thier day. Keeping in mind I was suppsedly dealing with the "manager". Was Accenture perfect? No. But based on what I've seen, projects were well run with componetent local staff, good managers and the client side was usually in shambles.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#285

Post by ashconnor » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #270

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes I had to document and then teach over multiple sessions a small team from Infosys how to use Git. 3 weeks, and they all said they understood. Months later nobody could still check code out let alone commit. Then again, I…

What's the deal with this? I worked with an Info Sys contractor from India. He was supposed to be the Apache Spark expert we so desperately needed to start being more productive. Not only did he not have expertise on Spark, he could barely type and I had to do everything for him with regard to Git. I suggested it would actually be a better use of his time to brush up on these essential skills than to try being produc…

"Centres of excellence" was something promised to my last company after a round of outsourcing to TCS. They claimed that since TCS is such a large company that they had these COE teams that were domain experts on certain enterprise software.

Once the contract was signed we never heard of this again. We were stuck hiring consultants that were almost as bad as TCS.