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> Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation. I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices

> Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation. I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices in India are just using this as an excuse to trim their workforce, enforce paycuts (upto 50%), hold back increments for the year (and even next) and restructure salaries drastically - by moving almost 60% to vaiable pay(which typically never gets paid). Such a list is live at https://careervscovid19.com/insights https://careervscovid19.com/insights Traditional BigCo ITeS/outsourcing shops are using this as a great opportunity to trim the flab in the middle (claiming as "a dire measure to sustain shareholder value") while it was always about . These are the same bunch in middle-management whom they would pamper regularly by giving quarterly/monthly awards (quarterly Gem, Spot awards, Player of the month, etc bullshit accolades) And the markets also work that way. On a regular day, if there's firing, stocks of a BigCo go wonky sensing something is amiss. During a crisis, if they do not fire people by the thousands, markets deem it as lack of financial prudence and stocks go down. Everything (and anything) in the name of profits and shareholder value. There's a saying dated thousands of years, goes like "vyaparam droha chintanam” meaning "Business is all about profits most often via undue advantages". Related article - http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/download/16062/13461 http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...

blaser-waffle 6y ago
Our experience with Indian firms during COVID has been rocky. Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds. But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything. The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.
- raghava 6y ago
  > some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements. And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability. Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    And the lack of good tools and beefy desktop machines is precisely why they cannot grep the code themselves, which is why those outsourced coders will fail unless you micro-manage them with design specifications. Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

Our experience with Indian firms during COVID has been rocky. Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds. But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything. The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.

raghava 6y ago
> some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements. And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability. Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  And the lack of good tools and beefy desktop machines is precisely why they cannot grep the code themselves, which is why those outsourced coders will fail unless you micro-manage them with design specifications. Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
dehrmann 6y ago
> big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.