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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

#51

Post by GordonS »

lgleason wrote: post #16
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…

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 people doing nothing but creating worthless unit tests that didn't test anything, 3 people writing HTML, 3 people writing CSS, 3 people coding an API, 3 people coding a backend, 3 people whose job it was to "manage the config files", 3 testers doing basically nothing... it was... so completely and utterly inefficient! It was a running joke that there would be someone to write the opening HTML tag, someone to write the name, and someone to close the tag - it wasn't far from the truth.

Of course, not all offshore teams are this insanely inept. To some degree it comes down to how much the client is willing to pay, but outsourcers also have different groups that target different segments. Their ODC (offshore development team) groups cater to the cheap-as-possible crowd, and are invariably atrocious, but their digital/consulting groups are comprised of "real" developers.

Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#52

Post by diehunde »

jrumbut wrote: post #8
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…

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.

That's why companies end up requiring "extensions" over and over for consultants. I know people working for consultant firms that have been with the same client for more than 3 years.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#53

Post by GordonS »

swalsh wrote: post #19
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…

These firms specialized in digital transformation. But the digital transformation is over, now its the digital cleanup. The companies that understood the benefits of digital technology moved to it, and the majority of the others went out of business. In this new phase, your digital infrastructure allows you to move quickly, or you lose business to those that can move quickly. A lot of these old legacy applications, a…

> But the digital transformation is over

"Digitalisation" has merely been replaced with "Industry 4.0". And after that hype train ends, they'll come up with some other nonsense.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#55

Post by kirubakaran »

kumarski wrote: post #43

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 ra…

> We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc

Good post, upvoted, but why the cameras?

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#56

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #32
geogra4 wrote: post #11

Well, at least from where I sit they're still getting plenty of business as with the apparent sun-setting of the H1-B program companies are just hiring offshoring firms instead.

> 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?

[deleted]

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#57

Post by ilikerashers »

I'm not sure I'm bought into this. I consulted at a big bank and am currently at a government department where I can see the in-house trend reversing.

10 years ago there was a big backlash against outsourcers and tech moved to "Agile" delivery and shiny AWS. Companies started investing believing they were being left behind.

We're going through a low point in the hype cycle right now. Blockchain/AI/Data science have all been a bit disappointing for Enterprise. Much of the mobile revolution passed them by too! Cloud is a bit pricier than expected and keeping on top of trends (CloudFoundry/K8S) has been exhausting for in-house staff.

Outsourcing is great for handle-crank, cheap IT and that's not going away.

Also, why is Saas being frequently mentioned as a solution here? Enterprise system complexity is not very Saas friendly.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#58

Post by kumarski »

kirubakaran wrote: post #55
kumarski wrote: post #43

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 ra…

> We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc Good post, upvoted, but why the cameras?

Oh for video conference calls so the video resolution is high/kosher.

Not for "surveillance."

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#59

Post by ethbro »

GordonS wrote: post #44
_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…

> But that is not how software is done. I want outcomes not masses. I need creativity to work on tools expressed through software not cheaper developers. Fully agree, but the people making the decisions at large corps are not developers, and are just as focused on costs as the Indian outsourcing firms pushing low cost devs. And in turn, those people are pushed by the board to make cost reductions, and board members u…

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).

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#60

Post by ThePadawan »

I have been keeping my ear to the ground in the local job market (Switzerland) and personally haven't encountered any company that outsourced to India specifically.

Most popular are Eastern Europe (Serbia, Ukraine, Romania) and Asia (Vietnam).

The """savings""" multiplier is still in the order of 3-4x, but time zones work out better.

I am however, still baffled how this happened after seemingly every company made the discovery that outsourcing too much of your business doesn't tend to work out (20 years ago, during the last boom).

I also talked to several companies that were willing to trust their outsourced teams to work remotely, but not the staff located in Switzerland (who once again have to come to the office during the pandemic).

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