Cue the anti-India bigots, per usual. (I am guessing some of you guys are still sore over your low- and mid-level tech jobs being outsourced to India).
As a developer and manager that's spent nearly two decades working with Indian outsourcing software shops, I'm only sore at the extremely poor quality of code we get back. It was so counter-productive that finally one of my employers, Target Corp, brought the skill back in-house. It took some time, but the higher ups seem to finally be realizing that labor cost isn't everything and the product matters.
Oh the stories I can tell you, my previous company has been outsourcing its IT systems support to India for 15 yrs and the issues we dealt with. I can not tell how many bad decisions we made because the data was bad because the IT teams in India fail to just test their changes. I asked them did they have known good data they run through analysis tools and verified the output against a known set of good outputs. Like put a 1 and get a 1 not a 2 out when it should have been a 1. There was times we would send over spreadsheet with all the equations and raw data and actually outputs we wanted to see and they never bother to check to see if the systems changes they made reproduced the correct results, they ran test and got outputs but could not tell if the outputs were correct. It was not until the company almost lost millions since the systems was providing wrong information they decided to being most of it back in house.
Here is a great article which was written by an India for our India friend who thinks we all bigots. This talk about how the H1B visa and the activities in India destroyed the IT industry in the US. My wife works in the Tech Recruiting industry and has since 1991 and has seen what has happen first hand. She will tell you it is fill with less then qualified Indian IT professionals making a faction of what people use to make just 10 yrs ago. It has gotten so bad that if you want to work for any of the Big companies doing any sort of IT work they do any these in person tests to prove you know what you are talking about. Google does them via video and makes candidate log into Google system and the monitory everything you are doing on your computer to make sure you not searching the web for answers and you not sending text messages to other people, they even try to determine if other people are in the room feeding answers. The companies she works with have to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs.
You pull out a bunch of anecdotes and stories, and that is tantamount to broad evidence on the Indian IT industry that we should accept? I could give you dozens of anecdotes and stories of companies that I am personally familiar with, e.g., Goldman Sachs, GE, Citi, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, where managers have told me time and again that the quality of IT services provided by the leading Indian companies exceeds that which you could find in the US. And for a lower price.
It's your anecdote against mine, and mine's as good as yours. Where does that leave us?
@Strangedays brings up the example of Target, which is only slightly better than Walmart in the price and quality of the products it sells. It's quite possible that, in their typical style of squeezing suppliers to get cheap stuff at the least expensive price, they went with less-than-high quality outsourcing firms in countries like India.
Since you brought it up, let me ask: which company does your wife work for that she has to "...to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs"? My guess is it must be some place that is not willing -- or has clients who are not willing -- to pay for higher-quality services.
You're muddying the waters about Target by suggesting they operate like Walmart, which they don't. Regardless, they weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel and were using big name outsource firms such as Wipro. Capital One did too and we saw the same problems there. In fact Wipro saw their reputation being damaged by this and even started a domestic consultancy brand to try to offer clients a higher quality product based right here at home (I worked with one of these teams recently at Shell).
GE has a tech office in my city and managers there told me they began "in-sourcing" a couple years ago, too.
Target, Capital One, Shell, GE -- pretty good spread of companies finding outsourced labor isn't all it's cracked up to be. That there's value in having a skilled local work force producing quality product inside your own building. It's just common sense really. Treating software development like manufacturing a widget is a mistake -- because while a widget goes into a box and into the consumer's hands as a finished thing, code lives on within your org, for years to come.
@Maestro64 - You are such a troll. US is the 2nd largest polluter in the world, so no, India is not being allowed to pollute while US reduces carbon emissions. The entire world needs to reduce its carbon footprint and with US being the 2nd largest, it also needs to do the same.
Reducing the price of iPhone and selling it in a country where people can't afford to buy them at their current price is smart. It doesn't devalue the brand. You are quite ignorant to say things like "Why doesn't India figure out ways for people can make more money". If India did that, then the goods you buy in US, like clothes that are made in India, will cost higher. Are you willing to pay 2x or 10x the price you pay for your clothes just so someone else in another country can buy their iPhones? I bet most of the Americans would not want that!
China pollutes at twice the amount of the US.
Your point being?
China isn't the one that is backing away from efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, US is. Countries like China and India are actually on track to exceed their goals that were set out in the Paris agreement.
The Paris Agreement was a toothless document. If the US was to seriously commit to such an agreement it would have to originate in Congress. The President doesn't create US laws. The whole thing was a poser-fest.
