
Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence - one_electron
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/23/indian-it-consultancies-struggle-against-technological-obsolescence
======
Brajeshwar
To set context, I'm Indian.

I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts
in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd
Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time.

So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian
Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes;

Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other individuals and teams.
The Indian team in Singapore/Bangalore/San Francisco will called the
Chennai/Other-Locale team as their outsource partner/team and are mis-treated.
I was like, "I thought you guys were team!"

In another incident, I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known
India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently
explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes, send
in pull request and not to email us zip files of their codes. Their head of
something-something (too many senseless designations/titles) was not happy and
in his mistake, sent a "Reply All" to the tune of, "Any email from Brajeshwar
should not be replied immediately, call a meeting with the tech heads."

Well, I was kinda referred to someone who should be sent in when shits stars
hitting the fan. ;-)

~~~
pankajdoharey
OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it
happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code
in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite
antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip
over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and
then she has to navigate the buereucracy writing emails to get access to some
proprietary database or OS.

~~~
mattlondon
I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the
part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and
configured.

I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM
on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have
been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the
timelines for a few weeks and billed the client.

To be fair we did use clearcase for source control, but the outsourced teams
were equally awful. There was a genuine concern that a lot of the team members
out there were people's friends/family/neighbors because they never ever spoke
in meetings (the lead would answer on their behalf if they were asked a
question), and either we never saw any code from them or what we did was
delivered slowly and was usually awful verbatim copy-paste work or simply just
plain did not work.

~~~
mtnygard
A couple of times in the past, I saw the pattern of one person as the VCS
proxy for a whole team. Eventually I realized it was not because there were
team members who didn't know how to use VCS. It was because individually-
tracked commits would reveal that only one or two of the people contributed
90%+ of the work.

Edited: this was _not_ exclusively from Indian IT firms.

~~~
pankajdoharey
That makes complete sense this is a scam they are pulling.

------
_the_inflator
It boils down to the Business Model.

Having worked extensively with the major Indian vendors, with people from
India in different settings, onsite and offshore, I observed that they simply
focus on labor costs in Europe and elsewhere.

Salespeople tried to sell us dozens of teams with “cheap” developers of every
skillset we wanted.

But that is not how software is done. I want outcomes not masses. I need
creativity to work on tools expressed through software not cheaper developers.

I felt sorry for my Indian dev friends that the true value of these folks was
left off the board.

Salespeople always tried to solve a problem with another “cheap team”. Enter
SaaS...

~~~
oneplane
I've talked with a lot of different Indian and similar 'offshore' engineers,
developers and managers and most of them ended up in the place they did due to
choices between being a farmer or being an IT person, being in a poor province
vs. being in a less-poor province, and being able to support your parents.
Almost none of them had an upbringing, background or base passion for
technology or IT in general.

While you can in theory do your IT things with no passion at all, and kill all
creativity and still be productive, it often ends up being just 'mass' like
you describe, a transformed version of the classical western 'consultants'
that usually end up being companies that focus on sales and billable hours and
never really deliver what the people needed (referring to earlier HN posts
about accenture and deloitte).

I get that at some point all companies converge on the same generic point of
being in the business of making money at all costs, and making it 'measurable'
via sales, hours and contracts. It doesn't matter if it's software, financial,
legal etc. At least not to them at that point.

The bigger problem with this is that the IT systems are not as well defined or
a closed system as the other examples might be. A ledger would be simple to
verify in comparison: you apply a fixed set of rules to a fixed period of data
and it must result in something within a known range. With software you can do
a little bit of determining that the 'borders' of your 'box' of functionality
would be, but to do an exhaustive verification is so far from profitable that
it's only done in a few highly regulated systems like flight controllers.

So now we have a system where a lot of money and power vectors are involved
that would (somewhat) work for legal and finance and the likes (i.e. the
classical big ones that existed long before software did) and a constant
attempt to apply it to IT and hide everything they don't like about getting
the wrong results. It still eats resources like the other kinds of work, but
doesn't produce the results you would expect for the resources that went in to
it.

Software doesn't operate in a vacuum, disconnecting users, buyers, sellers, or
stakeholders in general is bad for everyone and because of endless change and
interaction the whole model of 'buying a product' hasn't been realistic since
2000, and with connected OT (think SCADA and the likes) it won't even apply to
embedded systems anymore.

~~~
_the_inflator
"I've talked with a lot of different Indian and similar 'offshore' engineers,
developers and managers and most of them ended up in the place they did due to
choices between being a farmer or being an IT person, being in a poor province
vs. being in a less-poor province, and being able to support your parents.
Almost none of them had an upbringing, background, or base passion for
technology or IT in general."

This sadly happened to me many times. Since the quality of many Indian teams
was extremely abysmal, I found out that many so-called developers had no IT
background at all, as you wrote. They went through a 2 to 4 weeks HTML/CSS/JS
Bootcamp, and, very important allegedly in India, received a certificate, that
qualified them as “Middle Web Developers”.

~~~
TriNetra
if one is looking for $10-20 hourly developer, certainly the result will
likely be what you've experienced.

Big IT Indian firms usually will choose one or two highly talented developers
for a project team and others just hop around them. Usually these projects
aren't also very engineering-intensive and becomes boring once the base
framework is created for creative folks. Good devs don't stay longer in a
company at least during initial years simply they're in good demand and gets
double the package with every jump. Eventually they'll make it to Indian
subsidiaries of US companies like Microsoft/Google or, they'll start their own
expert consultancy/product companies.

For the record I've worked out of India exclusively and have charged up to
about $100 hourly rate from my US clients. I've gone through above process -
my last job being at Microsoft India (2011-2016)

~~~
imtringued
When developing nations that are primarily known for their cheap products
start creating competitive high quality products what happens is that they
start charging just as much as every other developed nation. That same dynamic
plays out with Indian software developers.

