Hacker News Reader

Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy, because you often end up implementing things 4 times before they're fit for purpose. Also, the attrition rate in Indian tech firms is crazy - I've often seen 80% of a team change before the end of a 6 month project, which means continual re-explanation of requirements etc etc. For me, developers in India have always been a bad experience, and I'm genuinely surprised at the success the Indian IT outsourcing companies have enjoyed over the decades.

View on HN

I was dealing with a smart IT engineer from India and then I found out that he has sold me code for peanuts he had created for another client (and was already owned exclusively by that client, which was a major venture backed company), and then I caught him selling the code I paid him well to create exclusively to a third client also for peanuts. Basically no regard at all for IP rights and the contracts he signed, just doing whatever he could to make a quick buck. Not sure if it was just him or a cultural thing. But ended up an IP nightmare.

At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.

In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.

A business not wanting to invest time hiring, training and integrating an employee who is likely to leave prematurely is not an abstract principle.

Then the business must be willing to pay generously.

That depends on expectations, whether in a given industry or culture. In most professional settings showing your hand as essentially a mercenary in terms of allegiance and showing no stickiness, will result in considering an alternative candidate, in the US.

Yes I think there is some deceit required for those implementing this philosphophy but it doesn't change the strategy.

We, also got burned by someone who accepted another offer and quit, a week after beginning work with us. Obviously, that guy--and whoever recommended him--are on our shitlist now. Word does get around hopefully.

> and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead

> It's hard to argue they're wrong.

Except for the fact that in this very thread there seems to be quite a backlash against them. Seems to be very short-term and selfish thinking.

If the cost of multi-multi-billion dollar industry is backlash on the internet forums, that's hardly a difficult choice.

Except when that "backlash on the internet forums" is a reflection of what is happening in reality which seems to be the case here.

>It's hard to argue they're wrong.

Eugenics. Thalidomide. Radium paint. Lead paint. Leaded gasoline. The list goes on.

It's quite easy to argue against taking shortcuts and eschewing rigor in favor of "results" if you know some history and have some perspective.

Actually it is quite easy, cost of doing business in such cultures is much higher as you can not really trust anything and must guard against a knife in the back at any moment.

There is a huge amount of friction that eliminates if counterparty can be trusted vast majority of the time.

A candidate who want to get better offer is a red flag ?

You can always negotiate, but if you accept an offer I expect you to commit.

Just curious, commit for how long? I have been in situations before, where I have accepted an offer, started a job and was informed 3 months later that the company mis-calculated the budgets/revenues and have to let go a bunch of people. Guess who gets let go first? The people who started the latest.

Doesn't this go both ways? In this day and age in America, there's no loyalty going in either direction, employer or employee.

Not entirely convinced that others' poor ethics are a justification for your own.

What argument can you possibly make for an ethical burden that amounts to one-sided loyalty? The REASON is would be immoral to have no loyalty to an employer is because it makes the employers loyalty one-sided. If the employer abandons their loyalty towards employees, as all modern employers did throughout the 1980s and have now established as standard business practice, then there is no ethical burden on the employee to remain loyal. In fact, it becomes unethical to be loyal, a betrayal of your family and self for an entity that does not respect you. I am sure there are a great many employers who expect that they should be permitted to acquire dirt cheap labor to build their profits with no consequences. Their desires are irrelevant.

"Make game of that which makes as much of thee."

There is no good reason at for any kind of ethic burden.

Some people steal; some might have even stole something from you. Doesn't mean you have to too, and I doubt most people are held back only by law/punishment.

I don't think you can equate me leaving an employer "early", for some definition of early, to theft. As long as the contract is "at will employment", which majority of American job offers are (sorry for my America centric view), then the contract is AT WILL, in both directions. In my mind there is no ethical, moral or legal lapse.

As a freelancer I feel I should try to commit for at least a year - and I will try to work a bit longer of possible. I believe this looks better on my resume as well.

I think it's hard for most jobs, at least in my space (mobile software) to do much effective work when staying only for -let's say- 3 months at some company.

But mismanagement happens. The example you mention of being let go after just 3 months should be the exception, not the rule. I certainly never experienced something like that. Then again I like to work for big clients, feels to me more guaranteed they will still be in business tomorrow and me getting paid.

