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20K Workers Will Be Jobless in Indian IT Sector, Thanks to Infosys and Cognizant

sumanthvepa 7y ago
This sad for the Indian IT ecosystem, but the world has been evolving into a more protectionist place for a few years now, and the trend isn't going to stop. Indian outsourcing companies need to evolve into SaaS and cloud companies to compete globally. They are already doing this to some extent. That needs to accelerate. Sadly though, this is not going to help the vast majority of their employees, particularly middle-management folks, whose primary skill -- project management, won't be in very high demand, as the deep hierarchies of these companies are replaced by flatter structures more suited to product companies. They need to re-skill skill themselves. And that is going to take a huge toll on them financially.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  I worked with an Indian SaaS/outsourcing provider. Worst experience of my life. Imagine sending build artifacts to be deployed and finding extra files in them. Of course this was all undocumented and untracked, so it was a great exercise in decompilation.
- paggle 7y ago
  Also Indian IT companies are overstaffed with followers and understaffed with leaders. Even ICs in a good product company like Google or Apple are entirely capable of self-managing 90% of their work -- you only need to tell them something like "implement smooth scrolling on the iPad mini that matches the iPad Pro." They will come back and evaluate the problem and approaches and say that the current system calls don't support an exact match but that reducing to 30fps can get a match or the OS team can do additional work to expose a lower-level graphics primitive to make an exact match. You'll never get that from your typical Infosys grunt. The vast majority of the Indian engineers with that skill level are either employed in the US on H-1Bs or in India at the FAANG India offices.
  - vermilingua 7y ago
    Nothing you said there suggests that this is an India specific problem. Paraphrasing: > good developers capable of self managing work at Google or Apple > the only Indian developers at that level work at FAANG It's almost like good engineers are attracted to the companies that can afford them, regardless of their nationality.
    - paggle 7y ago
      No, there are a lot of good Serbian developers for example but they all work in outsourcing since the FAANGs don't have offices there. So there are a lot of very talented Serbian devs who do contract work. But in India there is a robust export and domestic market for engineers and a HUGE services market so the services firms are mostly populated by crap talent. It is an India specific problem.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > implement smooth scrolling on the iPad mini that matches the iPad Pro No iPad Mini ships with ProMotion hardware, FWIW.
- iamsb 7y ago
  One of the suggestions I keep making to prime ministers office is to open up lateral recruitment is government much more and deploy these people with mid management experience to tackle some of the issue in government delivery. Lot of these people have expertise in managing mid to large scale project, are far more professionally trained, experienced, with exposure to more developed economies. It will help Indian government a lot if it can leverage this talent pool effectively.
tracer4201 7y ago
I worked for an oil and gas company in Houston about 5 years ago, and the IT organization was primarily Indian contractors working through a couple companies. I recall Infosys and Larsen and Toubro. One of the IT contractors supporting the SAP system confessed to me how horribly L&TI treated him, and how if he spoke up about it, they could force him to return to India. He was making $18 an hour btw, although I’m pretty sure his billable rate was far larger. One of his Indian friends found out what he’d told me and ended up yelling at him in their native tongue because he wasn’t supposed to speak up, apparently. I’m sure tons of talent from India absolutely is deserving of their work visas, but there were companies clearly gaming the system.
- chopraaa 7y ago
  I worked for HCL right out of college. If I asked people whom I worked with to guess my salary, they couldn't even come close. I made about $180 per month with 48 hour work weeks.
  - sokz 7y ago
    I got offered about the same amount last month by HCL,for a position that required a Master's.
repesorsa666 7y ago
Well you know, Indian developers have been taking shits on codebases around the globe for decades now so it's about time it ends.
bradwood 7y ago
This has been a long time coming. INFY and others like them have been slave-driving their staff with huge markups for eons. I’m glad the chickens are finally coming home to roost. I’ve worked in wholesale finance for decades and seen how these guys are treated both on- and offshore by their employers. It’s frankly despicable. Let’s hope the market in India finally pivots and smaller, more nimble shops take more and more market share. That being said, I wonder how much of this is embedded in cultural norms that will not be easy to shake. For example: saying yes to your client’s every request, even if it’s stupid, is not something that comes easily, I suspect, if you’re ingrained to just say yes...
- flarg 7y ago
  Is not a cultural norm in India, it's just a way of doing business. Source, have worked in India many times.
  - bradwood 7y ago
    the difference being?
  - inapis 7y ago
    Things have changed with newer companies especially those which are building and selling their own products. Though work life balance is still poor but at least people are not saying yes to everything just to appease.
- Nursie 7y ago
  That particular cultural norm (or way of doing business, in deference to 'flarg' who is better acquainted with this than I am) has got in the way of producing quality work several times in the past, and ruined the productivity we were trying to get from outsourcing in the first place (it was not my decision, I just had to try and make it work). "So you understand what you have to do?" "Yes" "And you have all the documentation and information you need?" "Yes" "OK great, let's get this thing going, get in touch if you need any help" Two weeks later - "How's progress on the project?" "I have not been able to start the work because I could not understand..."
buttholesurfer 7y ago
Is that like .004% of indian IT workers? Fuck em we've been facing those numbers yearly for 15 years because of cheap outsourcing. Why is this even here?
anuraj 7y ago
Average productivity of an Indian IT services employee is as low as $15000 a year. With no uptick in productivity - the only way you can improve margins is to cut the flab - which is there in senior and middle layers. So senior and middle managers who have made themselves redundant without upskilling are now game. Average work life duration of an Indian IT employee might be less than 20 years currently.
