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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 co
by 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 agoIs not a cultural norm in India, it's just a way of doing business. Source, have worked in India many times.
- Nursie 7y agoThat 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..."
- theshrike79 7y agoWith Indian contractors, you can't use questions that require them to give a yes or no answer. You need to phrase things differently: "What will be the first thing you'll be working on?" instead of "Do you understand?", for example.
- wheelerwj 7y agoopen ended questions are just better in general. Describe your next steps... Please create a step by step project plan in {tool name}... Another issue is waiting two weeks. Never, ever, wait two weeks. With any outsourced team you need much more frequent check-ins otherwise you run the risk of being blind-sided by huge project delays.
- Nursie 7y agoLessons learned I guess! We assumed that we were dealing with a (semi-) autonomous developer or team of developers, who would ask for clarification or assistance if needed. We made ourselves available, we didn't expect miracles (it was big product with a team you had years of knowledge about it attached, though they were working on a small, isolated area), but our expectations were just out of line with what we got. In the end the developer turned out to be able to do the work, though did not excel. The biggest hurdle to cross was this mismatch of expectations.
- donkeyd 7y agoI've explained this multiple times now at large (even fortune 500) organizations. I had a project where they kept asking 'can you finish this on Monday?' or 'we need this by Monday, when can you finish it?' Every time, they'd confirm it would be finished on Monday, but it never was. When we changed tactics to just asking for an estimation without any direction from us, we would get much more realistic estimates. Took a lot of work to convince our project manager though.
- Tade0 7y agoI guess asking specific questions that don't have a yes/no answer would have helped here.
- iobug 7y agoEx-Infosys guy here. It's just the mid-level managers are clueless. So their best shot is appeasing clients. I was lucky to have a manager for a while who knew his stuff and he did push back on irrational demands pretty systematically.
- goatinaboat 7y agoyou’re ingrained to just say yes... This is not limited to the IT industry. Never ask “is this the train to New Delhi?” for example...
- blaser-waffle 7y agoI'm reminded of Dave Barry's "Ways to Say No In Japan", which is essentially the same idea. Synonyms for "no" include: I see Ah Ah-hah Of course That is difficult Interesting Yes