Any commitment is only until a better offer comes along. Better is a bit loosely defined as there is a cost of burning the bridge with you by jumping (be that a day after accepting or after 5 years of working there), but at the end of the day there this is a business relationship and the extent of our obligations are only spelled out based on any contract we have signed, and our social obligations only extend to the extent that the cost of violating the social obligation outweighs the benefit. Any employee who doesn't see the other side as doing the same is eventually going to get burned by it.

I never quite understood this concept of loyalty or commitment to a business entity. You might interview the candidate and take it to the final stage with lot of effort but at the end of the day, the candidate is offered the job by the business entity and not personally by the interviewer. I don't see why the relationship should go beyond the applicable law of the land.

Of course, once the candidate joins the company, regular interpersonal concepts between employees that involve loyalty and commitment can be pursued.

Agreed, one-sided loyalty is a foolish activity. I never understood that either.

To all the people mentioning ethics - a company can and will fire people without any reason. I know a couple of people personally who can't sleep not knowing why they were fired. In 30 mins, they were walked out. That's incredibly unethical but for some reason, not giving advanced notice to your employer is considered unethical? Hypocrisy!

The problem is they have to give three month's notice when quitting a job. When other companies or headhunters learn that you gave notice, they do their best to hire you away from whatever new job you took.

Our HR Department now calls new-hires every couple of days to keep them engaged so they don't take a job elsewhere. It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.

>>It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.

And yet nobody ever agrees to lower the 3 month notice period rule.

The workers want no notice period.

The industry wants 3 months, so their benches are warm, and they can handle the buffer better.

How thoroughly one side has won indicates how thoroughly the power is held. One could call it legal enslavement.

The period is for both sides, so you cannot really say

> The workers want no notice period.

Im my anecdotal experience nobody wants "no notice period"

I am not sure how you can generalize. I would not consider it as a red flag unless the candidate in question has history of hopping too quickly. I have direct/indirect experience of being both the sides. I once left a company in couple of months because company's culture was totally different than what I expected. I have also seen a friend of mine getting fired in couple of months after joining a company because company felt he was a misfit

It is absolutely a red flag. If you've committed to another company, then you have no business interviewing elsewhere.

If you don't take a job seriously at one company, why would I expect you to take a job seriously at my company?

If I offer you a job, how can I be sure you'll show up for it, and not just take the next offer that comes along? I can't. So you're no longer in consideration as soon as you tell me you're disloyal to your other company.

In some industries in America (especially media companies, but it's also common in high-end retail), if your boss hears that you're looking for another job, you're immediately fired. Sometimes it's even written into the contract, if you have one.

If you are serious then you better give a generous offer so that is unlikely for other company to give better offer.

A job is a business. The loyalty is goes only as far what the company or the employee can offer.

Likewise a company can fire employee anytime as soon as that employee is not needed anymore or better employee come along.

I think the key word is "recently". It might have been many months already for the interviewing guy, but it sounds more like 2-8 weeks ago, and that is really fast (==bad) job hopping.

I would expect most developers to do the same thing if the offer was good enough, but I suspect they would be far less open to mention it. I'm assuming this is just a difference in cultural knowledge of how it looks. They might have been thinking of it as social proof of desirability where as more local developers are aware that culturally you are supposed to pretend to be loyal to the company.

I hate to say it (as I am Indian), but it's a cultural thing. Basically, it's all about solving the problem by any means necessary, regardless of cost to the environment, cost to others, future problems etc. This is changing somewhat, but rather slowly.

It certainly depends on who you are dealing with. It definitely isn't a cultural thing. Ethics and ethical people exist everywhere. Had it not been there wouldn't be these many tech companies or businesses in India.

Consequence of demographics? Competition in India and China are arguably fiercer because of scale. If you’re not pulling out all the stops then you might be handicapping yourself relative to your peers.

Wow, that actually explains a lot of problems I have with the way my Indian team work. Thanks for the heads up!

That basically hits the nail on the head, but it's not the full extent of it. We have ["Jugaad" culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad), where we actually take pride in doing things that would be labeled outright fraud in a lot of places.

I also can't see how its changing, I've become rather cynical from having to deal with it constantly. I sure hope you're right, though.