- klausjensen 7y ago
  Trying to understand "average productivity" here. The 15K is what an average IT worker produces per year - for example if they were billed out for 1500 hours at 10$ per hour? Genuine question, trying to understand. :)
  - sufiyan 7y ago
    Nah.. That's how much they get paid. The consulting company will charge about 5-10x for this resource though. (source from a friend who was there)
  - anuraj 7y ago
    That is true. Most companies have bench+overhead and billed resources may be 60% or less of total work force. Average billing works out to $10-15 for the low value high volume work these IT services firms do and that has not changed over the last 20 years or so. What has changed is a bloated middle/senior management which is a drag to the above business model. They did try to move up into consultancy and productised services - which did not really work.
hos234 7y ago
On the flip side - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-may-see-105-unicorns-by-2025-says-nasscom/articleshow/71930457.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
- t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
  Excuse me if I take that ToI article with a pinch of salt. Venture capitalists will throw money at anything they think they can make a buck on, e.g. WeWork.
- raghava 7y ago
  It is coming from NASSCOM, which is a lobbying arm. Value bloat is what people want, and NASSCOM does just that. Take that news with loads of salt.
t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
Is it a bad take (or a sweeping generalization) to say that the quality of work done by IT service companies in that part of the word is consistently below-par?
- gowthamgts12 7y ago
  This is a common stereotyping to assume. The quality of work you get from outsourcing is directly proportional to the amount you spend. If you need talented people you have to spend more money. It's as simple as that.
  - wheelerwj 7y ago
    > you have to spend more money. i'd go even more broad: its not just about money, its also about time. You can get good returns on junior team members but you need to put in the time to coach/teach/guide/manage just like anything else. more money just means that you're paying someone else to put in the time. Which is cool, different models work in different scenarios.
    - pferde 7y ago
      That doesn't work when you outsource to Infosys or Cognizant - the people you just spent two weeks coaching and training will be gone next week, replaced by brand new blank-slated, interchangeable cogs. These large Indian outsourcing companies are nothing but a big scam that has cost us millions in productivity, not to mention stress and frustration for not being able to get things done.
      - wheelerwj 7y ago
        I haven't worked directly with those specific firms so I can't comment directly. But that seems like a contractual issue.
  - t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
    QED. Once you're forced to spend more than x amount to secure talented workers, surely you might as well employ domestic programmers/DBAs/whatever?
lmilcin 7y ago
It is not really a slowdown. Companies are more than ever eager to hire anybody to do IT projects. The trouble is the level of service provided to customers by vendors from India is pretty shitty and that's why companies are migrating to other countries for IT resources. I work in banking and payment sector and I had a chance to observe this on a dozen projects. In one instance Cognizant offered to completely automate a significant application used by hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world. They were supposed to containerize half a dozen services, Oracle database, configure it to run on AWS and also automate environment creation. The team put by Cognizant had not a single person knowing how to do basically anything. They spent entire project schedule and more just learning the basics of how to get around. Instead of automating anything they negotiated to be allowed to just order vms on EC2 and install applications there, manually. It took them three weeks to figure out how to copy 400GB database backup (they had space, accesses and networking, they just couldn't figure out how to copy the file). Then they spent another two weeks unable to restore the backup. The trouble is that for a long time they have been cranking junior devs with no quality culture and no real interest in what they are doing and now this is starting to hurt them.
- jamisteven 7y ago
  I work in similar capacity, I have seen similar time and time again. So called "Devs" and "SME's", that basically know absolutely nothing and need to be trained.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The thing that's consistently baffled me with projects like this is why technical milestones aren't encoded in contracts. In your example, if they can't demonstrate a PoC container or automated environment creation in x% of the schedule, the contract is terminated. With similar milestones throughout the project. It's like traditional PM project pacing goes out the window when dealing with contractors. It's not a secret these shops put the least capable people on contracts they think they can get away with, so why not better incentivize them to bring a more skilled team?
  - dplgk 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
goatinaboat 7y ago
Genuine question: do any companies actually in India outsource operations to these kinds of companies? Or are their customers entirely gullible Western companies?
- sufiyan 7y ago
  The Indian government gives them contracts. A lot of big Indian companies also get droves of them to do repetitive work with no visible path of career progression
ooooak 7y ago
It's storytime S1. I met a guy who was really passionate about blockchain and python. At some point, he joined a startup. They were using react-native. Within 2 months he left the job. They treated him really poorly, and no one was there to help him. Now he is preparing for gov jobs. s2. Another young gun, who works in TCS it's been 6 months since he is last wrote a single line of code. At some point, they will throw a project at him and assume he is a top java hacker. That will solve all kinds of crazy problems.
lunias 7y ago
It took way longer than it should have, but recently it seems like companies have caught on. I've worked with more off-shore developers in the Dominican Republic / Belarus than India in the past 2 years. Never understood the need for such large, low individual cost, tech teams anyways... almost always seems like a better idea to pay 2 people 200k a piece to work on something than hiring 8 off-shore developers / managers for 50k each.

