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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

#61

Post by vvram »

zabil wrote: post #20

Major IT companies in India get a lot of revenue from maintainence projects and there is usually no scope for making major changes or innovating there. The time and material billing for these make it quite attractive from a revenue point vs fixed bid greenfield projects. I don't think that situation will change anytime time soon as along as these companies stick to services.

This 100% it's not a problem with talent alone or their approach to their problems presented to them. It's what they are engaged on and that's controlled by the consumers of these services.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#62

Post by diehunde »

hogFeast wrote: post #12

This is still very shallow thinking. Every company that views tech as a cost rather than a way to generate revenue will invest in these contracts/offshore centres, and that is the noose round their neck. In most cases, but not all, hiring consultants suggests you don't understand enough about your own business to manage it yourself ( insert image of senior executive trying to work out the Zoom so they can check their…

Depends on the project. People like to say "consultant" but most of the are just staff augmentation and many of them do work that won't absorbe a lot of knowledge.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#63

Post by blocked_again »

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 Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated.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, Swiggy, Paytm, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc.

Consultancy companies get students mostly from 2nd and 3rd tier (mostly private) colleges. Pretty much all these colleges are in a very bad shape. I think there are over half a million students enrolled in these colleges every year. Students still go to these engineering colleges since the education is not as expensive as in the USA and it's what pretty much everyone do after high school. If it was USA they would have just left college altogether instead of wasting money on a terrible college.

Sure, the quality of education of Tier 1 colleges can be improved a lot as well. But generalizing the entire Indian engineering education as the reason why these consultancy companies are doing poor is not correct either.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#64

Post by burntoutfire »

These consultancies may also finally reap what they sow re: quality of work. I work in a major bank and some senior managers say they'd rather get the plague than a team of those guys. The managers need to deliver what they promised to their higher ups, and they've learned that these teams, however cheap they are, in practice will not help them with that. Btw these companies still manage to get some business with us, which I suspect is to some degree helped with bribes.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#65

Post by danpalmer »

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…

Thanks for this, it's a great counter to the common thinking here.

It seems that most of the market just does it wrong when they outsource. They either assume that the outsourced resource is a black box that produces finished products/closed tickets/etc, or they assume that the people on the other end are like a western developer in terms of background/education/culture/language/career path/goals.

What it seems you've done is treat these engineers as first-class employees in your company. For a new starter you'd provide training, context, you'd have ways to get them up to speed, you'd invest in processes and communication to make a separate office or timezone difference work.

Congrats, well done. I'm not surprised that you're finding the results to be so good! It's a shame more companies who outsource don't recognise that this level of effort is necessary.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#66

Post by GordonS »

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…

> The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software is still one of the highest paying fields.

I've seen this a lot, especially in ODC parts of Capgemini, TCS, Cognizant etc - it felt like only a very small number of people actually wanted to be developers or even architects; everyone else just wanted to be "a manager".

I'd asked about this strangenes, and Indian friends told me that managers were seen as superior, and even their families would push them to become managers.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#67

Post by afrojack123 »

Indian IT consultancies have been struggling against technological obsolescence for 30 years. And they will continue to struggle for many more. This is an idiotic hit piece hit written by a journalist who needs to meet his quota. This journalist has never worked for one of these consultancies, a tech company, or been in C-suite of any org.

I have worked in these "consultancies" so here is my take. There is a wide range of talent in these consultancies. Some examples are web app developers/software engineers, website people, implementation engineers/enterprise app software, supply chain, cybersecurity, etc. Yes, unfortunately, some of this talent is not familiar with basic software tooling like basic linux commands or git or setting up a path variable. This sounds really bad until you work with a Georgia Tech computer engineering grad and realize he doesn't know this either.

Many methods of sales. A sale can be considered a billion dollar deal or having a director hiring a contractor. The billion dollar deal is closer to consulting. The director hiring a contractor is closer to professional services firm.

Prior to these consultancies, the orgs would hire their own employees and train them. What changed? Contractors easier to layoff than W-2 employees. Maybe their own employees didn't have the expertise.

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.

"Consultancies" exist for that reason. Look past their marketing/branding and their official classification is a professional services firm.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#68

Post by lloydatkinson »

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…

"As an Indian"

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#69

Post by kbrisso »

dclusin wrote: post #26
baybal2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java’s still going to be in use long after we’re both dead.

This is so very true. I just migrated a 17 year old Struts 1.* app with most of my team in India from Weblogic to Tomee. It's a mission critical application with 400 users during business hours. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#70

Post by ed25519FUUU »

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…

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

Unfortunately, the list that follows describes the managers of literally every US-based company. If this is the requirement for successful offshore consultancy, then engineers here can rest assured their jobs will never actually be at stake.

When you can successfully hire a remote worker without needing 1) to speak their language, 2) understand their culture, customs, holidays, and 3) worry about time zone differences, then engineers here should start worrying about offshoring.

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