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I recently joined a company where my main task is to modernise a business critical application built and supported by Wipro over ten years ago. Everything is st

by mjohn 6y ago

I recently joined a company where my main task is to modernise a business critical application built and supported by Wipro over ten years ago. Everything is still on .Net 3.0 (first released in 2007), and despite hundreds of pages of documentation the developers seem to have little understanding of what the application actually does for the business. The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution. This is fine if you don't need the software to evolve, but most business applications do need to evolve even if slower than at a start-up or FAANG. At least where I work there has been the recent realisation that outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Here’s the thing, I honestly think these consultancies are going to be feasting for decades to come with all these enterprise companies shifting to the cloud. That is the very definition of ‘their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution.’. This kind of lock-in at the enterprise level is a dream come true for them. They can marshal armies of AWS certified architects, and tie themselves to every corporation in the world, forever.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  I dunno, it could go either way. AWS is not cheap, unless you really understand the business domain, or someone else has done the hard work of understanding the business and re-architecting the design to leverage AWS' value propositions. It is painful to watch a team that doesn't understand what is really going on blindly rip and replace on-prem VM's with EC2's that only need to for example, run a script once a day to perform an extract and load operation in a few minutes. Even when you run pico instances, applying the same design culture across the enterprise adds up in a big hurry. This isn't Indian or non-Indian, this is "whether they deeply care about the customer enough to look for innovation on your own". You can't agile your way to nor bottle up and sell by the caseload innovation. I wish like hell we could, I'd buy a Panamax-load of that and mainline it into the fusion and AGI problems. What jrumbut said in this thread has some validity in certain scenarios, "Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense." And like the-dude said, the initial innovation is the automation behind aaS. It is up to those who build on top of aaS to carry that innovation momentum forward by adding their own innovation, the innovation isn't transitive nor inheritable by just using *aaS, which seems to be happening a lot currently though that is changing at an accelerating pace.
- heisenbit 6y ago
  Absolutely. And don‘t underestimate the mountain range of legacy these baby boomers coded.
jrumbut 6y ago
The truest saying in software is that the highest value output of a project is an engineering team that understands your business. Past a certain point of size/complexity you can't buy one of those for any price, you have to make it. Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense.
- patja 6y ago
  This rings true for my experience as well. And it also highlights the waste that occurs when a successful team finishes delivering and is immediately dispersed to the four winds, something that happens all too often.
- diehunde 6y ago
  That's why companies end up requiring "extensions" over and over for consultants. I know people working for consultant firms that have been with the same client for more than 3 years.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Where to outsource is the right question. I could write a word processor, but my company just buys me Microsoft office. My company could buy the software I wrote from an outsourcer, but we consider it a competitive advantage to do it in house.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Buying a product is different than paying someone to make a product for you. Since your company is the only customer for that product there is no benefit in outsourcing it other than the ability to rent a developer (contracting might be a better option). Nobody else is going to buy that product.
- pickle-wizard 6y ago
  I can’t remember where I read it, but I was reading an article about a company’s experience with outsourcing. One quote stood out. “We outsourced all the profit, but none of the risk”
bstar77 6y ago
I don't think this is a fair assumption. The work is going to be defined by the client... so if the client wants .Net 3.0 experts to maintain a legacy system, then that's what they are going to get. I have worked for and with Indian IT firms (I'm not Indian myself) and in most cases the directive is to use latest standards and best practices. In my case it has to do with cloud architectures. Outsourcing is something that still needs onsite experts that can help guide the project and critique/review what is being developed. Clients that are mostly hands off during the development are inevitably going to have significant struggles.
- mjohn 6y ago
  I pretty much agree with you, if the client doesn't have any in-house expertise and stays hands-off then you get the scenario I described but outsourcing can work if it's in addition to in-house expertise. In this case the client didn't want .Net 3.0 experts to support a legacy app, that's what the consultants built it in and then let it turn into legacy by not performing regular maintenance. The client didn't know that it was becoming legacy until it was too late because they never developed the in-house expertise to understand what was necessary and the consultants have no incentive to do it by themselves. In fact they can charge more by letting it rot and requiring development of a whole new project to replace the legacy.
