8 ms·

Infosys shares drop to 10-month low as whistle-blowers target CEO

113 points by mukgupta 7y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> 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.
- divs1210 7y ago
  It is very profitable as a company and brand, keeping other concerns aside.
  - hereiskkb 7y ago
    Maybe. But profitability does not imply "pristine".
  - rsj_hn 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this phenomenon. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-naked-chef/ 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.
- RyJones 7y ago
  It has a pristine anti-brand for me. Seeing InfoSys involvement is a signal to "stay away".
  - thrower123 7y ago
    It's gotten really bad. There are whole swathes of companies that we deal with that are great if you can deal with their first-party people, but we're just part of a bundle of services provided to that company through a big Tata/Infosys/Cognizant/etc contract. And that part of it is incredibly toxic. 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.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  I think its mainly in terms of the bean counters /boards of companies that out source. Though of course it might make developers wary of joining a company with accounting discrepancies like this.
- acdha 7y ago
  Programmers do not hire Infosys. Senior management does and their reputation is different there: those complaining programmers are just trying to protect their turf, the cost savings are compelling, etc. and there are a million ways to spin the inevitable failed projects.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- vmurthy 7y ago
  Infosys had a reputation as one of India's most transparent companies. Reputation is somewhat a nebulous concept so I am going to use a proxy: P/E ratio [1]. 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-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra... [2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-to-avoid-the-P/E-Ratio-Trap https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...
campfireveteran 7y ago
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.
- thunderbong 7y ago
  That's actually a very good analogy.
- anm89 7y ago
  Do you need to control how every engineer works? 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?
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    Unionized workers have far more leverage in business negotiations.
- r_singh 7y ago
  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.
  - anonymous_i 7y ago
    quality != quantity
goatinaboat 7y ago
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.
- throwaway77384 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Short term gain being firing their in-house IT staff, only to realize they're stuck in a 5-year contract.
- GordonS 7y ago
  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.
throwaway77384 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
r_singh 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- primax 7y ago
  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.
mathattack 7y ago
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 7y ago
  You mean Satyam?
gobins 7y ago
Two things that are frequently on the HN front page, negative news about China and Indian outsourcing firms.
- hereiskkb 7y ago
  For good reason too.
r_singh 7y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  If there's a knowingly broken process, both sides of it are to blame. One party for using a broken process, the other for exploiting it. 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.
  - r_singh 7y ago
    By this example, fraud is rampant across business[1], not just outsourcing. Facebook, VW, Theranos and many many more.
    - hereiskkb 7y ago
      Yep. It is. Fraud across the spectrum.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Never said it isn't. Big and small. The amount of shit I've experienced myself, or had reported to me by friends and acquaintances is so large that I have a very low starting opinion on small businesses on things not strongly enforced by law. I've shared some more egregious examples on HN a few times, like a practice in grocery stores to wash stale meat with dish cleaner to be able to sell it as fresh. Yes, fraud is very much rampant across business.
- hc91 7y ago
  Dude, you are obviously biased and try to portray the "pure play" companies in a positive light. Stop it, you are not fooling anyone. Stop defending them, those companies are the literal cancer of the software engineering world from the most literal point of view and the people in this thread talking bad things about them are doing that because they have very good reasons to.
kalesh 7y ago
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.
hc91 7y ago
Music to my ears !!!
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/jhK6V http://archive.is/jhK6V

113 points by mukgupta 7y ago

> 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.

divs1210 7y ago
It is very profitable as a company and brand, keeping other concerns aside.
- hereiskkb 7y ago
  Maybe. But profitability does not imply "pristine".
- rsj_hn 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this phenomenon. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-naked-chef/ 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.
RyJones 7y ago
It has a pristine anti-brand for me. Seeing InfoSys involvement is a signal to "stay away".
- thrower123 7y ago
  It's gotten really bad. There are whole swathes of companies that we deal with that are great if you can deal with their first-party people, but we're just part of a bundle of services provided to that company through a big Tata/Infosys/Cognizant/etc contract. And that part of it is incredibly toxic. 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.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
I think its mainly in terms of the bean counters /boards of companies that out source. Though of course it might make developers wary of joining a company with accounting discrepancies like this.
acdha 7y ago
Programmers do not hire Infosys. Senior management does and their reputation is different there: those complaining programmers are just trying to protect their turf, the cost savings are compelling, etc. and there are a million ways to spin the inevitable failed projects.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vmurthy 7y ago
Infosys had a reputation as one of India's most transparent companies. Reputation is somewhat a nebulous concept so I am going to use a proxy: P/E ratio [1]. 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-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra... [2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-to-avoid-the-P/E-Ratio-Trap https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...

campfireveteran 7y ago

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.

thunderbong 7y ago
That's actually a very good analogy.
anm89 7y ago
Do you need to control how every engineer works? 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?
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Unionized workers have far more leverage in business negotiations.
r_singh 7y ago
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.
- anonymous_i 7y ago
  quality != quantity

goatinaboat 7y ago

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.

throwaway77384 7y ago
Couldn't agree more.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Short term gain being firing their in-house IT staff, only to realize they're stuck in a 5-year contract.
GordonS 7y ago
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.

throwaway77384 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

r_singh 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
primax 7y ago
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.

mathattack 7y ago

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 7y ago
You mean Satyam?

gobins 7y ago

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

hereiskkb 7y ago
For good reason too.

r_singh 7y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
If there's a knowingly broken process, both sides of it are to blame. One party for using a broken process, the other for exploiting it. 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.
- r_singh 7y ago
  By this example, fraud is rampant across business[1], not just outsourcing. Facebook, VW, Theranos and many many more.
  - hereiskkb 7y ago
    Yep. It is. Fraud across the spectrum.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Never said it isn't. Big and small. The amount of shit I've experienced myself, or had reported to me by friends and acquaintances is so large that I have a very low starting opinion on small businesses on things not strongly enforced by law. I've shared some more egregious examples on HN a few times, like a practice in grocery stores to wash stale meat with dish cleaner to be able to sell it as fresh. Yes, fraud is very much rampant across business.
hc91 7y ago
Dude, you are obviously biased and try to portray the "pure play" companies in a positive light. Stop it, you are not fooling anyone. Stop defending them, those companies are the literal cancer of the software engineering world from the most literal point of view and the people in this thread talking bad things about them are doing that because they have very good reasons to.

kalesh 7y ago

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.

hc91 7y ago

Music to my ears !!!

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/jhK6V http://archive.is/jhK6V