Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.
I think if I get another email with less than a sentence describing a problem, no screenshots, nothing, ending in "do the needful", or a high-priority meeting invitation sent at 7 am for 8:30 am, with no agenda or any indication of what is going to be discussed, I'm going to come unglued. The communication and organizational skills of the project managers I've dealt with leaves so much to be desired that I can't even express it, and there always seems to be such a swirl of people with ambiguous authority involved that just trying to mentally keep track of an org chart is a struggle.
I just groan when I see that we've gotten a new lead; it may pay the bills, but I'm not sure the grey hairs and indigestion are worth it.
According to theory, investors pay up a premium PE for well managed companies and although it is an imperfect measure, lots of evidence suggests that it works (Look up HDFC Bank in India relative to its peers or government owned companies v/s their private counterparts) In India at least, Infosys had always had a premium PE compared to its peers [2]. So the "pristine brand" may have been with the investors.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra...
[2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...
Though of course it might make developers wary of joining a company with accounting discrepancies like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mahindra didn’t survive accounting fraud as an independent company. This could hurt Infosys too.
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.
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.
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.
Currently working for an American software dev company.
What I mean to say is, the issue you mentioned is not limited to these 5-6 companies, but for the whole IT industry.
I think the real problem is that many of these corporates haven't realised how important IT is to their business. The idea that a bank should outsource development is ridiculous, most of their interaction with customers is going to be through these systems. If they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors then they need strong IT.
One of my classmates joined infy out of college. His job for the first one year was - email the list of files changed in the day to the client. This friend was called newton in the college, one of the smartest person around. And he was doing one of the most boring job. Client was paying more than 3000 USD per month for this. Of course he automated the work on second day, used time to study for CAT and left to enroll in IIMA.
Not implying that there isnt anything good with these big companies, but there are lot of such stories. This particular one sounds more like defrauding the client more than anything else to be honest.
For those of you who don't know about CAT: think GMAT but with 200000 people appearing for it at the same time-frame (maybe a 15 day window)
IIMA - Harvard equivalent in India. Only about 400 people out of 200000 make it to IIMA.
TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
That project is a disaster of overblown budgets and under delivery. Like everything these companies touch. But the imaginary savings earned a few Western managers big bonuses before they quickly moved on before the chickens came home to roost.
> 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
"Infosys was established by seven engineers in Pune, Maharashtra, India with an initial capital of $250 in 1981" [0]
$250 in 1981 is $706 in 2019 dollar. So yes, looks like they started out exactly like how you advocate.
That system works for lawyers and doctors because there are bars and boards to not only vet theit credentials, but also restrict supply through quotas.
One solution might be for that coop to sell service around a valuable piece of software they own (or at least have demonstrable expertise with). Thats how the SQLite developers work, for example.
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.
If you don't want to work for a corporation, don't work for a corporation. Why do you need to tell the entirety of engineers how to do it?
I just think it’s not fair to accuse them of fraud.
It is. That's like saying selling a Merc with a Suzuki Swift engine inside is not fraud.
I think India is a challenging place to make a living and thus many people do whatever they can to make a buck, at least that is how I explain this behavior to myself.
It’s lack of regulation, funds and a lot of other things.
You’re right though, it’s going to affect reputation for sure. Not like it’s going to make the bad actors mindful, because as you suggest, it’s survival that’s on their mind.
Imagine you own a store with broken locks. A thief learns of that, and comes one night, and plunders your store. Yes, you'd be to blame for being irresponsible and stupid. But the thief would still be liable for theft.
Facebook, VW, Theranos and many many more.
Maybe in the your household blaming the victim when they hire a company with such a well known track-record of failing to deliver is acceptable, but many people have different values.
It’s a different matter that I don’t think very highly of them.
I just don’t think it’s fair to accuse them of fraud. W/o considering the fact that they’re from a country with a lot less resources competing for contracts that perfectly competent people reward to them.
That said, that's probably a bad motto to have in IT.
Having no experience on any cloud platform and being sold as an expert however is a different story.
I agree with this too. However, this arises 2 doubts in my head:
1. Is Apple outsourcing manufacturing to Foxconn any different from banks outsourcing their IT?[1]
2. Is hiring offshore talent the same as outsourcing? Can the talent still not be in-house and the company be a multinational?
[1] Yes, it is because a lot of times firms outsource their entire IT/System design to these outsourcing firms too. And this is because of lack of knowledge from the manager's part, laziness or just greed. But it is still comparable because they both have certain shared downsides in the long run.
On the other hand, everything I've seen so far outsourced in IT in a standard way could come back in any condition. Worst case, it's unusable, but contractors get paid anyway and move to the next client.
When you do it over and over and over again it sure starts to quack like the fraud duck.
Every penny of revenue earned by those companies is by fraud.
There simply has to be some major skullduggery afoot.
The internal GDS seem to be bucking the trend, delivering good services and contributing to OSS. Surely this demonstrates that an internal team is a better way? Even if they don't deliver entire projects themselvea, they could lead them from a requirements, architect and tech perspective, and have sway over which firm gets the outsourced part.
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
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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...
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.
And don't get me started on the security of the code these outfits produce.
Cough, pharmaceutical cos, doctors, social media & search giants, car manufacturing giants. Any of these ring a bell?
[1]As in, the above (your) definition of fraud i.e. misleading customers, by deliberately under delivering and over promising. With this definition, many businesses and accepted practices are fraud.
IMO, true fraud is what VW with their cheating device. Facebook did with integrating WhatsApp profiles. Theranos did with fake IP. Opioid manufacturers do by indirectly incentivising doctors. Don't you think so too?
Yes, I agree that Tata and similar companies are on the level of Theranos.
You have at least a dozen comments on this thread defending these practices and pointing fingers at the likes of Theranos as if that's a good justification. If someone needs Theranos to look good they must be pretty shady. Your line of argumentation sounds very biased.
All of it is fraud. Regardless. Promising results with the intention of not sticking to it is fraud.