
Ask HN: Who hires Infosys and Cognizant? - Taylor_OD
Infosys and Cognizant are everywhere. Who actually hires them and how are they so massive? Has anyone personally worked for them? Or used them as a client?
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janbernhart
Loads of companies do! Mostly bigger companies though. They've got tons of IT
resources in India, resources that are scarce & expensive in US/Europe. So
they outsource IT work for you while having consultants at the client as
liaison between business & the outsourced development.

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sheepmullet
Most fortune 500's. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a good
development team. So once you have swapped internal for external it's very
difficult to bring it back in house.

Going from a good team of 10 developers to a good team of 100 developers can
easily take 5 years if you want to maintain quality. And you probably won't
see major dividends for another 5 years on top of that. How many senior
managers are invested enough in a company to take a 10-15 year view on it?

On the other hand if I need a $50 million project finished within the next
year I can get 150 average quality developers next week from Infosys.

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sheepmullet
Now as a startup if you are trying to compete with the big players who have
100x as much capital you need the top 20% developers. And you won't get them
going through the consulting giants.

And having someone to blame is very important for a senior manager.... But
useless for a startup founder or small business owner.

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canterburry
Yes, we have a large cognizant contract right now. My company has hired about
300 cognizant resources both onshore and offshore. The overall strategy seems
to be leverage each employee with ~5 contractors. All employees are actually
just product managers, PMs and SMEs and management. All dev, QA, dev ops, dba,
networking, L1-3 monitoring etc has been outsourced.

I also used to work for a well known national retailer who employed a similar
strategy. There were only ~40 employees running a project of 400 people, 3
years and $100M. It's a common approach.

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falsestprophet
You can public companies file annual reports that explain the basic operation
of their business.

Infosys reports they focus on the following industries [1]:

    
    
      Financial services
      Manufacturing
      Retail, consumer packaged goods, logistics
      Energy, Utilities, Communications 
      Life Sciences, Healthcare & Insurance
    

I wouldn't hire them, but I'm not Proctor and Gamble so they'll probably
survive my disinterest.

[1] [http://www.infosys.com/investors/reports-filings/annual-
repo...](http://www.infosys.com/investors/reports-filings/annual-
report/form20f/Documents/form20F-2015.pdf)

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e15ctr0n
[https://www.google.com/search?q=infosys+case+studies](https://www.google.com/search?q=infosys+case+studies)