This sad for the Indian IT ecosystem, but the world has been evolving into a more protectionist place for a few years now, and the trend isn't going to stop. Indian outsourcing companies need to evolve into SaaS and cloud companies to compete globally. They are already doing this to some extent. That needs to accelerate. Sadly though, this is not going to help the vast majority of their employees, particularly middle-management folks, whose primary skill -- project management, won't be in very high demand, as the deep hierarchies of these companies are replaced by flatter structures more suited to product companies. They need to re-skill skill themselves. And that is going to take a huge toll on them financially.

Ygg2 7y ago
I worked with an Indian SaaS/outsourcing provider. Worst experience of my life. Imagine sending build artifacts to be deployed and finding extra files in them. Of course this was all undocumented and untracked, so it was a great exercise in decompilation.
paggle 7y ago
Also Indian IT companies are overstaffed with followers and understaffed with leaders. Even ICs in a good product company like Google or Apple are entirely capable of self-managing 90% of their work -- you only need to tell them something like "implement smooth scrolling on the iPad mini that matches the iPad Pro." They will come back and evaluate the problem and approaches and say that the current system calls don't support an exact match but that reducing to 30fps can get a match or the OS team can do additional work to expose a lower-level graphics primitive to make an exact match. You'll never get that from your typical Infosys grunt. The vast majority of the Indian engineers with that skill level are either employed in the US on H-1Bs or in India at the FAANG India offices.
- vermilingua 7y ago
  Nothing you said there suggests that this is an India specific problem. Paraphrasing: > good developers capable of self managing work at Google or Apple > the only Indian developers at that level work at FAANG It's almost like good engineers are attracted to the companies that can afford them, regardless of their nationality.
  - paggle 7y ago
    No, there are a lot of good Serbian developers for example but they all work in outsourcing since the FAANGs don't have offices there. So there are a lot of very talented Serbian devs who do contract work. But in India there is a robust export and domestic market for engineers and a HUGE services market so the services firms are mostly populated by crap talent. It is an India specific problem.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > implement smooth scrolling on the iPad mini that matches the iPad Pro No iPad Mini ships with ProMotion hardware, FWIW.
iamsb 7y ago
One of the suggestions I keep making to prime ministers office is to open up lateral recruitment is government much more and deploy these people with mid management experience to tackle some of the issue in government delivery. Lot of these people have expertise in managing mid to large scale project, are far more professionally trained, experienced, with exposure to more developed economies. It will help Indian government a lot if it can leverage this talent pool effectively.