I was about to mention "Jugaad" in my original comment - my dad talks about the concept proudly all the time. I am sort of proud of it, but also hate the conniving aspect of many jugaads!

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best

In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.

Were they in India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about Indians.

Indeed. I too am (British) Indian ;)

I am in India, and I can't help but feel insulted by this comment. Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.

----

edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.

>>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing.

Please note, everyone protects their own interests.

You are in India, and you exactly know what OP meant. He meant tons of people working in TCS/Infosys/Wipro where majority of them are bad engineers.

There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.

Hey, I don't agree with that either. In my experience, there is a normal distribution of idiots regardless of the country of origin.

A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company).

Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.

I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave.

The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.

>(I'm in a product development company). >The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.

Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base.

In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.

> Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. ... > it is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out.

This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.

>Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.

And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry.

Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates.

Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door.

This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes.

This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.

It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.

If you can make it in the West you’ll leave your homeland typically. Tech is a sector that often can is merit based so it’s not difficult for foreign engineers to prove their worth and make the migration (relative to other service sector industries).

> merit based

Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...

There is a massive screening process in both India and China that results in the top fraction of a percentage of students going off to study in the US. Those are the ones who later go on to publish while at US institutions. So yes, there is some signal there.

Please don't feel insulted. It's merely a general observation relating to culture in certain geographies, not to be applied to you specifically.

For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action).

Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.

I didn't mean to single you or anyone else out. I've seen this sentiment echoed in multiple online forums and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.

> ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.

Is there a typo (or 2) in here somewhere?

I substituted 'them' for 'those'. According to the interweb, it's grammatically acceptable in informal English.

Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually".

ref: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them

Makes sense. Unfortunately, the use of "them" instead of "those" in this case (actually, in many cases) is grammatically incorrect.

At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education.

Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help

Thanks for letting me know, I will avoid it.

> ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.

In your original sentence, you are trying to use "them" as an adjective to modify "incompetent developers," but "them" should only be used as a 3rd person plural pronoun. Using "them" as an adjective is not proper; your examples sound strange to native speakers, and is usually associated with vernacular English in general. Native speakers may assume this usage is due to poor knowledge of proper English, or possibly a regional (improper, but common) usage in the American South.

https://grammarstars.blogspot.com/2008/08/41-them-and-those-...

The first example is straight out of the oxford dictionary link that I posted. It's at the bottom of the page under "Informal, dialect".

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them

A couple of other examples: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB33z9xoSw8&feature=youtu.be... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUsB4y5RVk

There are plenty more examples on Google.

I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.

> I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.

No, it isn't. Using "them" in the way you did makes you sound like a hillbilly.

Just some advice: it's wise to avoid using any words or usage listed in the dictionary as "dialect" unless you're very familiar with the particular dialect it's from. Likewise, you should be very careful with "informal" terms unless you've actually been introduced to them informally by someone who knows how they're used. There's a lot of cultural context that needs to be mastered with those, and you won't learn that from a book, let alone a dictionary.

I saw the dictionary entry. Still, take it from a native (US)speaker. The only time you would want to use it is either in jest, or to sound like an uneducated hillbilly.

*edit - I will add that the 2 youtube videos are not good examples to be learning english from...

I would like to amend my above comment: the 2 youtube videos are HORRIBLE examples to be learning english from.

>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.

>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.

I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.

I think the issue isn’t Indian engineers living in India, but bad management of India-based companies who set the bar low enough for lots of bad “engineers” to join, making the experience unbearable for any good engineers that work there (if any). As a result the good ones leave and make a have career abroad.

Brain drain.

See my other comment. We don't all think this way, and I'm sorry you feel insulted.

i mean this is an obvious statement, if you've only worked with a group, then of course the most competent and least competent is within that group...

Thank you for saying this.

I love my Indian brothers and sisters, and think that the real offender in creating bad experiences with Indian devs are Indian businesses, which IMO have exploitative practices and emphasize over specialization. Even worse is the practice of requiring a 3 months notice to quit as a rule. There are 1 billion people in India, and I want the innovative, hard working, and kind among them to be welcomed to the US with open arms. I am deeply proud to have helped two highly talented young men get H1B visas and eventually green cards. They became great friends of mine and my family.