noble_pleb 6y ago
Can relate to that. I used to work for tech mahindra and they were using vb6 and .NET 2.0 for a major client even as late as 2014 when I quit from there. Its most likely that they are still using that old stack because its typically difficult to justify migration costs to a newer stack.
lgleason 6y ago
Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money spent on people who are onshore. Many of these efforts are akin to putting a bunch of monkeys in front of typewriters and expecting to get the next Shakespeare. The old "Mythical Man Month" book by Fred Brooks still holds true and it is truly astounding that organizations continue to make the same mistakes and not learn from history etc..
- ethbro 6y ago
  The ultimate take-away from "Mythical Man Month" is that the limit of adding people is not zero extra-work-per-additional-person, but unbounded negative extra-work-per-additional-person.
- peteradio 6y ago
  What you describe is clearly bad for the organization on the whole, is there some way this decision is being made to benefit the decision maker over the organization? Either for political reasons or maybe even illegal reasons?
- as1mov 6y ago
  > 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. This is mostly due to high attrition rates, these companies hire students fresh out of universities who have little to no experience. So most projects are in a state of constant flux where people who have worked on the code left after an year or two, only to be replaced by someone who knows very little about the codebase. The attrition is due to the very low pay and shitty work culture. Earlier people in India didn't really have a choice on where they could work in IT, it was mostly just these sweatshops, but this has changed in the past decade. There are product based companies and even higher tier consultancies who pay way better and treat their employees relatively better. Also remember, this gap in the payscale isn't minuscule, it could literally be 5x-10x if you posses the technical chops. > Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money spent on people who are onshore. I am stressing on the low pay in my comment because I tend to see a lot of anger online directed on the actual engineers (while making the point #3 in your comment) under the assumption that these people are making fat stacks of cash while living in a country with low cost of living. But this isn't usually the case, these people are paid peanuts, which is barely enough to cover the cost of living in the IT centered cities.
swalsh 6y ago
These firms specialized in digital transformation. But the digital transformation is over, now its the digital cleanup. The companies that understood the benefits of digital technology moved to it, and the majority of the others went out of business. In this new phase, your digital infrastructure allows you to move quickly, or you lose business to those that can move quickly. A lot of these old legacy applications, as useful as they are weren't made to be easily updated. I'd bet Corona virus is probably going to accelerate this. The amount of change going on in is so great that those that adapt the quickest will weather the storm the best.
- GordonS 6y ago
  > But the digital transformation is over "Digitalisation" has merely been replaced with "Industry 4.0". And after that hype train ends, they'll come up with some other nonsense.
  - ci5er 6y ago
    Maybe in supply-chain, logistics and industrial manufacturing, but it is "Digital Therapeutics" in healthcare (in the US) in the age of Corona. Regardless, marketers have eternal unbounded opportunities to come up with new nonsense that sells, but doesn't deliver on those promises. "Somewhere, over the rainbow... a pot of gold!"
kyuudou 6y ago
>The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution. This is fine if you don't need the software to evolve, but most business applications do need to evolve even if slower than at a start-up or FAANG. This, I think, is why companies like Wipro and TCS dominate in traditional financial companies like big banks where stability and security are emphasized more than innovation and feature development. I've seen Java apps running on RHEL5 as recently as 2 years ago.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology. Internally, we consider outsourcing the same as pausing all forward momentum on the outsourced components. It's just a reduction in current cost with an understanding that there will no new features and very little maintenance.
- caoilte 6y ago
  Yup. Very often. In fact every system I ever saw being outsourced was being done so in the knowledge that it was going to die. It's a face saving gesture that allows executives to sidestep the sunk cost write-off. In a couple of large retail examples it was obvious that they knew their entire bricks and mortar business model only had a decade or so of life left in it and they figured their godawful legacy ERP solution would stumble on until then.
snarf21 6y ago
Of course. Most manager types assume all code monkeys are the same. They just turn a crank all day. In the end one of the other key factors is just monthly expense. Business types like locking in engineering costs at $XX,000 per month. They have no ability to see that they will be paying twice as long until feature Y is ready and even then it won't be what they really want. But they did cut $30K from the monthly engineering expenses so here is a 10% raise and a bonus. Great Job!!!
JAlexoid 6y ago
> The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution. Like 99% of business is run like this. So... It's hardly surprising.