If they can deliver X amount of value they can also charge X for their
service. This means if you hire an Indian for $10 an hour you're going to get
value equivalent to $10.

Since productivity per member drops as you increase team size you can't just
hire a bigger team to get yourself out of this problem. The true number of
developers that your project needs is probably constant and quite low.

If you hire cheaper but less experienced developers then it might simply take
6 times longer to finish the project than if you had hired an Indian developer
that charges $60 per hour. This is usually where the project fails. Managers
expect the project to be done in 6 months but this estimate is based on
competent developers with 3 years of experience, not beginners who are working
on their first project and first need to gather 3 years of experience to
adequately finish the project.

Really the only way you can get a real bargain is by hiring someone, letting
them gain experience without giving them a raise. The difference between
market rate and actual developer salary is where you save the most money. The
tricky part is creating a environment in which people want to stay.

~~~
AmericanChopper
India has quite a way to go to break that boundary. The IT industry in India
is basically a giant demonstration of the Dead Sea effect. The most talented
engineers from India have been leaving the country in droves for decades. The
local industry has a deservedly terrible reputation, which motivates more
local talent to leave, further degrading the local labor market, which further
incentivises people to leave...

I think the most promising signs for the local industry is that it’s starting
to produce some rather successful home grown startups. Which are much more
likely to attract local talent than the outsourcing body shops are.

------
afrojack123
Indian IT consultancies have been struggling against technological
obsolescence for 30 years. And they will continue to struggle for many more.
This is an idiotic hit piece hit written by a journalist who needs to meet his
quota. This journalist has never worked for one of these consultancies, a tech
company, or been in C-suite of any org.

I have worked in these "consultancies" so here is my take. There is a wide
range of talent in these consultancies. Some examples are web app
developers/software engineers, website people, implementation
engineers/enterprise app software, supply chain, cybersecurity, etc. Yes,
unfortunately, some of this talent is not familiar with basic software tooling
like basic linux commands or git or setting up a path variable. This sounds
really bad until you work with a Georgia Tech computer engineering grad and
realize he doesn't know this either.

Many methods of sales. A sale can be considered a billion dollar deal or
having a director hiring a contractor. The billion dollar deal is closer to
consulting. The director hiring a contractor is closer to professional
services firm.

Prior to these consultancies, the orgs would hire their own employees and
train them. What changed? Contractors easier to layoff than W-2 employees.
Maybe their own employees didn't have the expertise.

The truth of the matter is for most organizations, IT is a cost center along
with legal and finance. It is not their money maker. They have no interest in
innovative IT/software "technology" until their competitor in the same
industry as them has it. Price matters. Laying off people easily matter.

"Consultancies" exist for that reason. Look past their marketing/branding and
their official classification is a professional services firm.

~~~
rafiki6
> The truth of the matter is for most organizations, IT is a cost center along
> with legal and finance. It is not their money maker. They have no interest
> in innovative IT/software "technology" until their competitor in the same
> industry as them has it. Price matters. Laying off people easily matter.

Accurate and poignant. Having lived in the banks for a while, this will always
be the case in industries. They don't give a shit if you have a passion or
about your career. They want you to be a "xyz developer with 50 years of
experience". Sometimes I think we forget how the real world works when we are
enamored with the cool things computers can do.

~~~
erikerikson
Isn't this why a variety of industries such as banking are being or will be
disrupted?

For example in banking, I would love to set up income apportionment (i.e. x%
here, y% there, ...) but for some reason I have to split out income deposits
every once in a while via manual, external tools. Why is it again that we
haven't set up two sided and payee specific authorizations so that we never
hand out data that can be used to steal from us and we could be notified if a
payee tries to bump the bill? I've suggested these and other things to banks
and credit unions for years...

~~~
PedroBatista
Banks aren't being "disrupted", every new fintech hotness has an old fat bank
behind, so either way they win.

Like every musical chair game, some poor schmuck will sleep and lose but most
of the banks will be just fine.

~~~
erikerikson
I agree. Banks haven't been disrupted in any serious manner yet.

You could go further and note that every angel or VC backed firm has a
financier behind it.

I wouldn't claim it will be easy but I will suggest there is a large
opportunity.

------
mjohn
I recently joined a company where my main task is to modernise a business
critical application built and supported by Wipro over ten years ago.
Everything is still on .Net 3.0 (first released in 2007), and despite hundreds
of pages of documentation the developers seem to have little understanding of
what the application actually does for the business.

The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building
one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as
possible with minimal evolution. This is fine if you don't need the software
to evolve, but most business applications do need to evolve even if slower
than at a start-up or FAANG.

At least where I work there has been the recent realisation that outsourcing
all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that
technology.

~~~
lgleason
Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations.

1\. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability.

