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Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

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Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#71

Post by r_singh »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #61
r_singh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably barely any big consulting firm or bank that does not have offshore mega offices (in India) where a lot of important work happens in equities, commodities, etc. Citibank, BOA, PWC, you name it. All employ tens of thousands of people in India. Even tech cos. like Amazon are hiring their next wave of knowledge workers offshore. It's not like the offshore heads can force anyone to do so, or the Indian go…

>Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud. When you do it over and over and over again it sure starts to quack like the fraud duck.

In that case their customers should be aware of this by now and they should be out of business (maybe soon).

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#72

Post by vmurthy »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

> The allegations “could severely damage the company’s pristine brand if true, especially in the IT services industry,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana wrote Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.

Infosys had a reputation as one of India's most transparent companies. Reputation is somewhat a nebulous concept so I am going to use a proxy: P/E ratio [1].

According to theory, investors pay up a premium PE for well managed companies and although it is an imperfect measure, lots of evidence suggests that it works (Look up HDFC Bank in India relative to its peers or government owned companies v/s their private counterparts) In India at least, Infosys had always had a premium PE compared to its peers [2]. So the "pristine brand" may have been with the investors.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra...

[2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#73

Post by GordonS »

goatinaboat wrote: post #31
r_singh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, TCS will pay a price for it in the long run.

They will not, the British taxpayers will, just as for every project outsourced to Tata, Capita, or anywhere else. Every penny of revenue earned by those companies is by fraud.

You've got to wonder when the government continually awards huge projects to the same outsourcing firms time after time, and time after time the project is either a total failure or not fit for purpose, and it's delivered years late at a multiple of the original price. And the next big project that comes along? They'll award it to one of the same companies again, and they'll get the same outcome again.

There simply has to be some major skullduggery afoot.

The internal GDS seem to be bucking the trend, delivering good services and contributing to OSS. Surely this demonstrates that an internal team is a better way? Even if they don't deliver entire projects themselvea, they could lead them from a requirements, architect and tech perspective, and have sway over which firm gets the outsourced part.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#74

Post by close04 »

r_singh wrote: post #37
close04 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it with the intention of underdelivering and ballooning costs and time to make more money is fraud though. And make no mistake, no outsourcing company goes to a tender intending to be on time and on budget. It’s not good business for them.

And just how commonly do we see such[1] fraud across any business or industry? Cough , pharmaceutical cos, doctors, social media & search giants, car manufacturing giants. Any of these ring a bell? [1]As in, the above (your) definition of fraud i.e. misleading customers, by deliberately under delivering and over promising. With this definition, many businesses and accepted practices are fraud. IMO, true fraud is what…

Your argument is "it's not fraud because others do it"? Yes, going forward knowing full well that you have no intention of fulfilling your promises is fraud regardless of "whatabout those guys".

You have at least a dozen comments on this thread defending these practices and pointing fingers at the likes of Theranos as if that's a good justification. If someone needs Theranos to look good they must be pretty shady. Your line of argumentation sounds very biased.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#75

Post by GordonS »

goatinaboat wrote: post #12

None of these companies - Infosys, Tata, Wipro etc - actually has a business beyond convincing technologically illiterate Western senior managers, by whatever means, to outsource the core of their businesses for short term gain.

Thing is, they are very good at the sales part.

I worked for a small IT company that serviced only a handful of clients, but had done so for several years. We got bought by one of the big outsourcing firms, and in a remarkably short time they were winning large new projects from our customers - we could never have convinced them to part with so much money!

All of the projects we run have a mix of western and Indian people, a mix of onsite and remote. There are always several manager types involved in nebulous ways that nobody understands, and there are always random Indian devs based in India who the client pays for, but they literally do nothing.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#76

Post by close04 »

r_singh wrote: post #46
goatinaboat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theranos did with fake IP Yes, I agree that Tata and similar companies are on the level of Theranos.

That's not what I meant, so you mean you disagree. Sounds like a huge personal bias to me my friend. There's something about these firms which might have affected you directly. I feel sorry for you. Also, Tata is not TCS. Tata includes Tata Motors which owns the British co. JLR.

