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> No competent employee stays in those companies I gotta say, this explains so much. We have a FTE who came from infosys and he's very good. I have such a ha

> No competent employee stays in those companies I gotta say, this explains so much. We have a FTE who came from infosys and he's very good. I have such a hard time squaring that with the team that submits an initial PR with the bin and obj directories checked in, then follows it up by adding .gitignore.txt file before FINALLY submitting a .gitignore file. And then finding them representing currency as float, or finding catch statements with a single line that rethrows it, as below (C#) // this form throws away the stack trace from the original exception. catch(Exception ex) { throw ex; } And when asked why this exists they add logging to it catch(Exception ex) { _log.Debug("Unhandled exception handled.", ex); throw ex; } ---- I could go on, but the ole eyebrow just twitches whenever I think about infosys. But then I see this other person who came from infosys. It's like trying to understand how that 6'11" basketball player came from that family who has no one over 5' tall. Rationally I know strong technical folks can come from these companies, but damn... how? There's another poster claiming everyone makes mistakes, but no, many of the mistakes they make are not reasonable.

willcipriano 4y ago
Imagine trying to debug a issue in the middle of the night and you go to the logs to find "Unhandled exception handled." dozens of times. I'd probably just quit.
QuinnyPig 4y ago
They employ a quarter million people. Quality may vary…
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Yes. There are a number of highly skilled and talented people in Infosys and the other WITCH companies, but they're generally staffed only on the most prestigious projects and tend to move on fairly quickly. As another commenter said, in most cases they got recruited straight out of college. So it's not that everyone at companies like Infosys are bad, it's that their hiring standards are so lax and hiring rate so high that the large proportion of their engineering people are mediocre at best, and that's why most engineers at European or American companies would've been exposed to. The typical model of a WITCH engagement is to get a new client project that requires, say 100 engineers, and immediately go to market to hire 90% of them because they don't have a bench. Screening is minimal. They're then heavily micromanaged on the project for the first few months, where it's expected that at least half of those people will fail and either their manager or the client will demand they get rotated off and then sacked. They're replaced by another cohort freshly hired and the process repeats until you have a stable-ish team of good-enough competence about 8 months in. It works because it's still cheaper and easier for big corps and big projects and the delivered quality is fairly shit, but still acceptable. And the margins are so good that in the rare event there are late delivery penalties they're fairly easily absorbed.
udkl 4y ago
He must have joined Infosys at 'on-campus' recruitment. Infosys and other companies might have visited his campus, he gave a sort of test and he was selected. Sometimes, once you pass an interview, you aren't allowed to try for other on-campus companies. So he was 'stuck' with Infosys. The other reason is that programming as a hobby during college isn't a thing in India. (This might have changed in recent years). So you only get a chance to really mature as a programmer in the first few years out of college. So when he was ready to move on from Infosys, he had matured, but still had the Infosys 'stigma'. And then it's really a numbers game. Infosys has hired millions in the past decade or two.
zwkrt 4y ago
Emphasis can be a good way to get visa endorsement for finding a better job. Also sometimes people who are booksmart are not streetsmart and end up working for a bad company.
rk06 4y ago
Tier 1 companies generally hire from tier 1 colleges. Tier 2 and tier 3 college students are either ignored or not able to make it due to lack of quality education. But those talented students take up any job offer they get (I.e. WITCH). when they get experience, they switch to higher tier companies. There are many talented folks at WITCH companies, they just don't stay there.
fellellor 4y ago
Programming/anything to do with PCs in India is a rich man’s hobby. Tinkering is not encouraged in colleges in the country. In any case this is a big country with a lot of talented devs. But for the same reason the pool of mediocre programmers is also pretty big.
- mindentropy 4y ago
  >Programming/anything to do with PCs in India is a rich man’s hobby. This is not true. We had a good culture of self assembled PC enthusiasts in our district. This was in early 2000s. In fact it has reduced now maybe due to lack of interest or something even though the prices of PCs have dropped significantly. I see many people use their PCs as locked up phones with no curiosity of hardware. >Tinkering is not encouraged in colleges in the country. This sad state is still present to this day and it has become worse as the hardware gets more and more locked down. I don't see much interest in Linux in the younger generations.
  - fellellor 4y ago
    >This is not true. It is absolutely true. Just because you don't consider yourself rich doesn't mean that these devices aren't out of the reach of a vast majority of the population. Almost everyone has access to a smartphone, but most of those are poorly made, overheating pieces of plastic - barely suitable for use as a phone, let alone as a computing device on which you can learn something. In my second statement, I'm also trying to say that though you have a huge number of people in the workforce who haven't had easy access to computing devices, there are also many who do (in absolute numbers but not in percentage). But the numbers are such that given an average Indian programmer, they are more likely to be someone who got educated in a substandard setting among unmotivated peers who have an aversion or even a fear of tinkering and putting a big investment (like a PC) at risk. People who have money to get a PC as a hobbyist do it for unworthy reasons - like the chance to play garbage tier games like pubg or whatever, or becoming an influencer. This is a generalisation but it will affect the probabilities.
    - mindentropy 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