2\. Communication barriers, even when the people are local.

3\. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into
3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more
expensive onshore devs.

4\. Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money
spent on people who are onshore.

Many of these efforts are akin to putting a bunch of monkeys in front of
typewriters and expecting to get the next Shakespeare. The old "Mythical Man
Month" book by Fred Brooks still holds true and it is truly astounding that
organizations continue to make the same mistakes and not learn from history
etc..

~~~
GordonS
> Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3
> different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more
> expensive onshore devs

When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back
around 2007, this really struck me too.

It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew _nothing_ beyond their very
limited task space. Literally.nothing.

You'd have 3 people doing nothing but creating worthless unit tests that
didn't test anything, 3 people writing HTML, 3 people writing CSS, 3 people
coding an API, 3 people coding a backend, 3 people whose job it was to "manage
the config files", 3 testers doing basically nothing... it was... so
completely and utterly inefficient! It was a running joke that there would be
someone to write the opening HTML tag, someone to write the name, and someone
to close the tag - it wasn't far from the truth.

Of course, not all offshore teams are this insanely inept. To some degree it
comes down to how much the client is willing to pay, but outsourcers also have
different groups that target different segments. Their ODC (offshore
development team) groups cater to the cheap-as-possible crowd, and are
invariably atrocious, but their digital/consulting groups are comprised of
"real" developers.

Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based
on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across
multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of
excellent developers.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I had to deal with people who couldn't grasp the concept of bitwise masking
and shifts to pack/extract fields from an integer. This was for a wire
protocol that needed to conserve space to minimize server costs. Their
solution was to have all booleans in their own field which ended up burning
five bytes each in our serialization format. I just gave up and let them do
what they wanted since nobody on my side seemed to care.

~~~
zentiggr
I worked desktop support for a few years in a large US based corp. My worst
day deploying a new machine was a laptop to a dev who came in and didn't
understand what I meant when I asked him to unlock the machine so we could log
him in. He wasn't even familiar with Ctrl-Alt-Del and the rest of the
deployment went just as painfully.

I get task siloing and hiring green people and giving them a chance to ramp up
but that just threw me for a loop.

~~~
andrekandre
> I get task siloing and hiring green people and giving them a chance to ramp
> up but that just threw me for a loop.

one thing i notice about a lot of companies is, they just dont invest into
growing and improving the knowledge and skills of "green people" or they stop
short at very basic stuff

i understand there are costs, but i think its eventually self-defeating..
maybe there is something i am missing...

------
marjann
I believe there is a bias towards the outsourcing, at least judging by the
comments.

Let me tell you my side of the story. We are a software development company
based in Macedonia - Emit Knowledge

From personal experience, we've refactored/rewritten code that was developed
by development teams from USA, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, UK where the hourly
rate is sky high compared to ours.

According to me the problem is not in the outsourcing itself, but rather in
the company size and culture. Bigger companies tend to have stronger sales
teams, getting whatever is in their way, closing deals without having
expertise and know-how. The only driving factor is how to maximize profit.
Hire less experience devs, leave the SRS so you can charge CRs and that kind
of doctrine.

On the other hand, I can tell that we as a company have better processes than
bigger companies: \- having our own framework:
[https://signals.emitknowledge.com/](https://signals.emitknowledge.com/) soon
to be open sourced; \- having multiple products, which you will find as rarity
when it comes to agencies; \- having an research and development; \- before we
start working with a client, the agreement is that it is a two sides stick,
the client needs to be part of the development if success is expected; \-
regular communication is a must; \- we discuss with the clients to reduce
scopes if we identify that it will increase costs without providing a business
value at the end;

The difference is in the culture. As a CEO I would like my client's business
to succeed so we can work together as partners, long terms, instead of getting
money from CRs and playing "you haven't specified this".

Be transparent guys. Stop playing games with your clients.

You need to give in order to get.

~~~
hashhar
> The difference is in the culture. As a CEO I would like my client's business
> to succeed so we can work together as partners, long terms, instead of
> getting money from CRs and playing "you haven't specified this".

I think this is the part that's most important and similar to how orgs like
RedHat operate.

------
kumarski
I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this
and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or
paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer
talent elsewhere.

I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the
talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of
output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure
and are scaling.

The "catch" is that we have to do over-documentation, lots of screenshots, and
consistent routine communications. My CTO and cofounder speaks 4 languages.

The talent has to be managed.

Within 12 months of being with us, a Pakistani developer has massively
increased their value.

We also don't bring anyone into core leadership team onshore unless they speak
at least 2 languages or more or they have a serious edge in terms of talent.

The developers who complain about Indian and Pakistani developers are usually:

\- Unilingual

\- have been over-resourced in every position they've ever been in

\- poorly travelled

\- are used to working with onshore talent that has context

\- find the time difference to be abhorrent

Right now, our core "mission critical" team speaks 4 languages.

I fully hope to add 10-20 languages as we expand. I'm hoping for Turkish,
Arabic, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese in that
order...

You cannot expect someone who has 10-14 times less electricity/capita to
suddenly have the context of an American. It takes time.

