The end of Indian IT staffing

[Hum]

BANGALORE/MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's IT outsourcers are promoting "mini CEOs" capable of running businesses on their own, while trimming down on the hordes of entry-level computer coders they normally hire as they try to squeeze more profits out of their staff.

The shift by Infosys Ltd (INFY.NS) and others is symptomatic of a maturing industry that wants more revenue from its own intellectual property instead of providing only labour-intensive, lower-margin information technology and back-office services.

For young graduates who see the $108 billion IT industry as a sure pathway to modern India's growing middle class, the transformation is unsettling.

Dozens of industry aspirants who were recruited on campus by No. 4 player HCL Technologies (HCLT.NS) recently protested outside its offices in several cities. They were offered jobs in 2011 before graduating last year but have not yet been given joining dates - or paychecks.

source

[neufuse Veteran]

This isn't representative of all coders in India, but the low level "cheap" code I've seen come from these coding shops in India has been HORRIBLE!

[Tom]

AFAIK when you onto freelance sites there's a lot of people from places such as India. I've been told from people that have accepted those jobs that the majority of the time they will just take pre-written code and hack it together. "Awful" was the word used on several occasions.

[Teebor]

I'm sure there was an article about 2-3 years ago about how India would start to become too expensive to outsource too, could this be that start?

I can't remember where there was talk of outsourcing it too though, Some other poor developing country which can be manipulated and exploited no doubt

I wonder if someone has a long term plan to do this Africa what with all the low cost cheap computing equipment that keeps getting given away over there, I get that its good and charity blah blah but I do sometimes tin foil hat about something like this

[Hum]

I was hoping this was the end of incomprehensible tech support operators in India ... :s

[FloatingFatMan]

AFAIK when you onto freelance sites there's a lot of people from places such as India. I've been told from people that have accepted those jobs that the majority of the time they will just take pre-written code and hack it together. "Awful" was the word used on several occasions.

The company I work for has operations in India. Without exception, code from that quarter generally works BUT, they NEVER EVER think outside the box. They never show even the slightest initiative when given specs; they just do precisely what it says without questioning it or suggesting better options (our specs are generally broad customer requirements, with implementation left to the developer in question), which most of the time means what we get back is just garbage. As for the code itself... It's usually a complete horror to work with and full of utter garbage that's clearly been culled from the internet.

We almost always have to rewrite their crap from scratch, so that the customer doesn't have kittens when they see what they almost got; but we're forced to use these "developers" as they're "cheaper" than local staff. What a load of cobblers THAT is...

[Tom]

The company I work for has operations in India. Without exception, code from that quarter generally works BUT, they NEVER EVER think outside the box. They never show even the slightest initiative when given specs; they just do precisely what it says without questioning it or suggesting better options (our specs are generally broad customer requirements, with implementation left to the developer in question), which most of the time means what we get back is just garbage. As for the code itself... It's usually a complete horror to work with and full of utter garbage that's clearly been culled from the internet.

We almost always have to rewrite their crap from scratch, so that the customer doesn't have kittens when they see what they almost got; but we're forced to use these "developers" as they're "cheaper" than local staff. What a load of cobblers THAT is...

Surely the cost of what the extra would be to someone who can write better code would be cheaper than the extra that would be added from the result of having to rewrite the code?

[FloatingFatMan]

Surely the cost of what the extra would be to someone who can write better code would be cheaper than the extra that would be added from the result of having to rewrite the code?

Yep! But quota's are quota's, and they state 40% of our local work has to be outsourced to the Indian office. God help anyone that try to tell the far more intelligent management staff how to do their jobs right, Oooooh no. :p

[Growled Member]

I was hoping this was the end of incomprehensible tech support operators in India ... :s

Me too. It gets embarrassing after having to ask them to repeat themselves the third time.

[Raa]

Those call centers have to go!

Local jobs FTW (Y)

[neufuse Veteran]

Me too. It gets embarrassing after having to ask them to repeat themselves the third time.

three times? I've been as much as 10 times!

my favorite thing is they are not allowed to veer of script.... one time I had a systems PSU die.... they would not replace it until I reinstalled windows to verity it isn't windows... had to actually lie and go "ok reinstalled windows, still wont turn on"....

[Teebor]

The company I work for has operations in India. Without exception, code from that quarter generally works BUT, they NEVER EVER think outside the box. They never show even the slightest initiative when given specs; they just do precisely what it says without questioning it or suggesting better options (our specs are generally broad customer requirements, with implementation left to the developer in question), which most of the time means what we get back is just garbage. As for the code itself... It's usually a complete horror to work with and full of utter garbage that's clearly been culled from the internet.

We almost always have to rewrite their crap from scratch, so that the customer doesn't have kittens when they see what they almost got; but we're forced to use these "developers" as they're "cheaper" than local staff. What a load of cobblers THAT is...

My girlfriends company does this now (only just recently started) and she keeps coming home saying the same thing as you. The amount of extra work she now has to do correcting mistakes is crazy

[Kami-]

Ive seen some atrocious code come back not only from India but other cheap labour markets too.

One in particular had no concept of OOP and everything was just a HUGE list of variables in one huge void... my eyes bled purple for weeks...

[Tigurinn]

Wait .... so no more of this?

[Coagulated]

Avoid outsourcing to anywhere like India / Philippines. If the work is important, it isn't worth the hassle of dealing with their screw-ups.

I work in IT Recruitment (Marketing though, not Sales) and you would not believe the amount of projects we've staffed that began life as a screw up because they outsourced to a cheap company.

Hell, even some of our stuff was originally outsourced to Russians / Indians (before the Marketing team was created) and the code was, and in some cases still is atrocious. At least once a month I'll see my Developers with their jaws dropped as they find some of that code.

One example I can think of was one of our web sites had a section to upload your CV, but when applying for any job it also attached your CV - which is great in basic principle. However, at one point there was 500gb of CVs being stored on our server! Because if you uploaded your CV and applied for 20 jobs, we'd have 21 copies of your CV!