willcipriano 4y ago

Imagine trying to debug a issue in the middle of the night and you go to the logs to find "Unhandled exception handled." dozens of times. I'd probably just quit.

QuinnyPig 4y ago

They employ a quarter million people. Quality may vary…

_djo_ 4y ago
Yes. There are a number of highly skilled and talented people in Infosys and the other WITCH companies, but they're generally staffed only on the most prestigious projects and tend to move on fairly quickly. As another commenter said, in most cases they got recruited straight out of college. So it's not that everyone at companies like Infosys are bad, it's that their hiring standards are so lax and hiring rate so high that the large proportion of their engineering people are mediocre at best, and that's why most engineers at European or American companies would've been exposed to. The typical model of a WITCH engagement is to get a new client project that requires, say 100 engineers, and immediately go to market to hire 90% of them because they don't have a bench. Screening is minimal. They're then heavily micromanaged on the project for the first few months, where it's expected that at least half of those people will fail and either their manager or the client will demand they get rotated off and then sacked. They're replaced by another cohort freshly hired and the process repeats until you have a stable-ish team of good-enough competence about 8 months in. It works because it's still cheaper and easier for big corps and big projects and the delivered quality is fairly shit, but still acceptable. And the margins are so good that in the rare event there are late delivery penalties they're fairly easily absorbed.

udkl 4y ago

He must have joined Infosys at 'on-campus' recruitment. Infosys and other companies might have visited his campus, he gave a sort of test and he was selected. Sometimes, once you pass an interview, you aren't allowed to try for other on-campus companies. So he was 'stuck' with Infosys. The other reason is that programming as a hobby during college isn't a thing in India. (This might have changed in recent years). So you only get a chance to really mature as a programmer in the first few years out of college. So when he was ready to move on from Infosys, he had matured, but still had the Infosys 'stigma'. And then it's really a numbers game. Infosys has hired millions in the past decade or two.

zwkrt 4y ago

Emphasis can be a good way to get visa endorsement for finding a better job. Also sometimes people who are booksmart are not streetsmart and end up working for a bad company.

rk06 4y ago

Tier 1 companies generally hire from tier 1 colleges. Tier 2 and tier 3 college students are either ignored or not able to make it due to lack of quality education. But those talented students take up any job offer they get (I.e. WITCH). when they get experience, they switch to higher tier companies. There are many talented folks at WITCH companies, they just don't stay there.

fellellor 4y ago

Programming/anything to do with PCs in India is a rich man’s hobby. Tinkering is not encouraged in colleges in the country. In any case this is a big country with a lot of talented devs. But for the same reason the pool of mediocre programmers is also pretty big.

mindentropy 4y ago
>Programming/anything to do with PCs in India is a rich man’s hobby. This is not true. We had a good culture of self assembled PC enthusiasts in our district. This was in early 2000s. In fact it has reduced now maybe due to lack of interest or something even though the prices of PCs have dropped significantly. I see many people use their PCs as locked up phones with no curiosity of hardware. >Tinkering is not encouraged in colleges in the country. This sad state is still present to this day and it has become worse as the hardware gets more and more locked down. I don't see much interest in Linux in the younger generations.
- fellellor 4y ago
  >This is not true. It is absolutely true. Just because you don't consider yourself rich doesn't mean that these devices aren't out of the reach of a vast majority of the population. Almost everyone has access to a smartphone, but most of those are poorly made, overheating pieces of plastic - barely suitable for use as a phone, let alone as a computing device on which you can learn something. In my second statement, I'm also trying to say that though you have a huge number of people in the workforce who haven't had easy access to computing devices, there are also many who do (in absolute numbers but not in percentage). But the numbers are such that given an average Indian programmer, they are more likely to be someone who got educated in a substandard setting among unmotivated peers who have an aversion or even a fear of tinkering and putting a big investment (like a PC) at risk. People who have money to get a PC as a hobbyist do it for unworthy reasons - like the chance to play garbage tier games like pubg or whatever, or becoming an influencer. This is a generalisation but it will affect the probabilities.
  - mindentropy 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]