We pay for the entire floor of a building in Pakistan, have cameras, etc...
remote now is a core part of our tech biz.

~~~
theflyinghorse
Forgive my skepticism

> I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy
> the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms
> of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core
> infrastructure and are scaling.

SV is a hotbed for a ton of international talent, not just American. Indeed,
SV pays the most out of anywhere on the planet and therefore has an incredibly
strong pull for the best and brightest from across the world. I sincerely
doubt that one country's local talent is strong than a clustered talent center
like SV.

Is Pakistani talent flying under the radar? Are we simply not aware of the
amazing research and development being made in Pakistan vs US or China?

~~~
novok
The good ones eventually end up in SV or work for the international offices of
SV or work at local superstars like flipkart and such because of the pay
differential. %40 of SV staff being some form of 'asian' is a testament to
that.

~~~
oa335
It's much harder immigrating to U.S. from Pakistan than from India...more
likely that Pakistani dev will have to stay in Pakistan than an Indian dev.

------
entha_saava
As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this.

Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-
enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date.
As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss
poor.

The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who
enter computer science / engineering courses don't have any interest in
computers. They enter because they scored well in entrance exam (which can be
games by studying some books relentlessly for some years), and since Software
is still one of the highest paying fields. And quite some of them continue
their relentless pursuit for a good "package" by grinding Hackerrank /
leetcode. It is literally a rat race.

The same mindset will create an impression that being a manager is superior to
being a programmer. Because you are "managing" people. These people do all
kind of office politics to become manager, and spend rest of their life
ruining someone else's life.

You can't expect these kind of people to love their job or even do it
properly.

Hierarchy: Related to above point, in India, you don't oppose or even question
an upper officer or elder's decision, because ELDERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT HERE IN
INDIA. That's why so many people want to be manager.

Lack of interest in improving education: In many Indian engineering colleges,
one year is wasted teaching theoretical subjects like chemistry and physics.
No computer science related subject except basic C Programming (Lol not even
malloc() and free()) are taught. This appears to be purely done in order to
provide jobs for people who had studied these subjects. While teaching these
subjects may have marginal benefits, they are outweighed by pure rote learning
oriented assesment sysem and wasting one year of CSE programme. That's a bad
trade-off for someone interested in CS. All entrance exams are based on
Math/Physics/Chemistry and we have learnt enough of that. STOP the old age
tradition.

If the chemistry they teach in last two years of high school (called pre
university here), which is quite high level, qualifies for entrance exams,
Computer Science should too. No I am not telling this because it is a
programmers forum. But CS taught in pre-uni (optional subject) is more
essential and often more helpful than chemistry and half of physics taught to
these grades. But chemistry is compulsory for some legacy reasons. There is no
interest to change that.

~~~
blocked_again
Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right.

India has a lot of Engineering students.

There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India
(IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private
colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these
consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join
product companies like Flipkart, Swiggy, Paytm, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc.

Consultancy companies get students mostly from 2nd and 3rd tier (mostly
private) colleges. Pretty much all these colleges are in a very bad shape. I
think there are over half a million students enrolled in these colleges every
year. Students still go to these engineering colleges since the education is
not as expensive as in the USA and it's what pretty much everyone do after
high school. If it was USA they would have just left college altogether
instead of wasting money on a terrible college.

Sure, the quality of education of Tier 1 colleges can be improved a lot as
well. But generalizing the entire Indian engineering education as the reason
why these consultancy companies are doing poor is not correct either.

~~~
entha_saava
Yeah. Tier 1 colleges. Tell me more about NITs and IITs.

I study at a so colled top college. Where highest placement is always around
50-60 LPa. That doesn't mean teaching and other things are good (sure better
than average, but that's not what I call 'good'). The highest placements are
more because of students and a FEW professors who actually happen to be
passionate.

But in the entire class, there are less than 15% of people who actually have
interest in CS or Programming. Many came through good scores in entrance exams
(myself included) and many through management quota (i.e Paying the
institution heavy sums). While the first group has some people who like
programming and CS, it also has more number of people who just happened to get
good scores because of relentless studying and practice, then took CSE branch
because placements.

I don't think NITs and IITs look much better these days. I attempted JEE but
that was really hard to get an NIT without studying hard for 2-4 years. People
who have money take coaching classes and study for JEE exclusively, but a
rural student like me can't do that. The system is gamed like hell. With the
abundance of such coaching kids, I don't think IITs and NITs can keep their
previous charm.

Here is a paper on the Joint Entrance exam (JEE) tragedy:

[https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE...](https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE.pdf)

~~~
blocked_again
I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make. Nobody is saying
all the students in top tier colleges studying CS are super passsionate into
CS. Some are. A lot of them are not.

My point is that tier 1 colleges produce a lot of good programmers. The reason
why they are good at programming can be because of high salary expectations,
peerpressure, parents, status, passion, etc. I honestly couldn't care less as
long as they do their job. The reason why companies like TCS/Infosys are bad
is not because tier 1 colleges produce programmers that are not passionate
about CS. It's because India has way too many Engineering colleges that is of
abysmal quality. And those colleges accept students who otherwise would not
have gotten into any decent engineering colleges

> Many came through good scores in entrance exams (myself included) and many
> through management quota (i.e Paying the institution heavy sum

I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting
students. Highest package is not really what is used for defining tier A. What
I meant by tier A are centrally funded colleges like IITs, NITs and really
good private colleges like BITS and IIIT-H(not SRM, MIT etc). None of them
take students by accepting money. If the college takes students by accepting
money then it is definitely not tier A.

