18 ms·

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. Communicat

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.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I've been to It oriented cites in India. Normal people sleep on the sidewalk because they have nothing else (we don't share a language, so it is hard to be sure, but this isn't like homeless in the US where sleeping on a sidewalk implies a drug or mental problem, these seem like my neighbors here who have a typical family). You would fit right in on low pay if you wanted that life. Now I'll grant most people want a better life and I'm not sure the low end supports much better, but in context it isn't uncommon.
GordonS 6y ago
> 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 When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 people doing nothing but creating worthless unit tests that didn't test anything, 3 people writing HTML, 3 people writing CSS, 3 people coding an API, 3 people coding a backend, 3 people whose job it was to "manage the config files", 3 testers doing basically nothing... it was... so completely and utterly inefficient! It was a running joke that there would be someone to write the opening HTML tag, someone to write the name, and someone to close the tag - it wasn't far from the truth. Of course, not all offshore teams are this insanely inept. To some degree it comes down to how much the client is willing to pay, but outsourcers also have different groups that target different segments. Their ODC (offshore development team) groups cater to the cheap-as-possible crowd, and are invariably atrocious, but their digital/consulting groups are comprised of "real" developers. Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  >Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers. You're by no means the only one. TCS and Infosys are 2 others that I've seen engage in exactly this kind of activity. "manage the config files" haha.. thanks for the laugh.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I had to deal with people who couldn't grasp the concept of bitwise masking and shifts to pack/extract fields from an integer. This was for a wire protocol that needed to conserve space to minimize server costs. Their solution was to have all booleans in their own field which ended up burning five bytes each in our serialization format. I just gave up and let them do what they wanted since nobody on my side seemed to care.
rams 6y ago
wrt Tech Mahindra a very senior engineer who used to work there told me that there have been so many layoffs there that, in some projects the Team Leads report straight to the VP. Newbies receive little to no training or guidance.

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.

bluGill 6y ago
I've been to It oriented cites in India. Normal people sleep on the sidewalk because they have nothing else (we don't share a language, so it is hard to be sure, but this isn't like homeless in the US where sleeping on a sidewalk implies a drug or mental problem, these seem like my neighbors here who have a typical family). You would fit right in on low pay if you wanted that life. Now I'll grant most people want a better life and I'm not sure the low end supports much better, but in context it isn't uncommon.

GordonS 6y ago

> 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 When I first started working with an offshore team of Capgemini devs back around 2007, this really struck me too. It was bizarre - you had "devs" who literally knew nothing beyond their very limited task space. Literally.nothing. You'd have 3 people doing nothing but creating worthless unit tests that didn't test anything, 3 people writing HTML, 3 people writing CSS, 3 people coding an API, 3 people coding a backend, 3 people whose job it was to "manage the config files", 3 testers doing basically nothing... it was... so completely and utterly inefficient! It was a running joke that there would be someone to write the opening HTML tag, someone to write the name, and someone to close the tag - it wasn't far from the truth. Of course, not all offshore teams are this insanely inept. To some degree it comes down to how much the client is willing to pay, but outsourcers also have different groups that target different segments. Their ODC (offshore development team) groups cater to the cheap-as-possible crowd, and are invariably atrocious, but their digital/consulting groups are comprised of "real" developers. Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers.

kyuudou 6y ago
>Disclaimer: I don't mean to make sweeping assumptions etc. This post is based on around 15 years experience working with outsourced devs in Indian, across multiple companies. Plainly a country the size of India has plenty of excellent developers. You're by no means the only one. TCS and Infosys are 2 others that I've seen engage in exactly this kind of activity. "manage the config files" haha.. thanks for the laugh.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
I had to deal with people who couldn't grasp the concept of bitwise masking and shifts to pack/extract fields from an integer. This was for a wire protocol that needed to conserve space to minimize server costs. Their solution was to have all booleans in their own field which ended up burning five bytes each in our serialization format. I just gave up and let them do what they wanted since nobody on my side seemed to care.

rams 6y ago

wrt Tech Mahindra a very senior engineer who used to work there told me that there have been so many layoffs there that, in some projects the Team Leads report straight to the VP. Newbies receive little to no training or guidance.