by mjohn 6y ago

runawaybottle 6y ago

Here’s the thing, I honestly think these consultancies are going to be feasting for decades to come with all these enterprise companies shifting to the cloud. That is the very definition of ‘their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution.’. This kind of lock-in at the enterprise level is a dream come true for them. They can marshal armies of AWS certified architects, and tie themselves to every corporation in the world, forever.

yourapostasy 6y ago
I dunno, it could go either way. AWS is not cheap, unless you really understand the business domain, or someone else has done the hard work of understanding the business and re-architecting the design to leverage AWS' value propositions. It is painful to watch a team that doesn't understand what is really going on blindly rip and replace on-prem VM's with EC2's that only need to for example, run a script once a day to perform an extract and load operation in a few minutes. Even when you run pico instances, applying the same design culture across the enterprise adds up in a big hurry. This isn't Indian or non-Indian, this is "whether they deeply care about the customer enough to look for innovation on your own". You can't agile your way to nor bottle up and sell by the caseload innovation. I wish like hell we could, I'd buy a Panamax-load of that and mainline it into the fusion and AGI problems. What jrumbut said in this thread has some validity in certain scenarios, "Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense." And like the-dude said, the initial innovation is the automation behind aaS. It is up to those who build on top of aaS to carry that innovation momentum forward by adding their own innovation, the innovation isn't transitive nor inheritable by just using *aaS, which seems to be happening a lot currently though that is changing at an accelerating pace.
heisenbit 6y ago
Absolutely. And don‘t underestimate the mountain range of legacy these baby boomers coded.

jrumbut 6y ago

The truest saying in software is that the highest value output of a project is an engineering team that understands your business. Past a certain point of size/complexity you can't buy one of those for any price, you have to make it. Outsourcing turns an investment opportunity into an expense.

patja 6y ago
This rings true for my experience as well. And it also highlights the waste that occurs when a successful team finishes delivering and is immediately dispersed to the four winds, something that happens all too often.
diehunde 6y ago
That's why companies end up requiring "extensions" over and over for consultants. I know people working for consultant firms that have been with the same client for more than 3 years.
bluGill 6y ago
Where to outsource is the right question. I could write a word processor, but my company just buys me Microsoft office. My company could buy the software I wrote from an outsourcer, but we consider it a competitive advantage to do it in house.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Buying a product is different than paying someone to make a product for you. Since your company is the only customer for that product there is no benefit in outsourcing it other than the ability to rent a developer (contracting might be a better option). Nobody else is going to buy that product.
pickle-wizard 6y ago
I can’t remember where I read it, but I was reading an article about a company’s experience with outsourcing. One quote stood out. “We outsourced all the profit, but none of the risk”

bstar77 6y ago

I don't think this is a fair assumption. The work is going to be defined by the client... so if the client wants .Net 3.0 experts to maintain a legacy system, then that's what they are going to get. I have worked for and with Indian IT firms (I'm not Indian myself) and in most cases the directive is to use latest standards and best practices. In my case it has to do with cloud architectures. Outsourcing is something that still needs onsite experts that can help guide the project and critique/review what is being developed. Clients that are mostly hands off during the development are inevitably going to have significant struggles.

mjohn 6y ago
I pretty much agree with you, if the client doesn't have any in-house expertise and stays hands-off then you get the scenario I described but outsourcing can work if it's in addition to in-house expertise. In this case the client didn't want .Net 3.0 experts to support a legacy app, that's what the consultants built it in and then let it turn into legacy by not performing regular maintenance. The client didn't know that it was becoming legacy until it was too late because they never developed the in-house expertise to understand what was necessary and the consultants have no incentive to do it by themselves. In fact they can charge more by letting it rot and requiring development of a whole new project to replace the legacy.

noble_pleb 6y ago

Can relate to that. I used to work for tech mahindra and they were using vb6 and .NET 2.0 for a major client even as late as 2014 when I quit from there. Its most likely that they are still using that old stack because its typically difficult to justify migration costs to a newer stack.

