Why India outsourcing is Doomed

IndiaIndian IT outsourcing has become a commodity business with no innovation and nothing to offer other than questionable rate savings.

This not an attempt to write a scientific paper or predict future. This simply an opinion I have formed based on 15+ years of working with various providers in India and all over the world. This is not an attempt to stereotype every employee in a 1.2 billion people country. Over the years I have worked with brilliant Indian engineers and managers both in India and in US. This write-up is an attempt to describe an outsourcing industry in India and problems we face as customers, not people working there.

My conclusions and assumptions are also based on the fact  that many companies are moving towards a more agile development where decision-making and ability to adjust is a key.

Resource Availability 

Access to resources is increasingly complex. Finding talent in Hi Tech centers like Bangalore is almost as hard as finding qualified people in Silicon Valley. There are simply more jobs than there are good people. Even if you find someone you’d like to bring into your project from outside it will take you 2-3 months. In India an employee is usually obligated to give two to three months notice or he will have to buy himself out of a contract.

Most people and their employers overestimate their seniority level. Most of the resumes I see are at least two steps above of where I’d put them based on US standards. Employees have an unrealistic (by US standards) expectation of speed of their promotions and type of work that’s expected from them.

Resource Quality

Agra_020Do you remember how in late ’90s anyone with a pulse was becoming a programmer or a QA engineer? Remember all those schools that promised to turn anyone with or without brain to be a QA engineer in 3 month? Well India is there now. In fact it’s been going through the same high-tech boom for the last 15 years or so. With billions of dollars sent to India by US and European companies it created a Tech Bubble. People with no technical background or any interest in the field are becoming software engineers because that’s where the money is. You project will be a training ground for all this new engineers. Training you’ll be paying for. Training you will offer only so your provider can move this person after 6-12 month to a different project where they will be billed at a Sr rate and help provide the same training to others.

Employee turnover

Ask your potential provider what is their current employee turnover rate. You will likely hear a number somewhere in the 8-10% range, which they will pronounce proudly. Now ask them what is their turnover rate on projects, which would include people moving from project to project within the same company. Watch them cringe and dance around, but never answer that questions. It’s not uncommon to see turnover rates on a given project exceeding 50%. See ‘Resource Quality’ section above to know why.

Communications

The time difference between India and United states is the worst possible. With about 12 hours difference with Pacific Time there is simply no reasonable time for you to talk to your team in India. When they are finishing their work day you are not even ready to start, and when you are ready to leave office they are not anywhere to be found. This forces you to communicate through email or through a dedicated person whose job is to be a conduit and live in two time zones at the same time. With faster delivery times and more agile development cycles communication is the key to success. Your team can’t succeed if it takes over 24 hours to receive an answer to any question, which usually only generates more questions.

Mindset and work ethics

Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate. You’ll notice that weeks and months go by with very little progress being made. Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little. Many developers seem content with what would be considered stagnant projects. This may be due to the fact that they don’t have enough life experience and are unable to see the big picture of what’s happening. (See above in Resource Quality to know why) They don’t have a clue about the big goal. It’s hard to be motivated when you don’t understand why you are doing something.

I recently had a Indian contractor whose task was to perform a certain test several times a day. The test consisted of the following steps: buy an item, post it for sale, buy it again, and post it again. She was performing this task for about two weeks and sent ‘test passed’ notifications. This is when we noticed that we had a bug that you were unable to post a purchased item. But her recent test said that it worked. The problem? She was posting items purchased previously and available for posting. She knew that there was a problem with posting recent purchases, but didn’t understand that the goal of this test was to verify that the full a cycle works.

Indian people will not question their boss. As a customer you are their boss. They will not say “no”. However ‘Yes’, doesn’t mean what we are used to. – “We need this project to be done by the end of the week” -“Yes”. This ‘yes’ doesn’t mean that it will be done. it simply means an acknowledgement that you need it by that time.

Making excuses seems to be an art that many Indian outsourcing companies have excelled at. They are so good at it that at times you begin to question yourself.

Cost

Outsourcing companies rely heavily on giving you the ‘right’ mix of experience. They simply can not sustain low rates by providing senior staff. The biggest smoke screen you’ll get is a concept called ‘blended rate’. The sales pitch goes something like this: “We’ll have a team that consists of different level of people. The blended rate is only $$. Yes this is the price you’ll be paying for your senior developers” Too good to be true? This how your team’s composition will look like: Super junior people who can barely work – 50%, junior people that are just a notch better than the first group – 25%, mid level people that were juniors yesterday – 25%. You’ll also have one senior person who will frequently act as project manager as well.

