4 ms·

Only 3 comments into a story about a UK problem and here's a comment blaming it on foreigners. Incredible.

by smcl 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
soco 3y ago
I take the spirit of that comment that they didn't blame the foreigners, they blamed the outsourcing. Because even if the provider was local the result would have likely been similar (and we do have recent examples, Horizon and not only)
- smcl 3y ago
  They didn't say "Work is getting outsourced" they said said "Work is getting outsourced to India"
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Which is even more jarring as McD's platform team is in their Chicagoland office. The amount of unbridled racism on HN is getting annoying. We outsource to Israel, Poland, Romania, etc as well, yet no one is acting racist about them.
    - p_l 3y ago
      Because TCS, HCL, Wipro, Infosys, and some western companies also keeping outsourcing teams there (i.e. Atos) provide consistently below-absolute-zero quality that pushes and enforces bad stereotypes. Because the real issue is not Indian people or their skills, but corporations that established a pattern of supplying people whose only skill is alleged knowledge of english language. The best thing I can say about those companies is that their IT sweatshops are better than starving, and those who learn anything seem to escape to better workplaces. I have yet to meet as consistent (negative) quality signal as finding out the job has been outsourced to consulting company in India. I have worked with, well, low-quality coworkers (and betcha been one myself more than once) from many countries - but nowhere else there is such negative selection. For comparison, there's no such correlation if the coworker is indian but working elsewhere.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    Adding the country receiving the outsourced work doesn't change the rest of the sentence to mean those getting the work are to blame.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      McD's Platform Team is at their HQ in Chicagoland. At some point it is plain racism and prejudice.
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        The headquarters location doesn't really matter in the context of outsourcing. Was the work in question done in Chicago, India, or somewhere else? Assuming racism isn't particularly useful without more context. Racism is an intent, simply saying the work was outsourced to India could be as benign as having incorrect information and absolutely doesn't say anything about the people of India themselves.
        alephnerd 3y ago
        The work is done IN CHICAGOLAND! I have managed and sold products or funded companies that have sold to the very same guys who do this stuff at McDs and insert_F1000_here The fact you automatically assume "India" is sheer racism, as if all good programmers are only in the US and all bad ones in India. Newsflash - all humans are kinda good and kinda bad.
        _heimdall 3y ago
        Fair enough, I think that falls into incorrect information then. I didn't make the original claim and wouldn't have assumed it was outsourced at all, I have no idea the inner dynamics of McDonald's engineering teams. My point was simply that saying the work was outsourced to India isn't itself enough to make a very real claim that someone is racist. Having incorrect information isn't racist, making an assumption that outsourced work went to India if that matches a person's experience with outsourced IT work ending up in India isn't racist, and saying the country to which work may have been outsourced to says absolutely nothing about the people there.
  - 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
- mtmail 3y ago
  They gave 4 reasons, and I think all are guesses without knowledge of the IT failures in question.
bilekas 3y ago
A great quote I love. Being British is about driving a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then traveling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. All while being suspicious of foreigners.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > Belgian beer Completely unrelated, but I love a classic British ESB. The microbreweries at attempt them here in the US just suck. I miss a nice Spitfire XPA.

Only 3 comments into a story about a UK problem and here's a comment blaming it on foreigners. Incredible.

by smcl 3y ago

Only 3 comments into a story about a UK problem and here's a comment blaming it on foreigners. Incredible.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

soco 3y ago

I take the spirit of that comment that they didn't blame the foreigners, they blamed the outsourcing. Because even if the provider was local the result would have likely been similar (and we do have recent examples, Horizon and not only)

smcl 3y ago
They didn't say "Work is getting outsourced" they said said "Work is getting outsourced to India"
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Which is even more jarring as McD's platform team is in their Chicagoland office. The amount of unbridled racism on HN is getting annoying. We outsource to Israel, Poland, Romania, etc as well, yet no one is acting racist about them.
  - p_l 3y ago
    Because TCS, HCL, Wipro, Infosys, and some western companies also keeping outsourcing teams there (i.e. Atos) provide consistently below-absolute-zero quality that pushes and enforces bad stereotypes. Because the real issue is not Indian people or their skills, but corporations that established a pattern of supplying people whose only skill is alleged knowledge of english language. The best thing I can say about those companies is that their IT sweatshops are better than starving, and those who learn anything seem to escape to better workplaces. I have yet to meet as consistent (negative) quality signal as finding out the job has been outsourced to consulting company in India. I have worked with, well, low-quality coworkers (and betcha been one myself more than once) from many countries - but nowhere else there is such negative selection. For comparison, there's no such correlation if the coworker is indian but working elsewhere.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Adding the country receiving the outsourced work doesn't change the rest of the sentence to mean those getting the work are to blame.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    McD's Platform Team is at their HQ in Chicagoland. At some point it is plain racism and prejudice.
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      The headquarters location doesn't really matter in the context of outsourcing. Was the work in question done in Chicago, India, or somewhere else? Assuming racism isn't particularly useful without more context. Racism is an intent, simply saying the work was outsourced to India could be as benign as having incorrect information and absolutely doesn't say anything about the people of India themselves.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        The work is done IN CHICAGOLAND! I have managed and sold products or funded companies that have sold to the very same guys who do this stuff at McDs and insert_F1000_here The fact you automatically assume "India" is sheer racism, as if all good programmers are only in the US and all bad ones in India. Newsflash - all humans are kinda good and kinda bad.
        _heimdall 3y ago
        Fair enough, I think that falls into incorrect information then. I didn't make the original claim and wouldn't have assumed it was outsourced at all, I have no idea the inner dynamics of McDonald's engineering teams. My point was simply that saying the work was outsourced to India isn't itself enough to make a very real claim that someone is racist. Having incorrect information isn't racist, making an assumption that outsourced work went to India if that matches a person's experience with outsourced IT work ending up in India isn't racist, and saying the country to which work may have been outsourced to says absolutely nothing about the people there.
- 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
mtmail 3y ago
They gave 4 reasons, and I think all are guesses without knowledge of the IT failures in question.

bilekas 3y ago

A great quote I love. Being British is about driving a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then traveling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. All while being suspicious of foreigners.

alephnerd 3y ago
> Belgian beer Completely unrelated, but I love a classic British ESB. The microbreweries at attempt them here in the US just suck. I miss a nice Spitfire XPA.