tracer4201 7y ago

I worked for an oil and gas company in Houston about 5 years ago, and the IT organization was primarily Indian contractors working through a couple companies. I recall Infosys and Larsen and Toubro. One of the IT contractors supporting the SAP system confessed to me how horribly L&TI treated him, and how if he spoke up about it, they could force him to return to India. He was making $18 an hour btw, although I’m pretty sure his billable rate was far larger. One of his Indian friends found out what he’d told me and ended up yelling at him in their native tongue because he wasn’t supposed to speak up, apparently. I’m sure tons of talent from India absolutely is deserving of their work visas, but there were companies clearly gaming the system.

chopraaa 7y ago
I worked for HCL right out of college. If I asked people whom I worked with to guess my salary, they couldn't even come close. I made about $180 per month with 48 hour work weeks.
- sokz 7y ago
  I got offered about the same amount last month by HCL,for a position that required a Master's.

repesorsa666 7y ago

Well you know, Indian developers have been taking shits on codebases around the globe for decades now so it's about time it ends.

bradwood 7y ago

This has been a long time coming. INFY and others like them have been slave-driving their staff with huge markups for eons. I’m glad the chickens are finally coming home to roost. I’ve worked in wholesale finance for decades and seen how these guys are treated both on- and offshore by their employers. It’s frankly despicable. Let’s hope the market in India finally pivots and smaller, more nimble shops take more and more market share. That being said, I wonder how much of this is embedded in cultural norms that will not be easy to shake. For example: saying yes to your client’s every request, even if it’s stupid, is not something that comes easily, I suspect, if you’re ingrained to just say yes...

flarg 7y ago
Is not a cultural norm in India, it's just a way of doing business. Source, have worked in India many times.
- bradwood 7y ago
  the difference being?
- inapis 7y ago
  Things have changed with newer companies especially those which are building and selling their own products. Though work life balance is still poor but at least people are not saying yes to everything just to appease.
Nursie 7y ago
That particular cultural norm (or way of doing business, in deference to 'flarg' who is better acquainted with this than I am) has got in the way of producing quality work several times in the past, and ruined the productivity we were trying to get from outsourcing in the first place (it was not my decision, I just had to try and make it work). "So you understand what you have to do?" "Yes" "And you have all the documentation and information you need?" "Yes" "OK great, let's get this thing going, get in touch if you need any help" Two weeks later - "How's progress on the project?" "I have not been able to start the work because I could not understand..."

buttholesurfer 7y ago

Is that like .004% of indian IT workers? Fuck em we've been facing those numbers yearly for 15 years because of cheap outsourcing. Why is this even here?

anuraj 7y ago

Average productivity of an Indian IT services employee is as low as $15000 a year. With no uptick in productivity - the only way you can improve margins is to cut the flab - which is there in senior and middle layers. So senior and middle managers who have made themselves redundant without upskilling are now game. Average work life duration of an Indian IT employee might be less than 20 years currently.

klausjensen 7y ago
Trying to understand "average productivity" here. The 15K is what an average IT worker produces per year - for example if they were billed out for 1500 hours at 10$ per hour? Genuine question, trying to understand. :)
- sufiyan 7y ago
  Nah.. That's how much they get paid. The consulting company will charge about 5-10x for this resource though. (source from a friend who was there)
- anuraj 7y ago
  That is true. Most companies have bench+overhead and billed resources may be 60% or less of total work force. Average billing works out to $10-15 for the low value high volume work these IT services firms do and that has not changed over the last 20 years or so. What has changed is a bloated middle/senior management which is a drag to the above business model. They did try to move up into consultancy and productised services - which did not really work.