Sincerely, a white American guy who can't wait to travel to Maharashtra one day to visit Pune and Mumbai, and meet my friend's families.

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience.

That is because you dont pay them well, the good engineers who are being paid well work in MS, Amazon etc in India.

Not sure about that... I worked at an investment bank in London, and had a tech team support our quant desk from India. I signed off on the costs and they were ranging from 10 lakhs to 35 lakhs per person. I think that's comparable, or even better than MS or Amazon for the city they were in (Pune).

I’ve seen developers in the London office of some banks get paid over £150k who were not any good at software either. it would be disingenuous to say that isn’t common.

I also saw some incredibly good devs there but you get both.

Very true. I was not really on the tech side, but often found myself correcting the code of some very expensive developers. Simple things, like not realising when things have been passed by value or by reference etc. Most developers lack the passion to be truly great at their work, because they consider it just a job. It's fair enough, but every so often you see a developer write effortless technical poetry with their code - they are a rare breed with innovation in their blood.

There are some really good Indian teams in the Banking sector. You do have to be careful of course, but I've worked with some excellent Indian colleagues over there in Hyderabad and Chennai. I think the thing is the banks and other big corporates hoover up the top talent, and retain it, which then becomes invisible to the wider tech industry.

All the problems mentioned here do exist and are real, but they're not the whole story. The management culture over there s a bit different. Managers tend not to want to be involved in anything technical. There is a 'yes' culture of not challenging requests. However there are plenty of exceptions to the 'rule'.

There are definite exceptions. Were those people employed by your bank, or by an outsourcing company? The distinction is important, both in terms of quality and price. Internal hires are much more expensive (training, benefits etc), but generally better and less likely to leave. Outsourced staff basically don't care because they know they're being taken advantage of. So you get what you pay for.

You’re quite right, they were direct hires.

The truly good people would expect a significant fraction of the UK salary, not an average Indian IT salary.

The sad part about India is most people who come from low income households accept any salary. Because a job and the opportunity that comes with it is more important than anything else.

Negotiations are for freshers whose father's have been paying college fees and bills. The remainder can't afford to turn down a job for these reasons.

35 lacks you mentioned is a good starting salary for a person at Amazon or MS. 10L is not, even in Pune.

35L starting sounds like exaggeration. The most common is <15L for 0-5 year of experience.

35L is about 40k GBP - the average cost of a JS developer in many parts of the UK. Are you saying that's a starting salary for a developer in India - because in that case, why outsource?!

There are starting developers who get paid that much but it's not common. I hear most consulting firms pay about 1.5-6L, and Amazon pays 12-14L.

UK is famous for having poor dev rates. A coworker of mine transferred from Microsoft Beijing to Cambridge and had to take a pay cut because the payscale for the level he was at was actually lower there.

I have a decade of experience but get about half of that. Not all companies pay so much.

Not sure how to respond to your anecdote.

If what you are saying is true then you should have a chat with the person who hired them to see what is going on.

The poor salaries which I am talking about is Rs 2 lakhs for freshers who join IT consultancy services.

They just come over here. Why would they work in india when they can make 4-10x here?

Let me be clear - “Not all Indian Developers are bad”. The reason why quality of engineers at Infy, wipro, tcs etc. is so bad is because of their recruitment process. They recruit engineers from various colleges like herd of sheeps and call it mass recruitment. Irrespective of the his specialisation (Mechanical, Electronics or Chemical etc.) Students practice code for a day and so go for interview and unfortunately many get recruited. Then there is one year of Training. After training these engineers get into software development. Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer. Indian college and companies need to change how they recruit students.

>>Then there is one year of Training.

So more than your average CS engineering grad?

>>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer.

B.S.

Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.

There's a difference between writing something that compiles and being able to write code properly.

The "throw enough cheap coders" at the problem will work really well, until it doesn't, and at that point you have nothing but an expensive mess that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

If you don't have a good foundation, you're screwing the project in the long run, and this is the result of every offshoring programming project I've witnessed.

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience.

The problem, I think, is that management draws conclusions about the quality of Indian engineers based on interactions with the ones working in the US, who by definition are the absolute best of the best. "Sanjay is one of our best engineers", the bean counter says, "and my God, there's _a billion_ of them back in India!"

