
Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO - mukgupta
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-21/infosys-whistleblowers-allege-unethical-practices-shares-fall
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> The allegations “could severely damage the company’s pristine brand if true,
> especially in the IT services industry,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst
> Anurag Rana wrote

Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of
programmers I have met.

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divs1210
It is very profitable as a company and brand, keeping other concerns aside.

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rsj_hn
Brands aren't determined by how much wall street loves the firm, but by how
much customers like the firm. In the actual industry it's in -- that of H1B
visa mills -- it doesn't have a particularly good reputation for producing
good code. It also has been plagued by scandals in India, and has a poor
reputation in the eyes of immigration authorities as well.

~~~
lev272
Who are the most highly regarded of the firms in Infosys's field?

I realize that might sound sarcastic, but I mean it sincerely. I have little
experience with that world, but I wasn't aware there was a hierarchy of brands
in the offshore consulting firm space. Now I'm curious

~~~
rsj_hn
None of the big firms are well respected. The problem here is that if you are
outsourcing software development, then you view it as a cost to be minimized
rather than as something you care about. That means most of your projects are
not interesting to work on, so these firms tend to have big turnover problems
with talented staff. A lot of their work is keeping products alive in
maintenance mode, for example, so that the vendor can claim that something is
still supported in order to meet contractual commitments, but really they
don't want to keep investing in the product. Consultancies are the hospices of
dead product lines.

Real engineering innovation doesn't happen in this space, and there is so much
innovation going on right now that if you are a talented developer you can do
a lot better than work for one of these firms. If you are an overseas
developer, you are much better off getting hired directly by a tech company to
work on their products with an H1B than by going the Infosys route. There just
isn't the surplus of talent claimed to staff these companies, and if you are
unlucky enough to be a smart, driven developer working for one of them, you
will end up bored out of your mind.

But at the same time, there are some excellent boutique consultancies, mostly
small sized, with truly talented people, who decided to strike out on their
own or in small teams. But again that's not a business model that scales to
create massive consultancy behemoths. I know of a few, but they are colleagues
who decided to work for themselves, it's not a brand you would have heard of.

This is true even for blue chip firms like IBM, whose consultancy business
also has a terrible reputation for overcharging customers and not delivering
what was expected.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this phenomenon.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-
na...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-naked-chef/)

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of IT consultants to build The
System. The IT consultants he hired were incompetents who kept talking about
“The Methodology” and who spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce
a single thing.

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smart and talented.
The youthful programmer built his whole system in one day for $20 and pizza.
Mike was overjoyed. He recommended the youthful programmer to all his friends.

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he has more work than he
can handle, so he hires a bunch of people to help him. The good people want
too many stock options, so he decides to hire even younger programmers right
out of college and “train them” with a 6 week course.

The trouble is that the “training” doesn’t really produce consistent results,
so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules and procedures that are meant to
make more consistent results. Over the years, the rule book grows and grows.
Soon it’s a six-volume manual called The Methodology.

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a Huge Incompetent IT
Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and a lot of people who blindly obey
the Methodology, even when it doesn’t seem to be working, because they have no
bloody idea whatsoever what else to do, and they’re not really talented
programmers — they’re just well-meaning Poli Sci majors who attended the six-
week course.

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throwaway77384
I have only ever run into dealing with InfoSys' services (back in 2011 or so
they provided the entire media / marketing / advertising tech stack for
Diageo, called Neo at the time).

Complete black-box. Impossible to work with. Impossible to get documentation.
We literally had to debug via crash reports delivered to us every 24h. Of
course it was ALWAYS their machine images somehow differing from their
environments, so our tests passed locally and then failed in their black box.

Horrific performance problems (think services locking up at 200 concurrent
connections...for mobile apps, when advertising-apps were still a thing.
Released across virtually all pubs in a whole country. You can imagine how
that went).

Of course they would continuously blame all their issues on the company I
worked for at the time. And Diageo even fought tooth and nail to defend them.
We had to waste an insane amount of resources just proving to them that their
system sucked. Easily one of the worst examples of a company wasting huge
amounts of money, thinking that outsourcing would save them money. It's so
stupid.

~~~
esotericimpl
I worked with them on crown royal.com and everything you say is 100% true

Nothing ever worked and their technical stack was an absolute joke.

Eventually the agency lost the business due to not delivering, which was
solely due to their platform not doing anything promised by infosys.

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goatinaboat
None of these companies - Infosys, Tata, Wipro etc - actually has a business
beyond convincing technologically illiterate Western senior managers, by
whatever means, to outsource the core of their businesses for short term gain.

~~~
GordonS
Thing is, they are _very_ good at the sales part.

I worked for a small IT company that serviced only a handful of clients, but
had done so for several years. We got bought by one of the big outsourcing
firms, and in a remarkably short time they were winning large new projects
from our customers - we could _never_ have convinced them to part with so much
money!

All of the projects we run have a mix of western and Indian people, a mix of
onsite and remote. There are always several manager types involved in nebulous
ways that nobody understands, and there are always random Indian devs based in
India who the client pays for, but they literally do _nothing_.

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r_singh
I can't help but notice the bias people from the west tend to have against
Indian outsourcing companies. They have issues and downsides, sure. Major long
term downsides, as an Indian programmer (not working for any of these
companies), I agree (just like outsourcing to ANY company, be it American e.g.
Cognizant).