hos234 7y ago

On the flip side - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-may-see-105-unicorns-by-2025-says-nasscom/articleshow/71930457.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
Excuse me if I take that ToI article with a pinch of salt. Venture capitalists will throw money at anything they think they can make a buck on, e.g. WeWork.
raghava 7y ago
It is coming from NASSCOM, which is a lobbying arm. Value bloat is what people want, and NASSCOM does just that. Take that news with loads of salt.

t0ddbonzalez 7y ago

Is it a bad take (or a sweeping generalization) to say that the quality of work done by IT service companies in that part of the word is consistently below-par?

gowthamgts12 7y ago
This is a common stereotyping to assume. The quality of work you get from outsourcing is directly proportional to the amount you spend. If you need talented people you have to spend more money. It's as simple as that.
- wheelerwj 7y ago
  > you have to spend more money. i'd go even more broad: its not just about money, its also about time. You can get good returns on junior team members but you need to put in the time to coach/teach/guide/manage just like anything else. more money just means that you're paying someone else to put in the time. Which is cool, different models work in different scenarios.
  - pferde 7y ago
    That doesn't work when you outsource to Infosys or Cognizant - the people you just spent two weeks coaching and training will be gone next week, replaced by brand new blank-slated, interchangeable cogs. These large Indian outsourcing companies are nothing but a big scam that has cost us millions in productivity, not to mention stress and frustration for not being able to get things done.
    - wheelerwj 7y ago
      I haven't worked directly with those specific firms so I can't comment directly. But that seems like a contractual issue.
- t0ddbonzalez 7y ago
  QED. Once you're forced to spend more than x amount to secure talented workers, surely you might as well employ domestic programmers/DBAs/whatever?

lmilcin 7y ago

It is not really a slowdown. Companies are more than ever eager to hire anybody to do IT projects. The trouble is the level of service provided to customers by vendors from India is pretty shitty and that's why companies are migrating to other countries for IT resources. I work in banking and payment sector and I had a chance to observe this on a dozen projects. In one instance Cognizant offered to completely automate a significant application used by hundreds of thousands of customers throughout the world. They were supposed to containerize half a dozen services, Oracle database, configure it to run on AWS and also automate environment creation. The team put by Cognizant had not a single person knowing how to do basically anything. They spent entire project schedule and more just learning the basics of how to get around. Instead of automating anything they negotiated to be allowed to just order vms on EC2 and install applications there, manually. It took them three weeks to figure out how to copy 400GB database backup (they had space, accesses and networking, they just couldn't figure out how to copy the file). Then they spent another two weeks unable to restore the backup. The trouble is that for a long time they have been cranking junior devs with no quality culture and no real interest in what they are doing and now this is starting to hurt them.

jamisteven 7y ago
I work in similar capacity, I have seen similar time and time again. So called "Devs" and "SME's", that basically know absolutely nothing and need to be trained.
ethbro 7y ago
The thing that's consistently baffled me with projects like this is why technical milestones aren't encoded in contracts. In your example, if they can't demonstrate a PoC container or automated environment creation in x% of the schedule, the contract is terminated. With similar milestones throughout the project. It's like traditional PM project pacing goes out the window when dealing with contractors. It's not a secret these shops put the least capable people on contracts they think they can get away with, so why not better incentivize them to bring a more skilled team?
- dplgk 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

goatinaboat 7y ago

Genuine question: do any companies actually in India outsource operations to these kinds of companies? Or are their customers entirely gullible Western companies?

sufiyan 7y ago
The Indian government gives them contracts. A lot of big Indian companies also get droves of them to do repetitive work with no visible path of career progression

ooooak 7y ago

It's storytime S1. I met a guy who was really passionate about blockchain and python. At some point, he joined a startup. They were using react-native. Within 2 months he left the job. They treated him really poorly, and no one was there to help him. Now he is preparing for gov jobs. s2. Another young gun, who works in TCS it's been 6 months since he is last wrote a single line of code. At some point, they will throw a project at him and assume he is a top java hacker. That will solve all kinds of crazy problems.

lunias 7y ago

It took way longer than it should have, but recently it seems like companies have caught on. I've worked with more off-shore developers in the Dominican Republic / Belarus than India in the past 2 years. Never understood the need for such large, low individual cost, tech teams anyways... almost always seems like a better idea to pay 2 people 200k a piece to work on something than hiring 8 off-shore developers / managers for 50k each.