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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting how the top H1B companies are IT consultancy companies.

There are far too many enterprise I.T. consultants and I'm all for B2B adoption of software. I question how much value these consultants add sometimes. I hear so many stories of failed deployments and spending millions on projects a few competent individuals could of accomplished.

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Enterprise IT is all about money, cost reductions, etc. Good people are expensive as hell (we're talking bill rates of $2000-$5000/day). So outsourcing (and near sourcing) companies offer rates like "I'll give you 3 .NET guys that are three times as productive as that one guy who costs $3k/day and we'll only charge you $2k/day. Great savings!". These IT companies have fantastic profit margins. There is a complete disregard for the Mythical Man Month, thus all of the failure stories.

So the value they add is "we're cheaper and we can usually get you to where you want to be".

I look at this as Cargo Cult IT, but it makes sense in that if most IT project fail (and they do, something less than half outright or are canceled, significant lack of functionality and the like brings up "failure" to more than half) then this is a cheaper way to fail while still pretending to do IT.

Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average.

Google salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Google-Salary.htm?order=1 Microsoft salary http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm?order...

vs Wipro http://www.salarylist.com/company/Wipro-Salary.htm?order=1 Accenture http://www.salarylist.com/company/Accenture-Salary.htm?order...

>Outsourcing companies have lower salaries on average.

and, generally speaking, lower quality people. The consulting companies seem to love picking up bright, young, attractive people with little experience after college. I mean, one place I worked, accenture snapped up half our team. Now, these were all bright kids; I'd have hired them... in entry level positions.

I have worked for one such company, the salary of a fresher joining such indian IT consultant companies range from 6k to 10k $ per YEAR.

I think these companies are only called consulting companies because they are a vehicle for skilled programmers, engineers, etc. to get into the country and then placed at a client as a 'consultant' to fill roles specific to projects where the client wouldn't or couldn't arrange for an H1B visa themselves.

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