And so whats the point of backing out of a voluntary ("poser") agreement? - That is something the President did, not Congress.
Right. It was entirely cosmetic. Why enter into such a non-binding, pointless agreement to begin with?
If it's entirely cosmetic, what's the benefit of leaving?
What's the benefit of being in it? Answer: There is no benefit.
Cue the anti-India bigots, per usual. (I am guessing some of you guys are still sore over your low- and mid-level tech jobs being outsourced to India).
As a developer and manager that's spent nearly two decades working with Indian outsourcing software shops, I'm only sore at the extremely poor quality of code we get back. It was so counter-productive that finally one of my employers, Target Corp, brought the skill back in-house. It took some time, but the higher ups seem to finally be realizing that labor cost isn't everything and the product matters.
In an enterprise system, support costs of code typically far exceed its developmental costs. And, if you cut corners on development, those support costs can sky rocket. ... Outsourcing code development to India shows a lack of understanding of sound IT principles.
Wasn't Target one of the ones whose POS devices were hacked -- but continues to refuse to institute ApplePay?
Agree on support costs. I've had to manage apps that were so poorly developed and failing the basics of encapsulation, separation of duties and code reuse that it made maintenance very expensive and just a depressing task.
I agree that outsourcing code development to India isn't a great idea, labor savings be damned. Having dedicated, talented people in-house who know the product and know their trade is worth paying more for. I've seen this in enterprise where I work, and with small companies trying to get apps off the ground.
Yep, Target was hacked and is still dragging its heels on AP, for reasons I'll never know.
@Maestro64 - You are such a troll. US is the 2nd largest polluter in the world, so no, India is not being allowed to pollute while US reduces carbon emissions. The entire world needs to reduce its carbon footprint and with US being the 2nd largest, it also needs to do the same.
Reducing the price of iPhone and selling it in a country where people can't afford to buy them at their current price is smart. It doesn't devalue the brand. You are quite ignorant to say things like "Why doesn't India figure out ways for people can make more money". If India did that, then the goods you buy in US, like clothes that are made in India, will cost higher. Are you willing to pay 2x or 10x the price you pay for your clothes just so someone else in another country can buy their iPhones? I bet most of the Americans would not want that!
China pollutes at twice the amount of the US.
Your point being?
China isn't the one that is backing away from efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, US is. Countries like China and India are actually on track to exceed their goals that were set out in the Paris agreement.
The Paris Agreement was a toothless document. If the US was to seriously commit to such an agreement it would have to originate in Congress. The President doesn't create US laws. The whole thing was a poser-fest.
And so whats the point of backing out of a voluntary ("poser") agreement? - That is something the President did, not Congress.
Right. It was entirely cosmetic. Why enter into such a non-binding, pointless agreement to begin with?
If it's entirely cosmetic, what's the benefit of leaving?
What's the benefit of being in it? Answer: There is no benefit.
Cue the anti-India bigots, per usual. (I am guessing some of you guys are still sore over your low- and mid-level tech jobs being outsourced to India).
As a developer and manager that's spent nearly two decades working with Indian outsourcing software shops, I'm only sore at the extremely poor quality of code we get back. It was so counter-productive that finally one of my employers, Target Corp, brought the skill back in-house. It took some time, but the higher ups seem to finally be realizing that labor cost isn't everything and the product matters.
Oh the stories I can tell you, my previous company has been outsourcing its IT systems support to India for 15 yrs and the issues we dealt with. I can not tell how many bad decisions we made because the data was bad because the IT teams in India fail to just test their changes. I asked them did they have known good data they run through analysis tools and verified the output against a known set of good outputs. Like put a 1 and get a 1 not a 2 out when it should have been a 1. There was times we would send over spreadsheet with all the equations and raw data and actually outputs we wanted to see and they never bother to check to see if the systems changes they made reproduced the correct results, they ran test and got outputs but could not tell if the outputs were correct. It was not until the company almost lost millions since the systems was providing wrong information they decided to being most of it back in house.
Here is a great article which was written by an India for our India friend who thinks we all bigots. This talk about how the H1B visa and the activities in India destroyed the IT industry in the US. My wife works in the Tech Recruiting industry and has since 1991 and has seen what has happen first hand. She will tell you it is fill with less then qualified Indian IT professionals making a faction of what people use to make just 10 yrs ago. It has gotten so bad that if you want to work for any of the Big companies doing any sort of IT work they do any these in person tests to prove you know what you are talking about. Google does them via video and makes candidate log into Google system and the monitory everything you are doing on your computer to make sure you not searching the web for answers and you not sending text messages to other people, they even try to determine if other people are in the room feeding answers. The companies she works with have to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs.
