Hacker News Reader

Comment by markonen | Hacker News Reader

The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow).

Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.

View on HN

The system that's down was built, and is currently supported by, Tata Consultancy Services with support from BA IT staff. Once the system was built, BA made the majority of the IT department redundant.

I picture executives thinking of IT like rolling a big stone once it's moving get rid of the pushers.

The biggest Norwegian bank also uses Tata. A friend of mine that worked on a project there talked few times with their programmers. The company treated them really badly including things like trying not to pay for accommodation while they were in Norway for few months. They also told that they actively searched for a new job.

Not Krakow, Poland but India, via Tata about a year ago they made a big move.

So the Indians screwed it up, but the Polish are taking the blame? How wonderful of you brits !!!

Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.

It's not about Krakow per se. But when a company works towards specific targets like "90/10 supplier offshore ratio", rather than metrics based on quality or efficiency, I don't think quality comes first.

I agree with you on that. But I had to stick up for Krakow!

Relax, it's better if everyone thinks Krakow (and Poland) is a "third world shithole". Nobody's worried about it until it's too late :D

On the one hand I've never seen a successful project with non-colocated teams, whether 300km away or 10.000km away. On the other hand, I'm surprised a airplane company is so much localized in UK.

Basecamp

Any distributed startup. There are thousands.

if the offshored personnel work via a bodyshop then the incentives are completely different compared to direct employees, and the resulting work is considerably lower quality (at least in my experience)

if offshored personnel are direct employees it's a completely different story

given the main cost saving comes from being able to "ramp the size of the pool up and down to meet demand" most large companies opt for the bodyshop solution...

replace a long established (expensive) team on a complex app who know all the bear-traps with an offshore team of rent-a-coders with a 6 month average turnover rate but at half the price - wcgw

What makes Krakow inherently better than say, Bangalore?

Not snark, just asking.

Much more friendly timezone (1 h from London, 6 h from East Coast). I'd also say the accent is easier on the ears, but I might be biased since I'm Polish ;) Also, it only takes 2-3 years on average in Polish civil courts to resolve a dispute (as opposed to supposedly decades in India) - in case you want to sue your services provider.

Until about 2 years ago I was gold guest list with BA - spending £30k+ a year with them, and sending lots of others on BA.

Their high costs were fine, but then they started cost cutting more and more, and enough was enough. everyone I know has twigged that in Europe easyJet are far better, and longer haul virgin, the gulf carriers, and even USian carriers, are better.

Do you happen to know if they outsourced or if they opened a subsidiary there and just moved the positions?

It's a group function of the International Airlines Group (BA's corporate parent). http://www.iaggbs.com

Land costs are too high in the UK. Everything except banking must leave.

Land costs in the South East of England may be too high, but that really doesn't apply to the whole of the UK...

They are very high in most urban areas where you are likely to have a dev centre.

Waterside is absolutely able to accommodate a dev team.

I'd say there are several locations in the UK with quite low costs (definitely massively lower than SE England).

For example Glasgow. Average residential prices are 23% of London, that's a lot cheaper and there's a good level of skilled workforce there.

South Wales where the one of the BA service centres used to be, for example, is low cost and 2 hours train from London (there's Cardiff airport; and St.Athan's [ex-RAF?]).

Land costs are really not high in Birmingham and the Black Country, the second biggest urban area in Britain. You could build within walking distance of (say) Sandwell & Dudley station, with mainline trains to London, for comparative peanuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com