Comments talking about Infosys/TCS, not being a brand: programmers are not
Infosys' customers, in fact it's quite the opposite of that. Infosys' services
replace programmers for their customers, who are non-technical managers who
want to abstract the IT part of their projects and not be taken for a ride by
technical people (not saying that all of them do, but a lot of times
engineering department heads demand HUGE budgets to just become more
important) and managers feel that a dependency like that makes it necessary
for them to be obedient.

Just because they have downsides, does not mean that they are not brands.
Infosys has innovation labs in universities all around the world. They award
the Infosys prize to the tune of $6.5M to scientists for research. TCS is a
strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.

I actually view Indian outsourcing firms to be firms that trade human hours,
which turns out, are a lot cheaper in India. Maybe POTUS should actually
impose duties on importing software too.

Update:

I also agree with fellow developers on the fact that these outsourcing cos.
produce bad code and documentation and usually result in a net loss for
organisations where technology is in inherent competitive advantage.

However, these downsides are not because of the lack of skill. It's because of
the nature of project based model that outsourcing firms follow. If anyone is
to blame, it's the myopic or misconstrued managers who employ them for
projects where outsourcing is not the solution.

However, there are many applications where outsourcing firms do just fine. And
hiring a separate engineering department could be a risky alternative.

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primax
I would agree if Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and HCL were in the business
of offering up skilled people that they have promised to clients. But every
single one of my clients who engages these companies has a story where they
were sold X cloud or devops or security people and the people put on their
engagements had 0 experience.

I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the
same thing. And the managers overseas want to charge me expert rates while I
have to train up their staff on the basics of how to do their job. And I mean
the ABSOLUTE basics.

I really don't see how it's not fraud.

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r_singh
There's probably barely any big consulting firm or bank that does not have
offshore mega offices (in India) where a lot of important work happens in
equities, commodities, etc. Citibank, BOA, PWC, you name it. All employ tens
of thousands of people in India.

Even tech cos. like Amazon are hiring their next wave of knowledge workers
offshore.

It's not like the offshore heads can force anyone to do so, or the Indian
government is providing huge incentives (like for manufacturing in china).
It's because the decision makers believe doing so is the right thing. If it's
anyones fault, it's the heads of these organisations that are to blame, for
prioritising perceived cost savings over what their own workforce thinks or
does.

Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud. It's
something that companies trying to bite more than they can chew often result
in.

Also, I agree that having to teach your offshore counterpart how to do their
job is absolutely ridiculous. It makes me wonder, how selfish can these
corporates be, that they prioritise their profit or share price or bonus, over
their own workforce.

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dsfyu404ed
>Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud.

When you do it over and over and over again it sure starts to quack like the
fraud duck.

~~~
r_singh
In that case their customers should be aware of this by now and they should be
out of business (maybe soon).

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campfireveteran
Infosys and TCS remind me of Uber and Lyft: business models based on magical
thinking-rooted exploitation. Engineers need to form their own worker-owned
consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they
generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large
corporations.

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r_singh
Uber and Lyft are loss making experiments. Whereas Infosys and TCS are
profitable corporations, responsibly hiring hundreds of thousands of people
(which they do not plan to fire impulsively like Uber), bringing in huge
volumes of trade revenue to India for over a decade.

Uber and Lyft use contract workers, rather than getting people on their
payroll. Infosys and TCS hire freshers on bonds at salaries that are not very
high, but hire thousands every year on their payroll in a country where IT
engineering programs have near 100% placements. If those engineers want to
work for themselves or other non-corporates, no one is stopping them.

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anonymous_i
quality != quantity

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r_singh
Fair enough, I never said that they were quality. Just that they're nothing
similar to Uber or Lyft.

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kalesh
My early years were in a big outsourcing firm & man everything was delayed &
over budget. 3 months of development became 9 months. Projects promised in 6
months took 1 year of development. Projects with older technologies like VB -
which worked quite well, code was clean were rewritten for no benefit
whatsoever. These rewrites were sold by marketing people. People were
overbilled everywhere.

Glad I left the Indian corporate scene & started working remotely. Now I run a
small remote QA team for an international firm at 30-40% less cost &
delivering at least 2x times these corporate giants.

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gobins
Two things that are frequently on the HN front page, negative news about China
and Indian outsourcing firms.

~~~
hereiskkb
For good reason too.

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mathattack
Reputation is relative. Their reputation is good for what they do - cheap
bodies who can scale up and down.

Mahindra didn’t survive accounting fraud as an independent company. This could
hurt Infosys too.

~~~
r_singh
You mean Satyam?

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neonate
[http://archive.is/jhK6V](http://archive.is/jhK6V)

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hc91
Music to my ears !!!

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r_singh
I see a lot of comments here attributing outsourcing firms to fraud. Let's
remember that these cos. win contracts fair and square by taking advantage of
myopic tendering processes.

If there's something to blame then it's obsolete tender process that make it
impossible for quality vendors to compete or for outsourcing firms to make
realising proposals.

Overpromising and underdelivering is not fraud. Fraud is what VW, FB and
Theranos and the likes have done.

~~~
hereiskkb
> _Overpromising and underdelivering is not fraud._

It is. That's like saying selling a Merc with a Suzuki Swift engine inside is
not fraud.

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sumedh
Is it fraud or is it incompetence?