> The system is gamed like hell. With the abundance of such coaching kids, I
> don't think IITs and NITs can keep their previous charm.

Sure. The system is gamed. But it's still a fair system. The rules are same
for everyone. You are measured by the number of correct answers you circle in
the paper. Nobody cares about who your parents are. Nobody cares about what
you wrote in your essay. Its a hard competetion. But it's a fair competetion.
There is reservation at play for students from backward castes as well but
lt's not get into that. Some would say it's good. Some would say it's bad.

~~~
entha_saava
> I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make.

That the quality of NIT and IITs are decreasing. I have seen a lot of previous
generation people who studied in IITs and have stellar achievements. But I
don't think the same will be true for current crop of IIT and NIT students. To
be clear, I won't be judging those people who are of my own generation, but
this is a disappointment about how artificial the entry to these institutions
has become. How many of them will be mechanically grinding leetcode as
compared to their previous generation?

Increasingly so in recent years - the year I wrote JEE mains, the paper was
much more susceptible to 'tricks' and 'shortcut formulae' taught by coaching
institutions, than the previous years.

At this point, I have heard IIT professors expressing discontent about the
coaching center crap. I don't know how you think it is still a fair game.

> I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting
> students. Probably explains why your batch had a lot of CS students who were
> not any good.

Fine, what defines tier A? I also mentioned lot of them with high state-level
entrance exam scores are not "Good Enough", too.

In what I have seen, those people who do well in exams solely due to peer
pressure and high expectations, don't very well understand the concepts. I
have seen so many such book-worm topper kids not properly understanding
recursion or algorithm complexity.

------
Abishek_Muthian
It was far much worse, now the major consultancies are on rapid re-skilling
drive, also they have made significant changes to their pricing strategy to
their clients and are not just based on head count.

But the criticism of technological obsolescence cannot be just levelled
against these consultancies alone, much like how almost every electronics
hardware was(is) is manufactured in China due to cheap labour costs, so was
the reason behind extraordinary growth of Indian IT services and so it all
comes down to 'What the client wants'.

But when their client suddenly wanted to catch up on the AI/ML/Analytics
bandwagon, these consultancies understood the need to revamp their skilling
strategy. That said, it's not like these consultancies never innovate they
have dabbled with large in-house products ranging from cloud to automation and
some have been fairly successful e.g. TCS ignio, their (AI in air-quotes)
automation product[1].

End of the day, they get the job done for their clients which includes almost
every major Bank, Retail, Pharmacy to even Aerospace industry like Boeing
(Only green card holders/US citizens are employed), Automobile - Ferrari,
Cyber Security etc. also saving huge amount of money for them in the process.

[1][https://digitate.com/ignio-aiops/](https://digitate.com/ignio-aiops/)
(Warning: Marketing fluff).

------
deadalus
[https://archive.is/j7xRa](https://archive.is/j7xRa)

~~~
abrolhos
Thank you!

------
the-dude
There is little substance in the article. Biggest point made is that
enterprise software is easier to administer and use.

I feel they entirely missed the elephant in the room : SaaS.

~~~
pwarner
Yes, SaaS and even IaaS and PaaS are the ultimate outsourcing. Outsourcing
that _actually_ works since it's not simply swapping a US based high paid
human for a low paid off shore human. Instead it's swapping a human for
automation, that's real savings for customers, even after margin for the
automation creator.

------
josephjrobison
As a marketing person, I've learned the hard way over the years that I'm not
qualified to hire outsourced development. I've hired about a dozen over the
years, and only 1-2 have been a good experience. I probably gave myself too
much credit for knowing HTML/CSS/WordPress and not more, thinking I was
qualified enough. Only a good to great web developer has the expertise to spot
high quality outsourced talent, and ignore the other 90%.

The fault is mine for thinking I had the skillset to hire in a field in which
I'm not an expert. It's the same with any field, actually. Marketers bemoan
all the time when companies hire a cheap, bad SEO, but you have to feel sorry
for the hiring party that was making what they thought was a value decision,
even though they were not a practitioner expert.

Zooming out, you can see how decisions are made at a massive scale based on
the hiring party making the decision based on the sales team or personal
business relationships, while not being the subject matter expert.

------
ThePadawan
I have been keeping my ear to the ground in the local job market (Switzerland)
and personally haven't encountered any company that outsourced to India
specifically.

Most popular are Eastern Europe (Serbia, Ukraine, Romania) and Asia (Vietnam).

The """savings""" multiplier is still in the order of 3-4x, but time zones
work out better.

I am however, still baffled how this happened after seemingly every company
made the discovery that outsourcing too much of your business doesn't tend to
work out (20 years ago, during the last boom).

I also talked to several companies that were willing to trust their outsourced
teams to work remotely, but not the staff located in Switzerland (who once
again have to come to the office during the pandemic).

------
alexpotato
I forget where I heard this quote but I think it summarizes the whole
"outsourcing as a boondogle" scenario:

1\. A good development team in the US/Europe costs $X

2\. An equivalent team in not the US/Europe costs 75% of $X

3\. A terrible team in not the US/Europe costs 25% of $X

Most outsourcing decisions instead of stopping at Option 2 and enjoying the
25% savings, got greedy and went full bore to Option 3 and thought themselves
geniuses.

------
babaganooj
Cisco's IT is almost 100% Indian, and by almost 100% I mean I've only seen one
or two out of thousands who weren't Indian. Cisco's Indian IT department
managers having exclusive preference for Indian companies. It's so against the
law for Cisco to have their IT department almost fully staffed by H1B visa
holders who work for some Indian outsourcer and are themselves all Indian. The
work they do is only half decent (well, not really, it's purely best effort,
and depends on the individual or team doing the work it can vary dramatically)

The CEOs of many of the Indian outsourcers are so incompetent and focused so
exclusively on relationship based selling that it's pointless to even bring up
the topic of them falling behind the tech adoption curve. It's a giant heap of
incompetence and corruption.

------
shash
It’s easy to tar the entire Indian IT industry with the same brush, but it’s a
much richer ecosystem than just the Big Five.

For example, I work in a small product based company in a niche segment where
we’re among the very few people who can provide the solutions we can, and I’d
happily pit my colleagues’ skills against the best of SV.

Keep in mind that this article is only about the Big Five. They have a certain
business model, a value proposition and a set of clients whom they service. A
particular niche that’s been very lucrative and productive for them. This, as
the article says, may be drying up.

But that doesn’t mean that Indian IT as a whole, or even most of Indian IT is
in trouble.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
It won't dry up that quickly.

As long as customers still use SAP and Oracle it will be a long while.

The problem with enterprise software was never the technical details - it was
getting archaic, inefficient business processes in systems that didn't support
those processes.

This doesn't change with SaaS. Extension tools have gotten better but the core
problem still exists. So many customers still use on-prem SAP hosted in the
cloud. The end result is the same requirement for everything but sysops.

------
zabil
Major IT companies in India get a lot of revenue from maintainence projects
and there is usually no scope for making major changes or innovating there.

The time and material billing for these make it quite attractive from a
revenue point vs fixed bid greenfield projects. I don't think that situation
will change anytime time soon as along as these companies stick to services.