You pull out a bunch of anecdotes and stories, and that is tantamount to broad evidence on the Indian IT industry that we should accept? I could give you dozens of anecdotes and stories of companies that I am personally familiar with, e.g., Goldman Sachs, GE, Citi, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, where managers have told me time and again that the quality of IT services provided by the leading Indian companies exceeds that which you could find in the US. And for a lower price.
It's your anecdote against mine, and mine's as good as yours. Where does that leave us?
@Strangedays brings up the example of Target, which is only slightly better than Walmart in the price and quality of the products it sells. It's quite possible that, in their typical style of squeezing suppliers to get cheap stuff at the least expensive price, they went with less-than-high quality outsourcing firms in countries like India.
Since you brought it up, let me ask: which company does your wife work for that she has to "...to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs"? My guess is it must be some place that is not willing -- or has clients who are not willing -- to pay for higher-quality services.
You're muddying the waters about Target by suggesting they operate like Walmart, which they don't. Regardless, they weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel and were using big name outsource firms such as Wipro. Capital One did too and we saw the same problems there. In fact Wipro saw their reputation being damaged by this and even started a domestic consultancy brand to try to offer clients a higher quality product based right here at home (I worked with one of these teams recently at Shell).
GE has a tech office in my city and managers there told me they began "in-sourcing" a couple years ago, too.
Target, Capital One, Shell, GE -- pretty good spread of companies finding outsourced labor isn't all it's cracked up to be. That there's value in having a skilled local work force producing quality product inside your own building. It's just common sense really. Treating software development like manufacturing a widget is a mistake -- because while a widget goes into a box and into the consumer's hands as a finished thing, code lives on within your org, for years to come.
Like I said, your anecdote over mine.
As an aside, in-shoring has been happening for a lot of reasons, including the fact that many of the leading Indian tech companies have acquired or created large amounts of assets by investing in the US.
@Maestro64 - You are such a troll. US is the 2nd largest polluter in the world, so no, India is not being allowed to pollute while US reduces carbon emissions. The entire world needs to reduce its carbon footprint and with US being the 2nd largest, it also needs to do the same.
Reducing the price of iPhone and selling it in a country where people can't afford to buy them at their current price is smart. It doesn't devalue the brand. You are quite ignorant to say things like "Why doesn't India figure out ways for people can make more money". If India did that, then the goods you buy in US, like clothes that are made in India, will cost higher. Are you willing to pay 2x or 10x the price you pay for your clothes just so someone else in another country can buy their iPhones? I bet most of the Americans would not want that!
China pollutes at twice the amount of the US.
Your point being?
China isn't the one that is backing away from efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, US is. Countries like China and India are actually on track to exceed their goals that were set out in the Paris agreement.
The Paris Agreement was a toothless document. If the US was to seriously commit to such an agreement it would have to originate in Congress. The President doesn't create US laws. The whole thing was a poser-fest.
And so whats the point of backing out of a voluntary ("poser") agreement? - That is something the President did, not Congress.
Right. It was entirely cosmetic. Why enter into such a non-binding, pointless agreement to begin with?
If it's entirely cosmetic, what's the benefit of leaving?
What's the benefit of being in it? Answer: There is no benefit.
We'll find out soon enough.
LOL. I doubt it. They're actually trying to predict global weather patterns 100 years out to support their political machinations, aren't they? That is laughable in the extreme.
Cue the anti-India bigots, per usual. (I am guessing some of you guys are still sore over your low- and mid-level tech jobs being outsourced to India).
As a developer and manager that's spent nearly two decades working with Indian outsourcing software shops, I'm only sore at the extremely poor quality of code we get back. It was so counter-productive that finally one of my employers, Target Corp, brought the skill back in-house. It took some time, but the higher ups seem to finally be realizing that labor cost isn't everything and the product matters.
Oh the stories I can tell you, my previous company has been outsourcing its IT systems support to India for 15 yrs and the issues we dealt with. I can not tell how many bad decisions we made because the data was bad because the IT teams in India fail to just test their changes. I asked them did they have known good data they run through analysis tools and verified the output against a known set of good outputs. Like put a 1 and get a 1 not a 2 out when it should have been a 1. There was times we would send over spreadsheet with all the equations and raw data and actually outputs we wanted to see and they never bother to check to see if the systems changes they made reproduced the correct results, they ran test and got outputs but could not tell if the outputs were correct. It was not until the company almost lost millions since the systems was providing wrong information they decided to being most of it back in house.
