Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

True. My point was more to highlight that I don't actually have a problem with work being outsourced to another location. You are correct, when cost is the issue that creates incentives that tend not to work.

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 ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling.

The "catch" is that we have to do over-documentation, lots of screenshots, and consistent routine communications. My CTO and cofounder speaks 4 languages.

The talent has to be managed.

Within 12 months of being with us, a Pakistani developer has massively increased their value.

We also don't bring anyone into core leadership team onshore unless they speak at least 2 languages or more or they have a serious edge in terms of talent.

The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually:

- Unilingual

- have been over-resourced in every position they've ever been in

- poorly travelled

- are used to working with onshore talent that has context

- find the time difference to be abhorrent

Right now, our core "mission critical" team speaks 4 languages.

I fully hope to add 10-20 languages as we expand. I'm hoping for Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese in that order...

You cannot expect someone who has 10-14 times less electricity/capita to suddenly have the context of an American. It takes time.

We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc... remote now is a core part of our tech biz.

"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."

This sadly happened to me many times. Since the quality of many Indian teams was extremely abysmal, I found out that many so-called developers had no IT background at all, as you wrote. They went through a 2 to 4 weeks HTML/CSS/JS Bootcamp, and, very important allegedly in India, received a certificate, that qualified them as “Middle Web Developers”.

> 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability.

This is mostly due to high attrition rates, these companies hire students fresh out of universities who have little to no experience. So most projects are in a state of constant flux where people who have worked on the code left after an year or two, only to be replaced by someone who knows very little about the codebase.

The attrition is due to the very low pay and shitty work culture. Earlier people in India didn't really have a choice on where they could work in IT, it was mostly just these sweatshops, but this has changed in the past decade. There are product based companies and even higher tier consultancies who pay way better and treat their employees relatively better.

Also remember, this gap in the payscale isn't minuscule, it could literally be 5x-10x if you posses the technical chops.

> Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money spent on people who are onshore.

I am stressing on the low pay in my comment because I tend to see a lot of anger online directed on the actual engineers (while making the point #3 in your comment) under the assumption that these people are making fat stacks of cash while living in a country with low cost of living. But this isn't usually the case, these people are paid peanuts, which is barely enough to cover the cost of living in the IT centered cities.

As a marketing person, I've learned the hard way over the years that I'm not qualified to hire outsourced development. I've hired about a dozen over the years, and only 1-2 have been a good experience. I probably gave myself too much credit for knowing HTML/CSS/WordPress and not more, thinking I was qualified enough. Only a good to great web developer has the expertise to spot high quality outsourced talent, and ignore the other 90%.

The fault is mine for thinking I had the skillset to hire in a field in which I'm not an expert. It's the same with any field, actually. Marketers bemoan all the time when companies hire a cheap, bad SEO, but you have to feel sorry for the hiring party that was making what they thought was a value decision, even though they were not a practitioner expert.

Zooming out, you can see how decisions are made at a massive scale based on the hiring party making the decision based on the sales team or personal business relationships, while not being the subject matter expert.