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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

I truly believe offshore IT work was mostly a scam in the first place. The work they produced was of very low quality, and often was more expensive because you had to go back in and fix everything. The whole game was to overcharge western firms for cheap crap produced by shoddy programmers overseas. The IT outsourcing firms would pocket the difference. Come in and promise the world, overbill and underdeliver. Then the client is stuck with your crap and needs to pay you to maintain it.

It was on a matter of time before companies figured it out. Add to that advances in automation and the move to the cloud, and this was guaranteed to happen.

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After 3 years of trying to cooperate with two of the larges Indian IT services companies for a large, corporate client, I find it hard to disagree with you.

The level of incompetence I have seen is absolutely mindblowing - to the point of me thinking, I must be part of a hidden camera prank...

I employ several Indian FTE developers, who are great, so it is not the "India"-sticker, that is the problem - it is the culture in the large, Indian IT-services companies, that is completely broken.

There are 3 types of companies here in India.

1. The likes of TCS, Wipro and Infosys. These have a huge workforce and literally hire in wholesale. Even this month, Wipro hired something like 50 students from a nearby college. They don't look for your programming skills or even CS theory knowledge. Nope. They hire based on marks, group discussion, English skills and even looks. Basically, anything that is not related to CS. Hell, they even hire mechanical engineers. In my college, students got placed this year because, a. They had good relations with faculty. b. Looks(for women) c. Acting "friendly" to a middleman(applies to women) If you deal with these companies, I guarantee you, you'd get a poor product.

2. smaller outsourcing companies. Some of these are good, some of these are bad. Again, some manager might hire a student because she looks hot, while some other might genuinely look for skilled students. I'd suggest dealing with these companies, after getting good feedback about them from someone.

3. Startups. These are few, but the number is growing. I hope to get selected in one of these.

Are you in college? You will find that 3 is not all rosy as it seems to you right now, if you are not from a top tier or atleast decent tier college. I was like you back in college when I realized that heading to TCS etc was a dead career path from the start.

The better product startups all look for "IIT/NIT/whatever other brand college" students. Snapdeal, for eg, first switched the application engineer position that I applied for to other secondary positions, and then rejected me when I asked for the original position on this basis. There is no guarantee that you will find good things in other startups. I realize now that these companies have no better way of screening candidates, because the candidate pool quality in India errs on the side of less than decent. Doesn't justify the bait-and-switch but oh well.

If you do end up like I did, make sure that atleast the peer group in your startup is exceptionally talented, and that the startup is good with tech. The pay is shit in these kinds of startups (for eg those running as a small service company, but building their product behind the scenes), but the idea is to become really good at what you do and then jump ship to a good product startup.

Also, if you are still in college, it helps to have GSoC under your belt.

So did you make it to a good company?

Yes, I'm still in college, although I'm in final year, so only 6 months left. What you said is true, I realize that most companies are ignoring my resume(as I am not from IIT/NIT, I am not even from a autonomous institute). But I hope I can at least get placed in small scale startups, or small product businesses.

Wish I had concentrated more on OSS contribution/ side projects rather than competitive programming. Let's see what happens now. But I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS. Worst case, I'll become a Uber driver.

You can still do OSS contributions and make small side projects to get noticed. The likes of us merely start X years behind the likes of those that go to a prestigious engineering college when it comes to work. X is as big a gulf as you let it be. Factor that into your growth and make of it what you will.

>I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS

TCS is fine if you're fine with maintenance work and/or want to pivot into doing an MBA or something similar. However, even TCS etc are laying off a lot of people and will probably shrink their "bench" pools greatly in the near future, due to the death of outsourcing.

>I'll become an Uber driver

I'm sure it won't have to come to that, but yes, the job market slowdown is real.

What if the value add of off shore had nothing to do with the work done, but with the threat of replacement. Not that you could actually do the replacement, but the threat of it could result in reduction in wage growth that more than made up the waste of using off shore outsourcing.

Don't think I've seen this idea explored before. Maybe the numbers show it is completely idiotic (I did basically come up with it in the shower). Guess its my new conspiracy theory of the month.

This feels like your personal sentiment. You do know that there are good outsourcing firm out there right? I've been working at outsourcing firm for most of my career and I have to disagree. There are a full spectrum of good and bad developers out there even in the outsourcing world, not just bad ones. Do you think outsourcing as a practice can still survive if it doesn't bring value?

Yes, absolutely - plenty of decision makers face incentives structures that reward short term cost savings and don’t punish increased long term maintenance costs.

Why has been the scam running for almost 30 years now?

The same reason any other scam works: Somebody along the chain has exploitable greed, so that they believe something "too good to be true."

The real question is why it would be in temporary decline this year.

Such layoffs have occurred in the past as well, this is nothing new.

Can you point out similar scams which have been running for 30 years where revenue kept on increasing in billions

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