20K Workers Will Be Jobless in Indian IT Sector, Thanks to Infosys and Cognizant
techtudor.blogspot.com
techtudor.blogspot.com
I work in banking and payment sector and I had a chance to observe this on a dozen projects.
In one instance Cognizant offered to completely automate a significant application used by hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world. They were supposed to containerize half a dozen services, Oracle database, configure it to run on AWS and also automate environment creation.
The team put by Cognizant had not a single person knowing how to do basically anything. They spent entire project schedule and more just learning the basics of how to get around. Instead of automating anything they negotiated to be allowed to just order vms on EC2 and install applications there, manually. It took them three weeks to figure out how to copy 400GB database backup (they had space, accesses and networking, they just couldn't figure out how to copy the file). Then they spent another two weeks unable to restore the backup.
The trouble is that for a long time they have been cranking junior devs with no quality culture and no real interest in what they are doing and now this is starting to hurt them.
In your example, if they can't demonstrate a PoC container or automated environment creation in x% of the schedule, the contract is terminated. With similar milestones throughout the project.
It's like traditional PM project pacing goes out the window when dealing with contractors.
It's not a secret these shops put the least capable people on contracts they think they can get away with, so why not better incentivize them to bring a more skilled team?
By the time it became clear, that they were not able to deliver on their promises at anything that resembles an acceptable level, most people with actual skills were no longer around (FTEs and contractors).
My second best suggestion would be to let an outsourcing partner take over small areas and do a gradual transition as you monitor their performance and quality. The problem is, that these companies have specialized "window-dressing" consultants, that are actually smart and have real skills. As soon as the contract is won, the people with skills are moved to the next contract, that needs to be won - and they are replaced by extremely low-paid resources without qualifications. By the time the company realizes this, it is too late.
I felt quite sorry for these under-qualified people. Imagine going to work every day, barely eeking out a living, while being completely unable to deliver on what you are supposed to do, all while being shouted at by some local slavedriver/manager with a large moustache - for doing your best.
...So the reason I said "second-best" is because I do not believe there is any reason to do business with the Indian outsourcing companies at all, unless you are an exec whos bonus depends on "outsourcing x % to low-cost countries" - and you do not give a fuck about the company as a whole.
This is happening to my group right now...
I've worked on projects where we came to a compromise and had a fixed cost per story point, and the in house PO had to agree with estimations, but the vendor quickly started taking liberties and massively overestimating everything. When we called them out, they started compromising on quality instead leading us to code review everything. The overhead ended up being so large that we might as well have in-housed the project.
With time and materials projects it is almost impossible to get good results from the vendor. The vendor meets his goals when they deliver the team and they can't be held responsible for results, typically. If you are not happy with the people they delivered you can of course protest but then you just get different people and the people you protested will find place in another project and it does not matter much to the vendor.
I work for one of the big IT firms and we have many off-shore workers in India, but we're also bringing a lot of them on-shore now. Especially in finance, some customers are starting to demand people who speak the native language because they no longer want teams fully staffed with Indians. I feel like there's a change coming and it's going to be good for local developers, but it's going to be pretty bad for Indians counting on continued growing demand from the west.
I deal with these kinds of Indian outsourcing companies all the time, as a software vendor, so I'm used to them, but Cognizant is really just another level.
I’ve worked in wholesale finance for decades and seen how these guys are treated both on- and offshore by their employers. It’s frankly despicable.
Let’s hope the market in India finally pivots and smaller, more nimble shops take more and more market share.
That being said, I wonder how much of this is embedded in cultural norms that will not be easy to shake. For example: saying yes to your client’s every request, even if it’s stupid, is not something that comes easily, I suspect, if you’re ingrained to just say yes...
"So you understand what you have to do?"
"Yes"
"And you have all the documentation and information you need?"
"Yes"
"OK great, let's get this thing going, get in touch if you need any help"
"How's progress on the project?"
"I have not been able to start the work because I could not understand..."You need to phrase things differently: "What will be the first thing you'll be working on?" instead of "Do you understand?", for example.
When we changed tactics to just asking for an estimation without any direction from us, we would get much more realistic estimates. Took a lot of work to convince our project manager though.
Describe your next steps...
Please create a step by step project plan in {tool name}...
Another issue is waiting two weeks. Never, ever, wait two weeks. With any outsourced team you need much more frequent check-ins otherwise you run the risk of being blind-sided by huge project delays.
We assumed that we were dealing with a (semi-) autonomous developer or team of developers, who would ask for clarification or assistance if needed.