~~~
baybal2
Yes, one word to say — JAVA.

It's pretty much, the one and only thing that keeps enterprisey software
maintainance people occupied.

Thought, the Java is finally on decline on the backend. Android is pulling
Java devs from enterprise, and cheaper to use languages displace Java there.

~~~
theflyinghorse
There is nothing wrong with Java. Modern Java is pretty nice to use, fairly
fast, has an incredible amount of libraries and tooling to do just about
anything you want to do and a vast pool of talent to draw from.

At my current job I try to stick to Java for any new services because it's a
great overall language.

~~~
novok
People don't like Java for the same reasons they don't like Jira. It's all the
culture surrounding it.

~~~
caoilte
The JIRA culture would be fine if the software wasn't a total piece of crap.

------
ilikerashers
I'm not sure I'm bought into this. I consulted at a big bank and am currently
at a government department where I can see the in-house trend reversing.

10 years ago there was a big backlash against outsourcers and tech moved to
"Agile" delivery and shiny AWS. Companies started investing believing they
were being left behind.

We're going through a low point in the hype cycle right now.
Blockchain/AI/Data science have all been a bit disappointing for Enterprise.
Much of the mobile revolution passed them by too! Cloud is a bit pricier than
expected and keeping on top of trends (CloudFoundry/K8S) has been exhausting
for in-house staff.

Outsourcing is great for handle-crank, cheap IT and that's not going away.

Also, why is Saas being frequently mentioned as a solution here? Enterprise
system complexity is not very Saas friendly.

~~~
heisenbit
Yes, if enterprise systems were easy SAP would have cornered the market long
ago. Or Oracle for that matter.

One of the most valuable experience in my education was being forced to write
a review and discuss in class ‚There is no silver bullet‘. Better tools will
not stop the flow of new requirements. And being good enough for todays
business does not stop your competitor trying to outmaneuver you.

The dynamic may change once silicon progress has slowed down but until then it
will be risky to stop innovating.

------
burntoutfire
These consultancies may also finally reap what they sow re: quality of work. I
work in a major bank and some senior managers say they'd rather get the plague
than a team of those guys. The managers need to deliver what they promised to
their higher ups, and they've learned that these teams, however cheap they
are, in practice will not help them with that. Btw these companies still
manage to get some business with us, which I suspect is to some degree helped
with bribes.

------
hogFeast
This is still very shallow thinking. Every company that views tech as a cost
rather than a way to generate revenue will invest in these contracts/offshore
centres, and that is the noose round their neck.

In most cases, but not all, hiring consultants suggests you don't understand
enough about your own business to manage it yourself ( _insert image of senior
executive trying to work out the Zoom so they can check their staff aren 't
slacking off like their damn nephew, useless kid, thinks he knows
everything_). The cost advantages really aren't that large either...sure, the
staff cost less but they hire 10x more staff, they are slower, and when the
requirements change you are done for.

Btw, some places are very good for outsourcing (Russia, Ukraine, Poland,
Belarus) but India is definitely not one of them imo...which is bizarre given
how many engineers, prevalence of English, etc.

~~~
DrJokepu
I had extremely good experiences with opening a subsidiary office in Sofia,
Bulgaria (not outsourcing, but legit part of the company.) Code quality went
way up compared to what was developed in the US/UK, somewhat less expensive
(but not that much, like you said), and most importantly and perhaps also the
most surprisingly, the attitude of the young kids working there is way more
positive and well-adjusted that what we see when hiring in the US/UK
(especially in the UK).

At this point it's not even about the money, it's just that they're more
pleasant people to work with.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Can confirm, eastern europeans are above average regarding technical skills,
though sometimes lacking on the social side. If I had to outsource, I‘d go
east. They’ve got some amazing talent. I would avoid southern europe and
india. And yes, I have direct experience with all of those.