> by definition are the absolute best of the best.

I think that's probably true - the people who can claw their way through the H1B process are probably among the best India has to offer. I don't believe that that's entirely why management loves them, though. The fact that they work 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in crowded, noisy open offices without ever complaining since they're under constant fear of being fired at a moment's notice and being unable to find new work, coupled with the fact that they're capable software engineers, is why management loves them.

Right, but again I think they end up drawing incorrect conclusions about the state of Indian engineers in general based on what they see with their H1-Bs.

I don't think many who've worked with the major body shops would disagree with this. On the other hand, I've worked for companies that have opened offices offshore, and hired their own full time development staffs. I have seen very talented developers and dedicated teams via this arrangement. I work with one such team now, and I'm deeply impressed by them. They're some of best I've seen.

At risk of sounding hypocritical, I have done the same in my firm (https://osrec.co.uk). I took Indian grads straight out of uni and trained them to western development standards. They basically have to become good, or their pull requests never get merged into our core code bases. They soon understand the level of quality that is required, because, to their credit, they are genuinely keen to contribute. My issue is more with the big firms, where quality is not regarded highly (or at all), and they infuse that attitude across the Indian tech scene.

My suspicion: you're working with outsourcing consulting teams. The best engineers are locked up in the companies that actually hire there. Google, Microsoft Research, LinkedIn, etc. If you're not doing the actual hiring you're just getting talked into buying a team built for cheap.

Disclaimer: LinkedIn Employee. Our Banglore team isn't noticably different skill wise than our SV team.

Everytime I hear this I fail to see how it makes any sense. Either (1) All the firms hiring them are idiots and are unable to judge competency and continue falling for the "scam" every year, year after year on every project, with every company. (2) Your propositions are incorrect. They do have good engineers and they do end up doing good work.

They pick their targets very carefully. They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT. They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.

Basically, it's not (1) or (2), but instead (3): that these guys are master scammers, liars and confidence tricksters. They exaggerate without committing to anything and lull their customers into a false sense of security. They are THE slipperiest eels in the industry.

If you don't believe me, I encourage you to give them a try just once - it will probably convince you.

>They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT.

In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?

I know quite a few "business-focused" people. It is not so easy to fool them even if IT is not their core competency. Businesses typically will include several protection clauses in the contract and set the legal jurisdiction to their own country. I don't believe it is easy to fool businesses for years on end. They would go out of business pretty quickly.

>They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.

Then data would show that those firms have no long term contracts or repeat business from previous clients. Does it?

Every large organisation I've been in operates in silos, and these firms hide within these silos. Also, these firms have a bad reputation - everyone in banking knows it, yet they are still employed because they're cheap and let you add bodies to the shop floor when funding is squeezed. That makes managers look powerful with big empires, which helps getting promoted. So it's not all about code quality or productivity - sometimes it's just about looking like you're getting stuff done, before you leave and let someone else inherit the mess.

Okay, lets assume that this is happening. I would hope that the person harming their own business by willfully engaging with an incompetent third party is the one at fault here.

The thing is, it's not their business. They just show that they saved money and get promoted on to another role. The mess, when it becomes apparent, is for someone else to clean up...

Okay then they are a dishonest toxic employee. The way to solve that is by trying to weed out such people in your hiring, and do due diligence on their previous employment record. I fail to see how that changes my conclusion.

This won't work, because those employees don't actually register as toxic for the company - au contraire: They have reached - and quite possibly exceeded - their predefined performance targets! They have done exactly what they were hired for. You have to realize that things like long-term quality, or even reducing total costs for the company (only the silo is important!) is not a performance target in this scenario, and that's the root of the problem.

It's a systemic problem, a problem of corporate structure and incentives, and exactly the ecosystem where these kinds of contractors thrive.

In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?

If it's a US firm, then there can be financial and legal repercussions. Good luck going after a firm in India.

The usual way businesses deal with that sort of thing is by withholding milestone payments till the contractual obligations are fulfilled. Running such scams doesn't keep you in business for long. There is no one handed clap.

Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.

