One of the things they do is man the call centers in which the call agents are only allowed to: a) open tickets b) follow a script intended for people who didn't do basic troubleshooting before calling tech support c) be very sorry that your business is losing money due to the service interruption d) give you vague non-answers as to when the team with the authority to actually fix things but which is not allowed to interact directly with customers will actually get around to working on your issue, and e) ask you to kindly rate them highly on the customer satisfaction survey that you will be automatically connected to after this call.

Another thing they do is supply you with an endless cascade of developers who rotate in and out of your dev team on a 3-month basis. In those three months they will a) tell your IT team that they need a newer laptop because their current one gets slow when trying to run 3 instances of Visual Studio concurrently b) wonder why hard drive failures are correlated with rough handling of the laptop c) ask IT to troubleshoot their compilation errors d) only save their code locally instead of to a shared repo e) get upset when 3 months of said locally saved code, which IT was never told about, gets lost when the laptop, previously issued to the dev they replaced, is re-imaged before redeployment as per company policy/standard-procedure f) thereafter dodge turning in laptops to IT after their rotation ends, instead giving it directly to their replacement, causing IT's stores of deployable laptops to get depleted, and thus causing IT to come hunting after the never-turned-in laptops, because the next wave of 3-month devs is coming and hardware to issue them is needed, and finally g) treat company-issued laptops so roughly that when IT eventually does them back, what was brand shiny and new 3 months prior is now chipped, cracked, scratched and covered in grease and crumbs, and has a full kitten's worth of fluff accumulation in the cooling fan.

Okay, that last one was a bit hyperbolic, but every single point there did happen, and more than once.

Yes, I have been embittered by contractors from these large Indian IT firms, both as an end user 'supported' by them and as a co-worker supporting them. My experience with them has not been a positive one.

password resets? The one time I had to work with goverment IT they had a call center. They were trying to introduce a VPN product that required a super old version of IE / Java to connect (we literally had to run Windows XP with IE to get this thing to work). This was the "new" software that was like 10 years old when purchased.

I'll skip all the drama - but one thing you could do is call the help desk to get your password reset because of one clusterf after another. It actually worked great. Hi, my username is JoeBob. Ok JoeBob, your new password is XXXX.

That was it. This is a system with super long passwords that had to be changed ridiculously often, and an account lock feature after a few messed up entries which required a password reset and lots of temp staff who came and went among other issues (there were two layers of passwords and people constantly got them confused).

So they had a metric TON of password calls. Despite all the drama with passwords, you could get your password reset just by knowing your username and the number to call for resets. It was brilliant and did save a TON of time, but I had to laugh at the security of the system given your username was derived directly from your name and was widely available in reports etc.

I never mentioned anything though because the thought of a more complicated procedure to deal with for all the staff would have been a nightmare.

That's terrifying. What agency was this?

A major one.

That c) particularly hit home. I had a contractor insist a T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is usually caused by a RAM fault and sent people to replace hardware.

...did google not work on their machine? I can't remember what that is, but I remember googling it ages ago and finding out.

It's the parser token for the scope operator (::) in PHP.

Geez. That employee sounds almost as awful as the place you work.

employees, and worked. The individual items were distributed across the various individual contractors cycling in and out; no one was guilty of all of those points, but most were guilty of some. If it was one mostly-static set of contractors who could've been grown into actually productive devs who cared about their craft, that would have been one thing, and I'd have felt proud to have contributed to said growth. But an endless parade of people with whom communication is difficult will eventually have a corrosive effect upon the soul.

I haven't worked there for years. When I was laid off during the acquisition, I didn't protest, because I was about to look for a new job anyway. My only regret was not being allowed to finish building the new image deployment system so the persons to take up my duties wouldn't have to deal with yet-another-half-finished-system-built-by-people-no-longer-working-here.

The area I see these firms get a ton of work is in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) work. TONS of companies run their HR / Finance / Sales / etc departments on things like Salesforce and Oracle and whatever, and there are huge numbers of consultants whose jobs are to build custom installations over and over. I've never worked in the field, but my wife did. It's definitely reaaaally different from the way that the rest of the software industry works.

Its also a hugely lucrative ones for people who like working in Software as a job as opposed to Software Developers who like programming, enjoy the craft etc. Not to say that such people aren't good at their craft; just that they're more vocational: they understand certain technologies and know many different ways to configure them which is what businesses need and pay them good money for.

It can also be a stressful one if the tech you're familiar with goes out of style. Lots of re-training involved, years of experience is basically worthless, etc.

Yeah, when I first encountered the field I was quite confused. I’d interview developers who had worked for years, but only knew about really weirdly narrow areas of SAP or whatever and definitely couldn’t display the kinds of skills that we usually evaluate for. It’s so different as to feel like a completely different field; we just happen to share titles.

A company I worked at bought Firewire driver code from them (this was 15-20 years ago). The code was really, really terrible and we eventually had to replace it with our own code (which was 20x shorter, faster, and more spec compliant).

In retrospect, and as much as we in engineering hated their code, it was probably worth what they paid for it just because it got us 75% there and took pressure off the team while we created the replacement code.

A few years back I met with a few engineers working for Wipro. They were designing the dashboard electronics behind the new BMW 5 or 7 series. I was shocked to find that out at the time. Found some news about it here in case someone is curious on more info: https://www.wipro.com/newsroom/press-releases/archives/wipro...

Wipro has over 1200 clients worldwide.

From their Q4 FY18 presentation: https://www.wipro.com/content/dam/nexus/en/investor/quarterl...

Supposedly they are used by 150 of the Fortune 500.

I hope that this will start reducing over time. They clearly lied and dissembled in that conference call.

I wonder if it's because it's multiple layers down the "company stack." Company A hires company B hires company C and C uses Wipro.

It's a fun sight when all of the subcontractor of subcontractor of subcontractor recursion chains form a beanstalk into the heavens /peanutgallery

non-"tech" companies use Wipro etc for their websites and internal IT tools. All the stuff that's too boring or custom for Microsoft and Google etc.

A lot of places also contract out their server administration or firewall administration to places like Wipro. A fraction of a shared resource is a lot cheaper than several full time employees.

I've never seen anyone happy with the arrangement, management is merely satisfied by the cost savings. Quality is far (far) lower, but price is far lower as well.

People who do RFPs for projects.