> Sounds like a huge personal bias to me my friend.

> I feel sorry for you.

That's very disingenuous and insulting. You're implying you have no bias which anyone reading your comments on this thread would find really hard to believe.

Your whole reasoning relies on accusing everyone else of bias and claiming that other companies also have these shady practices. That's not a defense.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#77

Post by grilledyam »

primax wrote: post #19
r_singh wrote: post #15

I can't help but notice the bias people from the west tend to have against Indian outsourcing companies. They have issues and downsides, sure. Major long term downsides, as an Indian programmer (not working for any of these companies), I agree (just like outsourcing to ANY company, be it American e.g. Cognizant). Comments talking about Infosys/TCS, not being a brand: programmers are not Infosys' customers, in fact it…

I would agree if Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and HCL were in the business of offering up skilled people that they have promised to clients. But every single one of my clients who engages these companies has a story where they were sold X cloud or devops or security people and the people put on their engagements had 0 experience. I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the same th…

Basically all of the offshore devs I've had the pleasure of working with are at the very beginner end of the spectrum, bar one or two. Even had to teach a "senior" developer how to write a unit test the other day... it's ridiculous.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#78

Post by rsj_hn »

hc91 wrote: post #54
lev272 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the most highly regarded of the firms in Infosys's field? I realize that might sound sarcastic, but I mean it sincerely. I have little experience with that world, but I wasn't aware there was a hierarchy of brands in the offshore consulting firm space. Now I'm curious

All of the firms in Infosys's field are the running joke of the software engineering world. There is literally not one of them viewed in a positive or even neutral light. And yes, there is a hierarchy of brands in the offshore consulting firm space and the Indian consultancies are the bottom of the barrel.

I actually know of a Peruvian consultancy (HQ in San Francisco, but devs in Peru) that pays devs 20 bucks an hour to crank out business logic code for firms who have no tech competency and are willing to spend 4-5 figures to build an intranet or write some db logic. There are lots of shady players in this industry. The number of businesses who would benefit from some onsite scripting or automation is huge, as is the number of customers who get fleeced by these outfits and are stuck with unmaintainable code and need to keep sending regular checks to the consultancy to keep things going.

And don't get me started on the security of the code these outfits produce.

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#79

Post by [deleted] »

acdha wrote: post #55
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

> The allegations “could severely damage the company’s pristine brand if true, especially in the IT services industry,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana wrote Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.

Programmers do not hire Infosys. Senior management does and their reputation is different there: those complaining programmers are just trying to protect their turf, the cost savings are compelling, etc. and there are a million ways to spin the inevitable failed projects.

[deleted]

Re: Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

#80

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

rsj_hn wrote: post #8
lev272 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are the most highly regarded of the firms in Infosys's field? I realize that might sound sarcastic, but I mean it sincerely. I have little experience with that world, but I wasn't aware there was a hierarchy of brands in the offshore consulting firm space. Now I'm curious

None of the big firms are well respected. The problem here is that if you are outsourcing software development, then you view it as a cost to be minimized rather than as something you care about. That means most of your projects are not interesting to work on, so these firms tend to have big turnover problems with talented staff. A lot of their work is keeping products alive in maintenance mode, for example, so that…

Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this phenomenon.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of IT consultants to build The System. The IT consultants he hired were incompetents who kept talking about “The Methodology” and who spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce a single thing.

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smart and talented. The youthful programmer built his whole system in one day for $20 and pizza. Mike was overjoyed. He recommended the youthful programmer to all his friends.

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he has more work than he can handle, so he hires a bunch of people to help him. The good people want too many stock options, so he decides to hire even younger programmers right out of college and “train them” with a 6 week course.

The trouble is that the “training” doesn’t really produce consistent results, so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules and procedures that are meant to make more consistent results. Over the years, the rule book grows and grows. Soon it’s a six-volume manual called The Methodology.

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a Huge Incompetent IT Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and a lot of people who blindly obey the Methodology, even when it doesn’t seem to be working, because they have no bloody idea whatsoever what else to do, and they’re not really talented programmers — they’re just well-meaning Poli Sci majors who attended the six-week course.

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