lgleason 6y ago

Adding to this. I've worked with people from Tech Mahindra. Some observations. 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. 2. Communication barriers, even when the people are local. 3. Jobs that any other organization would do with one person being split into 3 different roles with a net result of costing more than hiring the more expensive onshore devs. 4. Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money spent on people who are onshore. Many of these efforts are akin to putting a bunch of monkeys in front of typewriters and expecting to get the next Shakespeare. The old "Mythical Man Month" book by Fred Brooks still holds true and it is truly astounding that organizations continue to make the same mistakes and not learn from history etc..

ethbro 6y ago
The ultimate take-away from "Mythical Man Month" is that the limit of adding people is not zero extra-work-per-additional-person, but unbounded negative extra-work-per-additional-person.
peteradio 6y ago
What you describe is clearly bad for the organization on the whole, is there some way this decision is being made to benefit the decision maker over the organization? Either for political reasons or maybe even illegal reasons?
as1mov 6y ago
> 1. Very green staff that have little to no coding skills/ability. This is mostly due to high attrition rates, these companies hire students fresh out of universities who have little to no experience. So most projects are in a state of constant flux where people who have worked on the code left after an year or two, only to be replaced by someone who knows very little about the codebase. The attrition is due to the very low pay and shitty work culture. Earlier people in India didn't really have a choice on where they could work in IT, it was mostly just these sweatshops, but this has changed in the past decade. There are product based companies and even higher tier consultancies who pay way better and treat their employees relatively better. Also remember, this gap in the payscale isn't minuscule, it could literally be 5x-10x if you posses the technical chops. > Because of #3 software takes longer to deliver resulting in more money spent on people who are onshore. I am stressing on the low pay in my comment because I tend to see a lot of anger online directed on the actual engineers (while making the point #3 in your comment) under the assumption that these people are making fat stacks of cash while living in a country with low cost of living. But this isn't usually the case, these people are paid peanuts, which is barely enough to cover the cost of living in the IT centered cities.

swalsh 6y ago

These firms specialized in digital transformation. But the digital transformation is over, now its the digital cleanup. The companies that understood the benefits of digital technology moved to it, and the majority of the others went out of business. In this new phase, your digital infrastructure allows you to move quickly, or you lose business to those that can move quickly. A lot of these old legacy applications, as useful as they are weren't made to be easily updated. I'd bet Corona virus is probably going to accelerate this. The amount of change going on in is so great that those that adapt the quickest will weather the storm the best.

GordonS 6y ago
> But the digital transformation is over "Digitalisation" has merely been replaced with "Industry 4.0". And after that hype train ends, they'll come up with some other nonsense.
- ci5er 6y ago
  Maybe in supply-chain, logistics and industrial manufacturing, but it is "Digital Therapeutics" in healthcare (in the US) in the age of Corona. Regardless, marketers have eternal unbounded opportunities to come up with new nonsense that sells, but doesn't deliver on those promises. "Somewhere, over the rainbow... a pot of gold!"

kyuudou 6y ago

>The impression I have is that their business model is geared towards building one thing, learning one technology, and then exploiting it for as long as possible with minimal evolution. This is fine if you don't need the software to evolve, but most business applications do need to evolve even if slower than at a start-up or FAANG. This, I think, is why companies like Wipro and TCS dominate in traditional financial companies like big banks where stability and security are emphasized more than innovation and feature development. I've seen Java apps running on RHEL5 as recently as 2 years ago.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> outsourcing all your technology means you will struggle to iterate and improve that technology. Internally, we consider outsourcing the same as pausing all forward momentum on the outsourced components. It's just a reduction in current cost with an understanding that there will no new features and very little maintenance.

caoilte 6y ago
Yup. Very often. In fact every system I ever saw being outsourced was being done so in the knowledge that it was going to die. It's a face saving gesture that allows executives to sidestep the sunk cost write-off. In a couple of large retail examples it was obvious that they knew their entire bricks and mortar business model only had a decade or so of life left in it and they figured their godawful legacy ERP solution would stumble on until then.

snarf21 6y ago

Of course. Most manager types assume all code monkeys are the same. They just turn a crank all day. In the end one of the other key factors is just monthly expense. Business types like locking in engineering costs at $XX,000 per month. They have no ability to see that they will be paying twice as long until feature Y is ready and even then it won't be what they really want. But they did cut $30K from the monthly engineering expenses so here is a 10% raise and a bonus. Great Job!!!

JAlexoid 6y ago