I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the same thing. And the managers overseas want to charge me expert rates while I have to train up their staff on the basics of how to do their job. And I mean the ABSOLUTE basics.
I really don't see how it's not fraud.
Even tech cos. like Amazon are hiring their next wave of knowledge workers offshore.
It's not like the offshore heads can force anyone to do so, or the Indian government is providing huge incentives (like for manufacturing in china). It's because the decision makers believe doing so is the right thing. If it's anyones fault, it's the heads of these organisations that are to blame, for prioritising perceived cost savings over what their own workforce thinks or does.
Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud. It's something that companies trying to bite more than they can chew often result in.
Also, I agree that having to teach your offshore counterpart how to do their job is absolutely ridiculous. It makes me wonder, how selfish can these corporates be, that they prioritise their profit or share price or bonus, over their own workforce.
When you do it over and over and over again it sure starts to quack like the fraud duck.
Currently working for an American software dev company.
What I mean to say is, the issue you mentioned is not limited to these 5-6 companies, but for the whole IT industry.
Having no experience on any cloud platform and being sold as an expert however is a different story.
I think the real problem is that many of these corporates haven't realised how important IT is to their business. The idea that a bank should outsource development is ridiculous, most of their interaction with customers is going to be through these systems. If they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors then they need strong IT.
I agree with this too. However, this arises 2 doubts in my head:
1. Is Apple outsourcing manufacturing to Foxconn any different from banks outsourcing their IT?[1]
2. Is hiring offshore talent the same as outsourcing? Can the talent still not be in-house and the company be a multinational?
[1] Yes, it is because a lot of times firms outsource their entire IT/System design to these outsourcing firms too. And this is because of lack of knowledge from the manager's part, laziness or just greed. But it is still comparable because they both have certain shared downsides in the long run.
On the other hand, everything I've seen so far outsourced in IT in a standard way could come back in any condition. Worst case, it's unusable, but contractors get paid anyway and move to the next client.
One of my classmates joined infy out of college. His job for the first one year was - email the list of files changed in the day to the client. This friend was called newton in the college, one of the smartest person around. And he was doing one of the most boring job. Client was paying more than 3000 USD per month for this. Of course he automated the work on second day, used time to study for CAT and left to enroll in IIMA.
Not implying that there isnt anything good with these big companies, but there are lot of such stories. This particular one sounds more like defrauding the client more than anything else to be honest.
For those of you who don't know about CAT: think GMAT but with 200000 people appearing for it at the same time-frame (maybe a 15 day window)
IIMA - Harvard equivalent in India. Only about 400 people out of 200000 make it to IIMA.
TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
That project is a disaster of overblown budgets and under delivery. Like everything these companies touch. But the imaginary savings earned a few Western managers big bonuses before they quickly moved on before the chickens came home to roost.
Every penny of revenue earned by those companies is by fraud.
There simply has to be some major skullduggery afoot.
The internal GDS seem to be bucking the trend, delivering good services and contributing to OSS. Surely this demonstrates that an internal team is a better way? Even if they don't deliver entire projects themselvea, they could lead them from a requirements, architect and tech perspective, and have sway over which firm gets the outsourced part.
Cough, pharmaceutical cos, doctors, social media & search giants, car manufacturing giants. Any of these ring a bell?
[1]As in, the above (your) definition of fraud i.e. misleading customers, by deliberately under delivering and over promising. With this definition, many businesses and accepted practices are fraud.
IMO, true fraud is what VW with their cheating device. Facebook did with integrating WhatsApp profiles. Theranos did with fake IP. Opioid manufacturers do by indirectly incentivising doctors. Don't you think so too?
Yes, I agree that Tata and similar companies are on the level of Theranos.
> I feel sorry for you.
That's very disingenuous and insulting. You're implying you have no bias which anyone reading your comments on this thread would find really hard to believe.
Your whole reasoning relies on accusing everyone else of bias and claiming that other companies also have these shady practices. That's not a defense.
You have at least a dozen comments on this thread defending these practices and pointing fingers at the likes of Theranos as if that's a good justification. If someone needs Theranos to look good they must be pretty shady. Your line of argumentation sounds very biased.
All of it is fraud. Regardless. Promising results with the intention of not sticking to it is fraud.
Comments talking about Infosys/TCS, not being a brand: programmers are not Infosys' customers, in fact it's quite the opposite of that. Infosys' services replace programmers for their customers, who are non-technical managers who want to abstract the IT part of their projects and not be taken for a ride by technical people (not saying that all of them do, but a lot of times engineering department heads demand HUGE budgets to just become more important) and managers feel that a dependency like that makes it necessary for them to be obedient.
Just because they have downsides, does not mean that they are not brands. Infosys has innovation labs in universities all around the world. They award the Infosys prize to the tune of $6.5M to scientists for research. TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
I actually view Indian outsourcing firms to be firms that trade human hours, which turns out, are a lot cheaper in India. Maybe POTUS should actually impose duties on importing software too.
Update:
I also agree with fellow developers on the fact that these outsourcing cos. produce bad code and documentation and usually result in a net loss for organisations where technology is in inherent competitive advantage.
However, these downsides are not because of the lack of skill. It's because of the nature of project based model that outsourcing firms follow. If anyone is to blame, it's the myopic or misconstrued managers who employ them for projects where outsourcing is not the solution.
However, there are many applications where outsourcing firms do just fine. And hiring a separate engineering department could be a risky alternative.