~~~
sumedh
> I would avoid southern europe and india.

Were you paying good salaries?

------
opportune
I think you can be successful outsourcing to WITCH or other consultancies IF
you have an in-house, full-context software engineer managing the project and
keeping people accountable.

You have to be careful because if you ask for someone who is "an expert in X
technology", you'll definitely get someone, and they might be able to describe
it at a high level, but may not even know how to compile a program or how to
copy a file (yes I have literally seen this firsthand). You need to give
people explicit instructions and be willing to help, and the in-house software
developer almost definitely needs to provide things like architecture/spec.
And you need to actively fight the need to increase the staffing for the
project and prevent dumb/churn processes from taking over (example: writing 40
different scripts (separately!) to do something that could just as easily be
done by one script with three parameters). And you need to manage the project
into a position where maintenance/ownership can be transferred.

You also need to set them up for success by having a clearly defined scope and
playing towards their skills (which means, don't give them work that needs a
ML PhD math genius, do give them work like "write a PHP website that does this
and looks kinda like that"). This is part of what I think the article is
missing but also not really a fair expectation of what an outsourcing firm is.
Consultancies are not meant to come up with 'killer apps', and you can try to
pay them to do so and they'll be happy to take your money, but you shouldn't.

------
MattGaiser
Isn't this also true of IBM? All these consulting firms have an expensive
business model which is increasingly no longer useful.

~~~
raverbashing
I'm sure IBM and other companies get a non trivial amount of checks with a lot
of zeros each year for supporting legacy applications/systems/etc with barely
any work involved on their part besides maybe running Make again once in a
while.

And to be fair, some companies are not even wrong because rewriting is still
more expensive than just paying for maintenance.

------
naruvimama
Just judging from the title it sounds silly. Last I remember while working at
one of the companies between 2006-2008, COBOL & mainframes was a good chunk of
their work.

Obsolescence is their bread and butter. I do agree they do have a lot of wrong
and toxic people running middle management along with short term thinking. But
that is partly due to their business model, a business model that gave the
best returns.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Nail / head I think; a lot of western devs, especially the HN crowd, has the
luxury of moving to the next 'cool' thing every couple of years. But they did
write code, they laid the groundwork, and it has to be developed further on.

Billions of LOC of Java are lying around and there is a need for an army of
developers to look after it.

------
jorblumesea
Pretty much what everyone in the tech industry has been doing for years.
Better to have your own overseas office where you can control the hiring bar
and talent vs making consultancies rich. The big consultancies are more
concerned with draining value from clients and treating them like cash cows
instead of delivering value.

That being said, probably the real solution is SAAS.

------
api
From what I've heard, programmers that are as good as domestic (US/EU)
programmers can absolutely be hired in India and lots of other places.

Problem is they are not significantly cheaper than domestic programmers once
you add management overhead and then compare the result against equally
skilled domestic programmers in lower cost of living places in the US/EU. It's
more practical and may be no more expensive to hire someone good in West
Virginia, Kentucky, or Michigan where rent or mortgage payments and many other
expenses are quite a bit lower than they are in big coastal cities.

------
geogra4
Well, at least from where I sit they're still getting plenty of business as
with the apparent sun-setting of the H1-B program companies are just hiring
offshoring firms instead.

~~~
dominotw
> with the apparent sun-setting of the H1-B program companies are just hiring
> offshoring firms instead.

Are you speculating here or have seen an actual trend out there?

~~~
JAlexoid
The article mentions that big corporate tech departments are just moving their
operations to Indie - like Walmart has Walmart Labs in India, despite having
no retail business there.

~~~
dominotw
That has nothing to do with pandemic. Article clearly lists walmart labs
specifically under "Before the pandemic.."

------
ramshanker
TLDR of the article is American / European companies creating in-house Indian
offices and moving away from "consultancies".

I whole heartedly agree to the huge advantages you get doing this. You have
better control over hiring quality talent, more focused developers who develop
institutional knowledge over time, much easier to scale up/down than the
contracts with these consultancies and so on.....

Outside IT, I can confirm the same tree has been happening from my industry of
Oil & Gas consultancy. Many American / European oil & gas consultancies now
have Indian engineering centres employing chemical / mechanical / civil /
electrical / instrumentation engineers.

It is easy to setup this over here. Everyone is welcome.

~~~
aszen
Being a part of one of these, I agree most companies have realised have a
dedicated offshore team is much better than assigning work via third party
consultancies.

If anyone is struggling to hire in their local market definitely try to get in
touch with talented people offshore and see if they can bootstrap a small
development team to help your business.

Also it's not always about cost cutting, sometimes businesses struggle to find
developers working on their technology platforms or just lack the pull to
attract local talent. In these cases if you invest in an offshore team and
help them learn about your business needs it will pay off in the long run.

------
la6471
This feeble attempts to generalize a whole nation or group of people will not
succeed. Individuals differ from one another and Indians are the most diverse
group in the world. Some of the engineers are good some are bad , just like
everywhere else. The sooner humanity realizes the truth about individuality
and discard the stereotypes attached to groups and aggregates the better it
will be for the whole world. Amen.

