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Nextgrid 3y ago

India is sadly at the forefront of low-quality tech sweatshops and may have even pioneered the concept... but not to worry, with remote work I'm sure other countries will catch up eventually too!

alephnerd 3y ago
So are Ukraine, Romania, and Poland. In McD's and ATT's case (because you commented on that as well) - their platform and security teams are located at HQ in the Central Sales Zone
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > Ukraine, Romania, and Poland. They have to compete with India (because otherwise why would you go there instead of just going with India) so they have to justify it by offering at least a slightly higher quality bar to differentiate themselves from a market saturated by low-quality sweatshops. Personal experience, I don't (yet) get spam emails offering me dev services from Eastern Europe (or Thailand/Philippines for that matter) but I've had my fair share of "agencies" promising me the moon at cheap prices, with all signs pointing that the origin of those is India. --- > In McD's and ATT's case The problem with large, non-IT "legacy" companies is less outsourcing itself (although outsourcing is a symptom of it) but that there is no healthy engineering culture. Nobody competent joins/stays there because if you're competent and actually want that skill to be rewarded you'll have much better options, so the only thing that remains is mediocrity. Since you mentioned ATT, ask yourself why there is zero innovation coming out of the telco space? It is after all just bits and bytes (and with things like IMS/VoLTE more and more of it is bog standard IP and SIP). We've seen innovation in banking (see challenger banks in the UK), we've seen it in electric utilities (Octopus Energy in the UK has a healthy Python-focused engineering arm), yet for some reason nothing ever comes out of telcos beyond excuses to misbill people and coming up with ever-outlandish use-cases for 5G.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > Personal experience, I don't (yet) get spam emails offering me dev services from Eastern Europe (or Thailand/Philippines for that matter) but I've had my fair share of "agencies" promising me the moon at cheap prices, with all signs pointing that the origin of those is India. Personal experience does not give you the right to be prejudiced. And ime EPAM and ELITEX have been equally as horrid as WITCH, yet I don't presume all East European programmers suck. > why there is zero innovation coming out of the telco space Plenty of innovation happens. They were some of the earliest adopters of Cloud and K8s, and a number of features and products that CSPs like AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, etc now sell were initially developed by telcos and then resold to the CSPs. --------- I get it, you're a freelancer/contractor and you must be jaded due to competition, yet in all honesty you aren't any different than a drone at EPAM or TCS. If you are going to be publicly prejudiced, at least have the decency to be anonymous and not directly link your professional information. It's a small industry
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > Plenty of innovation happens Over a decade ago, sure. Nowadays, it seems like they're struggling with basic things like defending against social-engineered SIM swaps (even when the account has an explicit note about it) and not leaking data (not talking about the "contested" AT&T breach, but the fully admitted T-Mobile one for example)? But don't take it from me, here's a more reliable source with way more experience in the field: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ > you must be jaded due to competition Outsourced sweatshops aren't meaningful competition for me - they have their customers and I have mine, and those rarely intersect. The sales pipeline and target market is completely different. My problem with them is more that they often manage to get government contracts (and thus get tax money) and then deliver no/subpar results. --- At the end of the day it's clear we have a different view on these things so let's agree to disagree - my mistake is your opportunity. If you feel like prejudice against common outsourcing sweatshops is mistaken, you are welcome to exploit it (you can do so via the stock market, or by taking on locally-priced contracts, outsourcing them and pocketing the difference). > have the decency to be anonymous I'm trying to share my experience and opinion, not fire cheap shots under the cover of a throwaway. If this means some people choose not to work with me, so be it. If I wanted to be a people-pleaser and never say anything remotely negative I'd instead join a big corp and only communicate through the PR department.