Breach at IT Outsourcing Giant Wipro

I don't think that's an Indian outsourcing issue, so much as an artifact of the dynamics of the consulting environment.

Your above average talent gets trusted with high stakes, client-visible scenarios like new business development, RFP pitches, and high-visibility fire fighting. The roles tend to be a combination of subject matter expertise, solutions architect, client management, and sales.

Once you have a contract in hand, theoretically the engagement is structured at that point. It no longer needs the independent competence of members of your A Team, but rather competent project/program management, client/engagement management, and execution resources.

That's the stage where a lot of problems get introduced, and it's not always a result of cost cutting or profitability measures. A lot of it comes down to operational competency (both for the agency and the client), as well as the structure of the contract itself.

The biggest thing I've learned in my time consulting is what to do (and not do) when structuring a contract for a consulting/outsourcing engagement. Everything else cascades from there.

I worked for a company who outsourced a few times and found that the cost was actually higher in some cases and as you describe there would often be immediate turnover to folks who were far worse, and at worst a liability.... and even those guys would turn over all the time. They'd try another company, same result.

Most confusing was when things were straight horrible ... there was nothing anyone can do. I don't know if the contracts say "you give us your money and just deal with whatever we give you" but that's how people would act. The outsourced company could do all sorts of absurd things that would have serious consequences had it occurred with domestic support / new procedures and etc. But when the outsource company did it and it was as plain as day "nothing we can do about it".

That's part of the business plan of most consulting busineses and especially of big name consulting companies.

Principal consultants, who actually really know their shit, are called in for the contract negotiations. Those are of course not the folks, which you get to work on the project.

The actual contractors are usually rather junior, often fresh of a plane and range in quality from quite good to absolutely abyssimal. With big name consulting companies they can still be billed at a daily rate of 2K +.

In other words, and less politely put, the consulting business is pretty much a bait and switch.

This is a pretty standard approach, not just an "Indian outsourcing company thing".

eg I used to do contract work with Fujitsu some years ago, as one of the implementation people in their projects team. We'd get things set up and working well, document the heck out of it for the ops team, and then hard it over to said ops team for daily running.

It's done this way so the more experienced / creative solution finding types ;) (eg expensive) can be engaged to solve the initial problem + implement the solution. Once that's working it just needs people to run the daily playbook and look after minor issues that crop up.

I worked with some other outsourcing companies from other part of the world, and seen exactly this pattern: The initial team was sharp and smart, to gain stakeholder confidence, they stayed for a few months, setting up demo and prototype. Later they would slowly bring in other team members and started to withdraw themselves from the project. Eventually, those A-team was gone.

Those late-joiners had absolutely no clue on what was going on, and also didn't have the competency at all to hold the helm. Result? A much mediocre rewrite of the whole platform which never fulfilled the requirements.

I’ve seen the version of that where one individual does the phone interview, and a different one shows up on-site.

The consulting agency was prospecting for enterprise clients who would not pay attention close enough to such details.

They problem is that the "A team" can impress clients by cutting corners, rushing stuff and applying fairly generic solutions that won't work long term as requirements get more specific and more data goes in. Then they've moved on to new things before having a chance to learn from their mistakes.

This is the story of literally every single B2B service company in every industry I have dealt with (media, IT, ad-tech, analytics, catering)

Basically any industry where manpower cost is the biggest cost and you have a fixed-ish price B2B contract, the only way to squeeze out a higher margin is to lower manpower cost.

That does not prove one bit that the A team was technically performant. It just proves that bullshit sells.

Apple surely has plenty of average people too. Arguably the key to operating a large business is to figure out how to optimize the placement and tasking of your geniuses/motivated people with vision/whatever for the greatest gains whilst using the average staff effectively to keep the general workload off of said individuals.

> Any company over size x is, by definition, staffed by average people.

Average for that company, not average across profession.

> What, then, would lead anyone to believe that a sufficiently large company could possibly be full of geniuses? It just can’t happen.

It absolutely can and should (though it's another question why it rarely does). It requires expending continuous effort though - effort to bring in above-average people, to raise the level of people on-board so they stay above average, and to get rid of people that are below average.

This is actually what life itself does. The default, lowest-energy state of matter is a mixed and utterly uninteresting soup of everything. Living things continuously expend energy to maintain an organized, higher-energy state against the threat of average. They continuously pump entropy out.

To be fair, the OP was referring to all large outsourcing companies. There are a lot of outsourcing companies that charge well over the rate for a full time hire (they don't necessarily pay their employees that, but...) I worked briefly for one such "body shop" and I found that the company billed my time at a rate of about twice what they paid me. As far as I can tell, it tends to slot in between a full time employee and an independent consultant/contractor in terms of price.

Why do companies pay this premium? For one, it may be because they have a budget for a "6 month project" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) but not for a full time hire. Sometimes it's because they think that they'll be able to pick and choose the best developers from inside a large organisation (and sometimes it works out that way... almost never, but sometimes...) But really it's just a matter of being naive, I think.

The company I used to work for (as an independent contractor... ahem...) went through a phase where the CEO was absolutely convinced that it didn't pay to hire developers -- they were a PITA (always demanding weird things, never showing up before 10:30 am, never dressing properly for work, etc, etc). They always wanted raises and you have to track progress and negotiate with them on price every year. You have to pay benefits and if a person is on disability on maternity, you've got to do something about it. You constantly need to be reviewing CVs, interviewing and hiring. If you get someone really bad, you can't actually reasonably fire them for a long time. Etc, etc, etc. So he tried a few experiments with hiring from outsourcing companies (all of which were charging considerably more than any of us were getting paid, I will add)... and it wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't really any better. But the cherry on the cake was, as soon as the project was done, they fled and no amount of pleading could get those developers back again (as you can imagine). So the CEO realised that having a crack development team was definitely worth the effort and the company really transformed as a result.

However, a lot of companies are still stuck in the mindset where it's best to have as few full time developers as possible.

My lord the "frictionless" buzzword BS in that made me feel like I was actually losing brain cells:

> He offers insights on:

> How privileged access management will fit into a frictionless security approach; > The role of artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain in enabling frictionless security and faster threat detection;

I seriously considered registering justaddblockchain.com after reading that to document all the places where people feel they look smarter by just adding "blockchain!" to random technical discussions.

Holy crap... That's not what frictionless means. That's literally the definition of appropriate levels of security based on risk profile, but even high levels of security should be frictionless, i.e. they should work the same way every time and should be relatively easy to do, which is what 90% of MFA apps are. What's not frictionless is when your security team needlessly causes you to change your very secure password every 90 days because someone told them that was a good idea. It leads to sticky notes and easily cracked passwords that use formulas i.e. Spring2019! Summer2019! And so on like in so many corporations due to poorly thought out security implementation. Longer time before forced password changes coupled with either a physical key or software token that don't have to be remembered are way better.

Focus* typo...