We made ourselves available, we didn't expect miracles (it was big product with a team you had years of knowledge about it attached, though they were working on a small, isolated area), but our expectations were just out of line with what we got.
In the end the developer turned out to be able to do the work, though did not excel. The biggest hurdle to cross was this mismatch of expectations.
The level of incompetence was at a level where you kind of look around and wonder if you are on some kind of hidden camera tv-show.
Never again will I work with a client that has outsourced anything that touches my work to Cognizant, Infosys or Cap Gemini.
(I think I screwed up but you get the idea!)
That would probably be equally evil and effective.
Even when those aren't issues yes/no questions rarely have the precision that you want, often you can phrase a question to seem like it only has a binary answer, but the real answer is way more complicated. Basic project management principles come into play here. As other posters have commented, asking what someone will be working on first, setting up tracking tasks etc.
I'm just a lowly eastern-European contractor banking on real estate prices in Silicon Valley remaining ridiculous on one side, and Indian contractors[0] remaining unreliable on the other.
[0] Those of them who have lower rates of course. Reliable Indian contractors have proper rates - and good for them.
You believe they are not being honest but they ARE!!
If they can not do the work, they tell you, but in their own language, not directly but in subtle ways.
They are expressing it, and in their mind you understand them, because they are actually saying it. It is just that you are deaf to their language, you are not looking to the nuances, and just ignore those signals they are emitting.
Then comes the blaming and the pointing fingers.
I wonder exactly what he or she had been doing for those two weeks, just staring into space? Were you being billed for that time?
It is so rude for them.
You are not telling them what you believe you are telling.
This is not limited to the IT industry. Never ask “is this the train to New Delhi?” for example...
Synonyms for "no" include:
I see
Ah
Ah-hah
Of course
That is difficult
Interesting
Yes
Imagine sending build artifacts to be deployed and finding extra files in them. Of course this was all undocumented and untracked, so it was a great exercise in decompilation.
> good developers capable of self managing work at Google or Apple
> the only Indian developers at that level work at FAANG
It's almost like good engineers are attracted to the companies that can afford them, regardless of their nationality.
No iPad Mini ships with ProMotion hardware, FWIW.
One of the IT contractors supporting the SAP system confessed to me how horribly L&TI treated him, and how if he spoke up about it, they could force him to return to India. He was making $18 an hour btw, although I’m pretty sure his billable rate was far larger. One of his Indian friends found out what he’d told me and ended up yelling at him in their native tongue because he wasn’t supposed to speak up, apparently.
I’m sure tons of talent from India absolutely is deserving of their work visas, but there were companies clearly gaming the system.
If I asked people whom I worked with to guess my salary, they couldn't even come close. I made about $180 per month with 48 hour work weeks.
The top developers in India and other similar countries have no reason to work there with shitty salaries and sweatshop projects when they can get visa and much better salary in almost any other place like US, Europe, China etc. So they’ll end up leaving and those mega enterprise outsourcing-corporations will pick from the ones that stay.
In Europe I'm already seeing some pushback against this. In some companies there are so many Indians that it's starting to affect the culture, so they're moving towards hiring more local juniors to train them, because there's less of a language/culture barrier.
A lot of really, really smart developers in India. I employ some of them myself. :)
If you need talented people you have to spend more money. It's as simple as that.
i'd go even more broad:
its not just about money, its also about time. You can get good returns on junior team members but you need to put in the time to coach/teach/guide/manage just like anything else.
more money just means that you're paying someone else to put in the time. Which is cool, different models work in different scenarios.
These large Indian outsourcing companies are nothing but a big scam that has cost us millions in productivity, not to mention stress and frustration for not being able to get things done.
Once you're forced to spend more than x amount to secure talented workers, surely you might as well employ domestic programmers/DBAs/whatever?
If by bad take you mean unpopular conclusion then maybe; it depends on who you share the unfounded conclusion with and whether they have information or biases that support or contradict your conclusion.
Value bloat is what people want, and NASSCOM does just that.
Take that news with loads of salt.
S1. I met a guy who was really passionate about blockchain and python. At some point, he joined a startup. They were using react-native. Within 2 months he left the job. They treated him really poorly, and no one was there to help him. Now he is preparing for gov jobs.
s2. Another young gun, who works in TCS it's been 6 months since he is last wrote a single line of code. At some point, they will throw a project at him and assume he is a top java hacker. That will solve all kinds of crazy problems.
Never understood the need for such large, low individual cost, tech teams anyways... almost always seems like a better idea to pay 2 people 200k a piece to work on something than hiring 8 off-shore developers / managers for 50k each.
Genuine question, trying to understand. :)