~~~
goatforce5
> and Indians are the most diverse group in the world

What metric(s) are you using to measure that diversity?

I live in Toronto, Canada, and approximately 50% of residents here were born
overseas. Toronto likes to boast it is one of the most diverse cities in the
world (based on that metric, at least).

~~~
throwaway0648
They're probably using this list

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level)

And you are probably using this one

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population)

So it depends what you mean by diversity

------
desaiguddu
I run a boutique consulting studio in India. Indian outsourcing /offshore
teams are beyond Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro etc.

There are design & engineering teams who deliver amazing value to their
clients. These teams are nimble & specialised.

------
ktrl
They should have seen this coming. The big Indian IT consultancies have
existed since the 1980s and they have been swimming in billions since the
early 2000s. They should have invested into actual product development at
least a decade ago.

------
naruvimama
You can get very good developers from these companies, and you can get it in
volume, you just need to insist on it.

When you ask for Sr.managers, 2xmanagers, 2x Asst. Managers, 2x Business
Analyst (with MBAs). You are quickly adding up costs for non-functional heads.
The only way to remedy that is to go cheap on developers and bloat their
numbers to match the overhead.

------
ycombonator
[https://www.tcs.com/business-4-0/report/behaviors-digital-
tr...](https://www.tcs.com/business-4-0/report/behaviors-digital-
transformation) Just read this and tell me if any of this makes sense. I read
it 10 times and couldn’t figure out what is the value they are bringing.

------
azpekt
I was (and currently still) working for such a company in US. Their business
model is to sell you bodies. That’s it.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/yNKSj](https://archive.is/yNKSj)

~~~
rramadass
Thank you!

------
known
Indian IT consultancies make money by selling Software Engineers, not Software
to US/EU;

------
known
[https://archive.is/yNKSj](https://archive.is/yNKSj)

------
random314
Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

~~~
klodolph
Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to
arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

~~~
BossingAround
While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down
votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result,
the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper
English" or "correct English".

If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British
Council, and teach British English.

If you go to China and a lot of Asian countries, a lot of their textbooks come
from the USA, and will teach American English.

You might find some Aussie textbooks in Japan or China... You will not find a
country that speaks Indian English outside of India.

So, "color" or "colour" are both correct because they are correct in one of
the "standards" of English. "Codes" then is not correct because it is
incorrect in what's considered the "standards" of English.

For the record, I personally am from neither US, UK, or any other English-
speaking country. I also think correcting people's English on HNews is silly.

Just my 2c.

~~~
jkaplowitz
I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English
speaker living in Canada myself.

Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because
it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of
its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's
English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK
for centuries?

As well, Indian English is spoken by an estimated 125 million people, more
people than the total populations of the UK and Canada combined and about a
third of the US population. And this is the predominant version of English in
a country of more than a billion people, which makes it standard enough there
to count as a standard.

Deferring to a standard requires a context in which to say whether one is or
isn't speaking standardly. Since we're discussing a topic about India on a US-
centric but globally inclusive website, either we should insist that everyone
uses the site's predominant US variety of English (I'm happy we don't do this)
or the Indian commenter should be free to use standard Indian English in
discussing this without that dialect being called wrong.

~~~
BossingAround
> I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US
> English speaker living in Canada myself.

I try to see it from the perspective of a non-native speaker trying to learn
English.

If I know no English, and pay for teachers to teach me English, I definitely
do not want to be taught Indian English.

Not because it's wrong, not because it's $whatever_adjective, but because it
will sound incorrect to the majority of native English speakers that are not
of Indian origin.

In a similar manner, you don't see Cockney English being taught, and you don't
think of as Cockney English as "correct". It has indeed its rules, and is
perfectly understandable to the speakers. I have nothing against Cockney
English. That said, I wouldn't want to be taught Cockney English by
professionals who claim "it is correct." It is indeed correct, but it will
hurt my communication even in the most of the UK.

~~~
gourabmi
I want to point out your claim about 'majority of English speakers'. The
number of English speakers in the Indian subcontinent is much higher than
anywhere else in the world, including US.

Source :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-
speaking_population)

If numbers decide what is the norm, Indian English should be it. However, I
feel like there are other factors that you are using to determine the
"correct" English.

~~~
BossingAround
> majority of English speakers

That's fair... That should have been "majority of native English speakers".
Corrected.

You'll now argue who's a native speaker, won't you... :)

~~~
gourabmi
Of course, I would. :)

IMHO everything other than British English is a regional derivative. The
software world has caught up to that fact and soon the popular language tests
will follow. They would need to do the needful eventually. Lol.

------
ETHisso2017
I wonder what GPT-3 will do to their business models

~~~
yourapostasy
Not sure about the business models, but it might generate pseudo-translations
of the same article, like this:

[https://www.news98.info/indian-it-consultancies-wrestle-
towa...](https://www.news98.info/indian-it-consultancies-wrestle-towards-
technological-obsolescence/)

My eyes bled trying to read that hash.

------
Trias11
These obese sweatshops are getting what they deserve.

