I started a thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41800114 let's see if people pick up on it.
The scale of the outsourcing I am talking about is far greater than whatever you're imagining.
We brought teams of people from India over to the US, housed and fed them, so they could be able to work with their counterparts overseas. On the India side we found their operating infrastructure to be woefully inadequate, so we helped them build entirely new facilities with perimeter fences, proper security, the works.
After all was said and done, the skills of the people we were getting were on par with someone with no programming experience that skimmed a java book in their spare time. The code quality was abysmal at best, and this was in the days before source control was popular.
One of the other huge problems was just the time zone difference. You get into work in the morning to have a meeting with some second-shift team in India, and find out about all of the work that didn't get done because they didn't know what they were doing .. spend the time to correct them, they say they will fix it the next day .. next day comes, same issues, no progress, repeat ad nauseum.
It physically hurt to be a part of all of this.
It does make a kind of sense to me now though - if Ratan Tata's goal was to pull money into India, he was massively successful. How he got there might be a different story. But that's just as true of all previous great capitalists as well.
That’ll conjure different emotions depending on where you sit in the world.
I worked for a division of GE during the Immelt years that outsourced large portions of IT to Tata, and was in charge of the transition.
It was a masterclass in waste and inefficiency.
Definitely one of the larger nails in the coffin of a former Fortune 5 company.