There is no secret that salaries in India today are skyrocketing, especially for experienced people. To keep their costs down companies are forced to constantly bring in fresh blood and train them. This is the only way to survive. Unfortunately it leaves you with low quality workforce that are you are training only to lose once they begin to be productive.

When you add productivity loss and overhead costs of running offshore in India you may actually be spending more than you were before.

329 Responses to “Why India outsourcing is Doomed”

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  1. Michael Young says:

    Zhenya up front you have made it clear that what you have written is an “opinion” which is a good thing as it does not resemble at all my own experience of both working in India and also utilising best in class Indian IT companies. As a classic callout when you state “Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate” you should have said “I found employees in India etc etc” as my own experience was quite the opposite. By investing quality time in understanding how to get the best result out of a collective of Indian nationals and Australians the motivation becomes clear. As an organisation we had no trouble keeping our colleagues motivated and high performance and then retaining them. A lot of what you have written is what I would call a fairly typical result for companies that do not truly understand how to construct the right agreements, operations, governance, involvement and human investment to get the desired outcome. When bringing together very different cultures then common ground is critical as is ensuring what is acceptable and what is not. An example that you raise in stating that Indian employees will not question their boss – this is an ingrained respect and in knowing this upfront you then ensure that everyone in the company working with you (the outsource provider and your own employees) understands that respectful challenge when you disagree is encouraged regardless of position. This can be reinforced by rewarding that behaviour in appropriate ways (project leadership, promotion etc) and suddenly you have a cultural norm that overcomes the natural behaviour of the country. It is a shame that you have not had the wonderful experience that I and many others have had and are still having and far from the outsourcing to India being doomed I believe it will continue to evolve and grow as more and more companies learn how to extract maximum benefits form the relationship.

    • ayuill says:

      I agree with Zhenya. I recently worked for a big and very well known company that has huge division in Chennai. How the company “found a way” to motivate its Indian employee? Easy. In US we have career ladder, say 24, 25, 26 etc. In India they created 24, 24.1, 24.2, 24.3…, 25, 25.1 etc. These fractional ladder steps don’t give an employee any salary differences, but instead give him/her “proud” to be promoted. Motivation of Indian co-workers ends at 6 PM their time and never exceeds past that unless they are being promised to get an additional promotion. The final target for the in most cases is to pack their luggage and get into the USA on H1B visa.
      Below, I saw many comments from people who is making their living by outsourcing to India. Of course, they blame Zhenya o being biased against Indian “brilliant” employees. Sorry folks, but your “brilliant” ones are in the USA already. In India are mostly trainee that wait for their chance to get to the USA.
      I the company I was working at the dirtiest code an the overwhelming number of bugs are flowing from India. The company often has to roll back the pushed to the production new code as it practically breaks old functionality or does not conform to the requirements.

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        I think a criticism is important, however it has to be based on merit. India is facing competition and there are several posts that discuss or bring to center stage the critics who are mainly from other competing destination.

        India is a leading outsourcing destination. More importantly companies who went for Offshoring without outsourcing to a third party provider have climbed up the value chain.

        Most arguments here are centered around coding or outsourcing at $10-15 kind of rates.

        Let us accept that in all fairness there will be criticism, there will be people who have had bad experiences in every country. An offshore outsourcing decision has to be taken based on various factors and, i would openly say, if such factors make a case on merit to outsource to Russia or Romania the decision should be taken on merit.

        India as such offers lot of advantages and clearly with a lead over others. Most certainly there are failures. But most failures are based on inexperienced offshoring management.

        If you are a small or medium business, it is better to seek this support from an external consulting resources. For example we provide a service where we mitigate risks in offshoring, we will take responsibility of recruiting a quality resource or replacing. Or things like we carry a due diligence on local provider and provide a level of comfort in managing project offshore. There are several things we do like that. We provide a Managed Offshoring service where Offshoring Management is the core competency with a measurable value. Having said this, it is also important that the sourcing company or organization understands value game. It can not be just man hour rate in $. that is one important factor but there are many others.

        So, if you are not intending to just hire a freelancer, what is important is the Management layer over and above offshore outsourcing or pure offshoring.

        If your requirements are 5+ people any thing 5, 10, 20 up to 50, it makes sense to use a service like ours where we provide the management bandwidth on all aspects HR, Finance, Admin, legal, People motivation, etc… If you are in need of more than 50 people, just go for a fully owned center with your own management.

        It is the strength and leadership position of India that large players are reaping the advantage to their fullest. If we start counting problems there are plenty in that space too.

