I am not Indian but I work for a large Tata like IT firm. This hit way too close to home. There a lot of cultural issues here that comes down to management being rewarded if things are done cheaply and discouraging any agency or self-realization by the developers. If I saw this in the US, I’d walk out. They literally don’t have that option as there’s a 90 day salary clawback if they do. Some general thoughts:
- Most management has a non-tech background. So they get what they want to hear and don’t want to hear what’s wrong.
- Thinking this coming from the same team or from the same company is wrong. They silo developers like crazy. There likely was an API developer, an Office 365 developer, frontend developer (so specific it is down to the framework or stack!) and the developers themselves will not touch anything they aren’t “certified “ in.
- I have been in meetings on $100 million projects where they will seriously argue over the cost of sendgrid. Eventually this will come down to no one having “sendgrid experience”
And some developer saying they can do it in Office365.
- Security team will get the first cut in budget since it should “already be secure.”
- You are likely talking over the head of the nephew hired to do security for this. Will the government or anyone sue them? No, so why is this guy bugging us.
Developers aren’t encouraged to develop but get tickets out and not question them. The manga is “It wasn’t in the requirements” all the way down the chain.
I work with smart developers out of India but it is not a culture of innovation. This kind of work is treated like a call center. Don’t go off script, stick your little problem domain, if we aren’t failing we are winning.