This isn't just an India thing. This is how government contracts work in the US too. The government contracts out to Lockheed Martin for a big IT project (used to anyway, LM got out of the business on the civilian side at least), LM hires the cheapest 'talent' they can find, loading projects 80/20 management/engineering, drag their feet for a few years, and eventually someone on the government side decides they're going to make their career by being the person who brings this project across the finish line. So they ignore or lie about the requirements being fulfilled and drag the steaming mess in-house, while LM hosts a champagne-drenched celebration. Contracting has fundamentally perverse incentives.

Ah yes, the $200 "military spec" hammer. Well with the government, you'd still have a job if you waste taxpayer money, since the government keeps collecting revenue. With a private firm, I'd expect them to go out of business if they keep wasting money like that. I work in pharma and I've been involved with a few consulting contracts. We chose our vendors very carefully and I can't imagine us ever paying when contractual obligations are not met.

>Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.

Its hard to imagine the owner(s) of the company not being good with numbers here. Surely, such frauds will be found out eventually? In any case if a company has indeed hired such a dishonest person, I would hope they improve their hiring process and do some due diligence on their previous record to weed out such people in the future.

You are talking as if the firms that have outsourced are just some poor innocent sheep. Most of the firms that have outsourced only care about money. Again it is all about money and nothing else. Nobody cares about tech, or the product or anything. It is just finding a good deal to make money. I have seen enough people from management outsource the work and then jump ship and let the lowly tech handle the mess. It is the same in India. You get the hike and then jump to another company which pays better.

If most of the firms that have outsourced have got really bad work from these big firms then why are they not suing for bad quality work? Why do they give bigger and bigger contracts? That shows the type of people in your management which you should take a hard look at before complaining about the quality of work of these big service companies.

Source: I have been on both sides. I have seen the internals of them doing business and it is a freaking mess.

My experience with offshoring is that you need to put a lot of due diligence into hiring. I've worked with excellent Indian engineers, but we really had to interview a lot before we found them.

About this particular comment and elsewhere in this thread, the sense of moral superiority westerners still have after trump, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica is just mind boggling. One would assume that by now one would realize one’s short comings. It also proves that there nothing intellectually or morally superior except for speaking English better then your average rickshaw driver in India. Is some parts of the USA even that’s doubtable.

A key insight is less that all Indian devs are bad, and more that they tend to be called in by companies who are incapable of knowing whether they are doing good or bad. So when a competent team comes in and sees an Indian team that has operated incompetently, things get pretty nasty pretty fast.

STOP creating racist stereotypes.

You do realise I'm Indian myself?! Not only that, I had to break away from the sham dev culture in order to become a good developer. Hence why I can see through the facade rather clearly.

Seems like mismatched expectations largely on your part. You get what you pay. If you ask for the cheapest workforce, you get shoddy work. I am not arguing the validity of your experience but I think it shows lack of depth.

On the other end of the market, there is a very talented workforce that commands a premium price that delivers world class products. You just need to know where to look. Most western tech decisions to use Offshoring/Outsourcing are based on the key belief that costs can be lowered. In a truly capitalist market, workers are also looking to extract their maximum worth (and upward mobility) and If you pay less, your workforce will bail at the first opportunity.

Additionally, no one wants to work for a project that is driven by a spec document that you authored and requires no design input from the local team

It's not a scam, you just have to know what you are buying.

For internal Enterprise apps, for testing, for some other things - you need just basic developers who can understand problems and solve them.

Also - there's a lot of basic IT work and basic dev-ops-ish stuff that can be done.

So yes, if you try to build a hot new thing, for your hot new startup using Infosys, you're going to fail.

But if you have large company, and need some well-defined system for reviewing customer service inquiries ... well, if you manage the project correctly, Infosys might be a good choice. In fact, it may be your only choice because hiring devs in North America is very expensive.

I'm not convinced. I've seen some terrible test cases written by Infosys engineers. Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software. Remember that India is not the "only choice"; Eastern Europe is waiting in the wings at a similar price point, better quality, and better timezone overlap.

" Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software." you get what you pay for to some extent.

E. Europe is considerably more expensive than India.

Not really, when you consider that tasks need to be repeated multiple times in India before they're done to an acceptable standard. A few years ago, things were still cheap enough to accept this problem, but now development costs in India have gone up significantly and makes them non viable in my opinion.

>Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software.

I get this with people Accenture and the like too though. . .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com