Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

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It is not really a slowdown. Companies are more than ever eager to hire anybody to do IT projects. The trouble is the level of service provided to customers by vendors from India is pretty shitty and that's why companies are migrating to other countries for IT resources.

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.

The thing that's consistently baffled me with projects like this is why technical milestones aren't encoded in contracts.

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?

I witnessed an outsourcing process first hand, where Cognizant was supposed to come in a handle X, Y and Z tasks (pretty much all IT services) in a large energy company.

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.

> I witnessed an outsourcing process first hand, where Cognizant was supposed to come in a handle X, Y and Z tasks (pretty much all IT services) in a large energy company. 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).

This is happening to my group right now...

Start looking for a new job and leave.

These days aren't we all trying to move towards more agile working practices? The problem is that fixed cost is pretty much at odds with this.

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.

Actually, I think fixed cost projects are better. With fixed cost projects you negotiate price for the expected outcome and it is much easier to show if the success criteria were not met.

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.

Fixed cost works on relatively simple, low risk, low innovation projects but not so much when there are lots of unknowns and emerging requirements. An example of low risk would be building a marketing website and high risk would be creating a new system from scratch to replace poorly defined business processes.

You don't really want to outsource innovative projects. You want to keep your best staff with you and have it work on most important projects and outsource the least important but highest volume of work.

From my experience only: the idea to outsource to under experienced developers is done by upper management who want credit for saving the company tons of money. Then they leave the company in a year or two after claiming great money saving victory and moving on to their next scam C-level job. If you build in milestones, then it's a chance to prove that the executive made a bad decision and wasted money on a useless transition. I've witnessed this in 3 different companies.

> I work in banking and payment sector and I had a chance to observe this on a dozen projects.

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.

Cognizant is quite possibly the worst of these outfits. I've never seen such incompetency, and they are just rude and awful to deal with. They'll do shit like schedule a meeting at 3AM for 7AM the same day, and get pissy when nobody attends, or send fourteen emails a day demanding that the needful be done, and status be provided.

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 work in similar capacity, I have seen similar time and time again. So called "Devs" and "SME's", that basically know absolutely nothing and need to be trained.

I agree, this is more of a correction by the market

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