This will buy what? A team of 4 interns and new grads for 6 months. At the end they'll have a slide deck with too much wordart in ith containing some half-baked ideas, and a few lines of code that don't do anything useful at all and are further from production readiness than starting from scratch.
They hired the bottom of the cohort (computer science/software engineering) at university and didn't hire anyone who could code. They emphasised communication over technical ability (fine, ok), but their style of communication is business buzzwords in slide decks, not substance. They are keen on business understanding, but that's not product thinking, understanding systems, or the limitations of solutions or anything like that, it's marketing, it's how can we look good.
A friend of mine worked for a company who regularly tidied up IBM messes. He was brought on to a project that had been run by a 5 person IBM team for a year. After a year they had detailed requirements for a system that no one wanted. His team of 3 spent 2-3 weeks building a boring CMS on top of Postgres and S3 and the client were ecstatic because it solved the problem they'd had for years.
The tech talent at IBM still exists, but it's doing the quantum computing research, or developing their mainframe or server business. The rest is a below average consultancy company.
I got a message from IBM CIC (customer innovation center). The HR lady was very rude, was looking for somebody with 6 more years than me and was disappointed by the fact that my yearly salary of the time was waay out of budget.
After that experience:
- a guy came for an interview, had been working in such place (IBM CIC). that guy had been studying agriculture (with a degree) but pivoted to computer science. he was okay-ish, but had limited experience outside of the power-point level competencies (some-times you have to come up with creative ideas)
- a colleague had worked in CIC. they really hire pretty much anyone and throw them at the customer. which basically means that it's a good place to get your foot into the industry, but you should be aiming at leaving as soon as you get any hands-on experience
Apaprently unless you work for the real IBM (doing research, ideally, or research-related stuff) you're working in a glorified sweat-shop.
After messing it up someone thought that maybe they should call in people who actually know this stuff but by then it was way too late. Highly annoying, that a brand that used to be associated with reliability is now pretty much a guarantee for pretty marketing, expensive suits and some disaster in your future.
They would run tours for undergrad CS students where we'd get on a coach to Hursley, tour around some flashy mainframes behind big windows, have a talk from someone senior, and then hear about their hiring/internship processes.
When I say "unable to code" here I mean unable to produce working solutions to problems in a professional environment. I'm sure these people can get a few ifs/loops together in Java.
Because the course is what you make of it, there are plenty of excellent programmers by the end, and the department has a good relationship with some great grad programmes at companies like ARM, Google, Microfocus, the finance industry, etc. IBM just look for a different kind of student.
In this case you've now got 3 levels of project management (Canadian govt, IBM CA, IBM India), 2 countries, 2+ languages, and 2 layers of a company who are banned from government contracts in parts of the world for over spending and under delivering.
Initial Price = Estimated_Cost / 1000
"Oops, we need more money" = (Estimated_Exec_Bonus + Estimated_Corp_Greed) + Worker_Cost + Extra_Corp_Greed
I just want to say that Americans, and certain other westerners have no right to talk badly about teams from places like India.
These teams often have some of the hardest working people in the world. They often have amazing academic credentials too, along with work credentials.
People who shortchange and underpay these extremely hardworking, gracious, and devoted people are scum. The same goes with talking negatively about people from diverse places. They are not all that different from you!
With the "globalization" that is occurring via the internet, which is being accelerated unbelievably fast by the pandemic, Americans are likely going to be in for an unbelievably ugly surprise in the next 10-20 years.
I am American and I do not want my fellow Americans to suffer, but lifestyle, even in STEM fields is going to decline hardcore. If I am correct on my bets, it will no longer be as remotely comfortable as it was in STEM for Americans.
The main thing I see impacting offshoring is communications: it’s hard to build custom software for a business you don’t understand and most companies haven’t been willing to invest in effective mitigation strategies. I’m expecting one outcome of this to be Indian companies pivoting towards SaaS, realizing that many businesses increasingly see in-house software development as a riskier choice.
So, a situation like OP described, is very likely to happen. This industry is "gone wild" anyways.
10 * 6750 USD * 22