        The final game is successful outsourcing or offshoring or a mixture, where ever you outsource. When we advice people on offshoring, we would go on merit on our advice, after building a full case.

        I feel for those involved in offshore outsourcing the challenge it to provide better service, higher value and increase the size of the entire pie of Offshoring. If the logic that every thing best resides only in US or heads for US will be accepted, the entire world out of US will be a dustbin. So, statements should be made with responsibility.

        Cheers !
        Sudhir

        • Victor Tan says:

          Hi Sudhir,

          Which company do you work for?

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            Hi Victor, I run a small consulting company where one of our main focus area is Offshore Advisory. I am an offshoring and outsourcing subject matter expert. We started in 2003 as Excelict consulting and lately we have been carving Offshoring practice as a separate unit by Name of Induri Software Services. You can find my profile on linkedin.

          • Paul says:

            I’ve spent the last year fixing various outsourced projects. In all cases there was no OOP, no architecture, inconsistency, spaghetti everywhere. While every individual is different it seems very clear to me there is a major problem in outsourcing. I’ve seen these failed projects shut companies down. When all along they thought they were saving money. Personally I blame the people hiring the outsourcing and not overseeing the project properly. Even then the quality of the work leaves a lot to be desired even for a junior developer.

        • Shaleen Mathur says:

          I believe the fault lies in the Indian management especially those belonging to older generation as they have a “Please the westerner” attitude. When they ask for work they pretend to be superman who can do all the work for negligible manhours, while expecting their Indian juniors to work till midnight at zero overtime payment. As a result except for trainees the senior/experienced staff unable to find work-life balance start looking for change within 3-6 months of employment. This problem they will recognise in lessons learnt sessions but never report to their western bosses. I ask is work-life balance exclusively reserved for westerners??? I suggest US companies should have representatives posted permanently in Indian offices to monitor work-quality & work-life balance issues.

  2. Jayant Ochani says:

    Zhenya, I found your opinion to be highly biased. While many points you raise are valid, there are many more that are simply untrue. It’s unfortunate you have had some negative experiences with Indian outsourcing companies, but by and large, they are high quality organizations who provide high quality talent. It seems you intended to paint a negative picture when you posted a picture of an automobile overcrowded with passengers, and worse – a picture of a snake charmer, something that has nothing to do with the points you are trying to make. That is akin to showing a sausage when talking about Poles, or a bottle of vodka when talking about Russians.

    • Jayant, thank you for your comments? Which points do you find to be untrue? I’d be happy to research them and correct.

      • Ann Brown says:

        Zhenya,

        Most of what you said, if not all, is absolutely true, I have over 10 years of experience working with Indian offshore companies, as well as my friends, colleagues, and even my own son, and we all had and have nothing but suffering at our day-to-day work trying to pull anything valuable out of their offshore teams. Our only hope is that many big companies are indeed moving towards Agile, and all Agile experts tell the same over and over again, that it won’t work with any offshoring/outsourcing.

    • Rob says:

      Like just about anything controversial, there is some truth to what Zhenya says. The custom software company I run (http://www.myprogrammer.com) hires both onshore (USA) and offshore (Indian) people. Initially we partnered with a few Indian firms, but quickly realized that the people on our projects were inexperienced (called “freshers”). Maybe they had 2 to 3 years experience, but they were dangerous to have on the sort of projects we take on. Of course we were given assurances that the people would be senior, but this was a company specific problem, and not a country-wide problem in India. We were paying around $13 per hour for people who were paid maybe $6 to $7, if not a bit less. Even in India, you aren’t going to find skilled developers for that rate.

      I don’t want to generalize about India. In our case, we partnered with companies that had low-cost pricing models, and that just wasn’t a good fit for us. I am sure for some projects it would work fine. But there are many companies in India on the higher end, but we just weren’t partnering with them. I consider that our fault, and not a negative on the country of India as a whole.

      Today. we avoid Indian outsourcing companies, as we feel doing so does not provide the visibility nor oversight we needed to manage our projects successfully. We also didn’t have any luck engaging the major software companies from India, such as Infosys, Tata Consulting, Wipro, etc. As a custom software company, we do not fit their target market (which is General Electric, Wal-Mart, etc.). The cost to engage them is also prohibitive, especially considering that we are the lower cost alternative to them in the market place.

      Like everything else in business, you need to come up with a creative solution, and we did just that.

      Our solution to this problem was to hire senior developers directly. We have very specific criteria for each new hire. All of our team members must have 7+ years experience, speak excellent English, and be available for meetings with our team 3 to 4 hours per day, during our time zone. This is the minimum. These are the key ingredients to a successful new hire for us.

