Hacker News Reader

Comment by basha94 | Hacker News Reader

Can't help but be annoyed by the flock of pretentious hackers painting every Infosys/TCS employee with a broad brush. One might say this particular leak is bad on part of Infosys and they must be held accountable for this. But calling the entire company incompetent is just lazy and stupid.

They make more than $3B in free cash flow, they are worth more than $80B in market-cap and they gainfully employ more than 100k people. Folks commenting here about the "competency" of a company should realize this. Most of their clients are based in US and UK. These companies have been using Infosys' services for decades and also have locked in deals for the coming decade. If a company was really that incompetent, it really wouldn't be on the scale they are today.

You might call them a "boring services company" but they matter a great deal to a lot of people. Less pretension, more focus on "value", please? :)

View on HN

I think you are misunderstanding what these companies have deals with Infosys for.

It's not because they're so competent, it's because they're a convenient scapegoat when things inevitably go wrong.

Things inevitably go wrong for them because people hiring a company like Infosys do not want to be told how to do tech by competent engineers (and are probably not able to distinguish competent from incompetent engineers in the first place).

Yeah, right. Vanguard is paying a billion dollars, and Daimler is paying three billion dollars to Infosys because they are a "convenient scapegoat"?

Yes -- among other reasons, none of them related to quality. WITCH companies are notorious for this. Accenture, for example, boasted similarly ginormous numbers for a contract with the NHS (11 bn GBP), which never produced any working software before being scrapped after several years.

Absolutely. Do you think any manager at Daimler wants to say/justify “I went with this noname 10 person company in the midwestern US” over “I went with Infosys because everyone in the G500 does, and have you seen those prices? I have 100 people working on this project where otherwise I’d have only 10.”

And what’s more, if one of them realizes their mistake, do you think any of them want to admit that to themselves, much less their boss, after sinking billions into it?

It makes me sad to hear that Daimler - or any other large company that can afford better pays something for WITCH companies

so much salt!

If the focus was primarily on value, a lot of comments would be significantly more scathing in significantly more cases. The fact of the matter is that if you work for a company that produces trash, that is fine - everyone has to eat. But nobody owes you respect for it.

Eh? First of all, I don't work for them. Secondly, what makes you think this company produces trash? Vanguard recently signed a $1B+ deal with Infosys to help them with cloud migration and other services. Why the heck would an established client like Vanguard pay a such huge amount for no reason? You are either ignorant or just don't understand the business value companies like Infosys provide. I'm guessing you are a Software Engineer?

> Why the heck would an established client like Vanguard pay a such huge amount for no reason?

For the same reason the Canadian government spent billions on IBM, and Hertz on Accenture, with a complete dumpster fire for a result, and other organisations still trust Accenture and IBM (Kyndryl now) with their money. It has never been about quality with these types of contracts.

For those who are downvoting me, would love to hear your take instead of a salty downvote. All numbers in my post are factually correct.

The numbers don't matter, because they're not about the core issue at all. My guess is that the post reads as if you don't understand that money can in fact be spent wrong and you are downvoted for this reason.

I don't understand why you are being down voted. I disagree with you that they provide quality though. They don't. It is also the case that the company that hires them provide any quality. All are in it for making money with lowest spend and quality that they can get by. Very few obsess over quality and ones that do are vertically integrated to control quality in each step of the process. Very few American companies are like this.

The engineers who complain here don't have any influence in the decision making or otherwise they wouldn't be crying and complaining here.

The engineers here need to understand the world doesn't function well if everyone waited for 100% quality before shipping something. Business trumps Engineering always. And I say this as an engineer myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com