Here is a great article which was written by an India for our India friend who thinks we all bigots. This talk about how the H1B visa and the activities in India destroyed the IT industry in the US. My wife works in the Tech Recruiting industry and has since 1991 and has seen what has happen first hand. She will tell you it is fill with less then qualified Indian IT professionals making a faction of what people use to make just 10 yrs ago. It has gotten so bad that if you want to work for any of the Big companies doing any sort of IT work they do any these in person tests to prove you know what you are talking about. Google does them via video and makes candidate log into Google system and the monitory everything you are doing on your computer to make sure you not searching the web for answers and you not sending text messages to other people, they even try to determine if other people are in the room feeding answers. The companies she works with have to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs.
You pull out a bunch of anecdotes and stories, and that is tantamount to broad evidence on the Indian IT industry that we should accept? I could give you dozens of anecdotes and stories of companies that I am personally familiar with, e.g., Goldman Sachs, GE, Citi, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, where managers have told me time and again that the quality of IT services provided by the leading Indian companies exceeds that which you could find in the US. And for a lower price.
It's your anecdote against mine, and mine's as good as yours. Where does that leave us?
@Strangedays brings up the example of Target, which is only slightly better than Walmart in the price and quality of the products it sells. It's quite possible that, in their typical style of squeezing suppliers to get cheap stuff at the least expensive price, they went with less-than-high quality outsourcing firms in countries like India.
Since you brought it up, let me ask: which company does your wife work for that she has to "...to do all kinds of screening to weed out the worse of the worse and those people still find jobs"? My guess is it must be some place that is not willing -- or has clients who are not willing -- to pay for higher-quality services.
You're muddying the waters about Target by suggesting they operate like Walmart, which they don't. Regardless, they weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel and were using big name outsource firms such as Wipro. Capital One did too and we saw the same problems there. In fact Wipro saw their reputation being damaged by this and even started a domestic consultancy brand to try to offer clients a higher quality product based right here at home (I worked with one of these teams recently at Shell).
GE has a tech office in my city and managers there told me they began "in-sourcing" a couple years ago, too.
Target, Capital One, Shell, GE -- pretty good spread of companies finding outsourced labor isn't all it's cracked up to be. That there's value in having a skilled local work force producing quality product inside your own building. It's just common sense really. Treating software development like manufacturing a widget is a mistake -- because while a widget goes into a box and into the consumer's hands as a finished thing, code lives on within your org, for years to come.
"Treating software development like manufacturing a widget is a mistake"
Y E S ! ! ! ! ! ... That is the fatal flaw in the logic of outsourcing software development -- or even its support (which can trash up even well developed code.)
Quality code not only does what it was designed to do but is maintainable over a lifetime of the system. Creating and maintaining that maintainability requires a long term view with a solid core of discipline that must permeate the development or support house. That isn't going to happen with a cost driven outsourcer.
Comments
GE has a tech office in my city and managers there told me they began "in-sourcing" a couple years ago, too.
Target, Capital One, Shell, GE -- pretty good spread of companies finding outsourced labor isn't all it's cracked up to be. That there's value in having a skilled local work force producing quality product inside your own building. It's just common sense really. Treating software development like manufacturing a widget is a mistake -- because while a widget goes into a box and into the consumer's hands as a finished thing, code lives on within your org, for years to come.
Agree on support costs. I've had to manage apps that were so poorly developed and failing the basics of encapsulation, separation of duties and code reuse that it made maintenance very expensive and just a depressing task.
I agree that outsourcing code development to India isn't a great idea, labor savings be damned. Having dedicated, talented people in-house who know the product and know their trade is worth paying more for. I've seen this in enterprise where I work, and with small companies trying to get apps off the ground.
Yep, Target was hacked and is still dragging its heels on AP, for reasons I'll never know.
Like I said, your anecdote over mine.
As an aside, in-shoring has been happening for a lot of reasons, including the fact that many of the leading Indian tech companies have acquired or created large amounts of assets by investing in the US.
Y E S ! ! ! ! !
... That is the fatal flaw in the logic of outsourcing software development -- or even its support (which can trash up even well developed code.)
Quality code not only does what it was designed to do but is maintainable over a lifetime of the system. Creating and maintaining that maintainability requires a long term view with a solid core of discipline that must permeate the development or support house. That isn't going to happen with a cost driven outsourcer.