      We cherry pick the best developers from India, and pay them more than other companies like Infosys can. And since they get to work from home, they feel it is a great deal. All of our regular developers were team leads in previous jobs, and many have been to the USA.

      Almost all of our new hires start part-time for 1 to 2 months, and we only put them on existing projects, where they can be closely supervised. We do this so we can more accurately evaluate their skills under low risk circumstances. Once they pass the test (maybe 50% do), then we bring them on full-time. We pay at or near the top of the pay scale, which is more than we paid our previous Indian partner. Our developers are happy, and we have a company full of senior developers at a reasonable rate.

      There are no shortcuts when hiring developers from any country, whether it be the USA, India, Russia or China. Our approach works great for us, but it may not work well for everyone.

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        Hi Rob,

        Firs of all I really liked the idea you are pursuing.

        AI also agree – Dealing with small companies one may always face hidden issues.

        I run a small consulting outfit on offshoring and we have continuously focused on importance of global human resources in the game. We have been able to offer innovative solutions to our clients and partners in offshoring.

        We had played a crucial role in offshoring adoptions by some medium scale companies. So even for small medium scale we could help them create their own offshore centers in India.

        There is another model that we are ready to offer now is Managed Offshore Centers. You can choose the team the way you want. We provide the offshoring management layer, a ready to move in facility in city of your choice, an interrupted facility where whole team can work at one place, hold meetings if required, VC rooms, cafeteria.

        You can send expatriates to work in our facility from any part of world and your managers to come and work say 3-6 months in a n year. You can actually use a mixed-shore approach.

        In sum we provide you full control of the center without any upfront investments and we taking care of most offshoring risks. You need to just focus on people and work that you need. There is a good balance of control and flexibility as you can scale up and scale down. We help you source manpower through a stringent process, place them for a trail period if wanted (on contract) and use them for longer periods.

        You can stat with even 1 or 2 person.However for better economies of scale it is good to have 5 people as starting point.

        This may take away many risks that may be there working with individual programmers on cultural, legal and commitment front as we are a legal entity in India and we can offer you dealing with us as a legal entity in US as well. Once the programmers are hired you can choose a methodology to work through a Project manager deputed by us or directly one to one with the programmers. I am sure they will be more happy to work when they have right environment, setting and infrastructure to support them.

        On rates you are right you may have paid $13 per hour where the programmer was paid $6. However, if we look at a thumb rule, the total cost of an operations is a sum of Direct and Indirect costs. The direct cost being all people cost the operations cost in India is approximately 40-45%. I am sure in US also it may be same or around 35%. Another thumb rule is the cost of a programmer is related to number of years.

        Many things in India are changing in past few years e.g. earlier young programmers wanted to have fancy designations and wanted to rise in hierarchy like a 3 year would look towards wanting to become team lead and a 5+ would start looking at project manager, the change coming in is many programmers wanting to be specialists in an technology group or a domain.

        Thankfully many things in Indian IT Industry were adopted from US and there is a growing change in similar direction.

        I feel if some one wants to work with a team approach and want to gain from economies of scale and scope, our Managed Offshoring model is worth looking at. We just work as a facilitator for you in offshore geography.

        This is not the end. We are ready to look at more innovation in the game to make it suitable for global IT Industry with providing quality global technical manpower and our role in managing and making outsourcing a valuable experience in offshoring, mixed-shoring and may be near-shoring too. So we are not limiting to India as a game. I feel it is finally a global pool of resources and technology + management knowledge can be used to add value.

        Any one can get in touch with me at sudhir.singh@induri.com. I am ready to help and be part of community working in this direction for any one.

        Regards

        Sudhir

        • John says:

          Sudhir, two or three comments are OK, but not dozens. Are you trying to annoy the readers?
          Your comments are mostly hidden ads for your business and that is disgusting.

          • Subin says:

            Well said, John. People like Sudhir Singh is one of the reason why customers shying away from India. That being said, I myself an Indian, working from India for a large Japanese consulting firm.

        • Martin Vahi says:

          As a freelance software developer from Estonia I have difficulties imagining highly experienced and smart software developers, who agree to sign a contract before knowing exactly, WHAT THE JOB IS. Development methodology is certainly a very important part of the job, which, according to the comment of the sudhir.singh@induri.com his or her (sorry, I’m not able to derive a gender from Indian names) promoted company determines AFTER hiring the developers.

          My opinion is that smart people do not let themselves to be pushed around like cattle, even in India, and from that You can conclude, what types of people Mr/Mrs Sudhir Singh actually hires. I believe that it can be plausible that Mr/Mrs Sudhir Singh had good intentions and is plausibly not aware of the situation in his/her company, because the only way to know the specifics of some occupation is to actively work as a specialist there oneself, working exactly on the same types of projects oneself. For example, robotics software has its problem domain, information systems have their particularities, etc.

          Indeed, I am VERY EMOTIONAL about the treatment of people, specially, if the people are software developers and Yes, I am totally biased, because I ended up reading this blog post as part of my attempt to get to know about competition on global market place. I wanted to find out, what type of software has been broadly covered by the Indian software development industry. If the Americans think that they can get by cheaply by buying services from India, regardless of the quality of work that the Indian outsourcing companies offer, then that determines the global price level for the given type of software. That means that I should avoid working on those types of projects that the Indian outsourcing companies are widely known for. I know that my current comment also is a de facto hidden commercial, but let’s face it: I’m not able to offer my services for 15$/hour. I live in Northern Europe and need more to barely get by. Hence it is important for me to choose targets wisely.

    • Hardrk says:

      They are not at all quality organisations. Sadly but true. First hand experience

  3. Steve Marshall says:

    I have found the same. I know many Indian engineers that are positively brilliant – but my experience with outsourcing outfits is exactly as described above – even when there have been some real stars on the teams. Maybe it has something to do with the price paid… you get what you pay for, even outside the USA. Imagine that!

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      I feel the write up is biased and intently placed here.

      1. I am a outsourcing or off-shoring facilitator to India and from my experience I have found Onshore managers and senior developers to be biased for their Qualaity for no reason and rhyme. We have proven them wrong by getting on to test pilot projects, time and again.

      2. Quality of Resource: It depends all on you how you recruit. If some one follow a proper process, you get very good quality. So, even fresh passouts are excellent in many cases because India has what is called finishing schools in many cities. There is no shortage of good quality talent.

      3. You never make a team out of all grey haired developers. Technology change almost every half year now. So, you need a mix. There as to be a good ration depending upon you task of Senior and Junior and off course some freshers. Mind you the young, intelligent, fresh graduates with a finishing training are excellent because they are passionate to learn and perform. So depending upon project’s technology need , you should have people of all experienced level. We used both kinds, very high quality, medium and what one would say low quality (less trained, from third or second grade institutes etc.) Let me tell you there are very good experiences from what HR would rate as low quality and vice-versa from high quality. So there is no fixed rule.

      4. When you have a team – motivation is very important for young people. So, if you do not have a good manager the show may end up in a disaster. A technical team lead is not always a good Manager or motivator. So, most people who stumble in India are those who do not give any importance to Offshoring/outsourcing management aspect. Management bandwidth and investment in it is equally important weather you do work onshore, offshore, in-house or outsource.

      5. Employee Turnover is a bigger issue in high-end Metros -like Bangalore or Mumbai, Chennai etc. This is very less in 2 tire or 3 tire cities. And over and above this there goes in a lot of science of HR to manage the employee turn over. Again, if you are not spending enough on managing offshoring you will be in problem. So, look for companies who have done good on keeping employee turn over. Lastly, it is a known fact that companies do need some minimum level of employee turnover, it can not be zero, it should not be more than average of Industry. This parameter has to be measured not less than on annual basis. You need to keep a long term approach.

      6. Communication and work Ethics are Softskill matters. Most 3+ year developers will be tuned to working in an Offshore-Onsite model. However good companies however small they will be spend good amount of time on Softskill training. We have not found this as a problem as front ending is always done by senior and experienced people. It is no ones worry what lower staff does as long desired out put is achieved.

      7. Coming to cost – yes the Cost in India has been rising, but also remember Quality has also been rising. Yet I have scenarios going on in my own sight and companies in UK can save more than 60%, companies in US are saving about 50% when we take in to account the day rate basis of comparison (all direct and indirect cost included). Please not that when cost is rising Quality is also going up. Industry in India is Matured now and you get not only good technical manpower but also excellent management resources.

      8. What is important is how you manage your outsourcing to India. We provide management services for outsourcing and off-shoring and we know the final game is not a good coder but an over all success objectives of offshoring. All the points mentioned in write up need management attention. Every scale of service is available in India – the freelancers, street player type companies, small smart and effective companies, established companies of all size small, medium and large.

      9. If you want to know weather India can be bypassed or not can be proven by Mircosoft, IBM, Accentuer and 1000 more companies operating in India. They are now doing high end job also India.

      10. One of the good way to outsource to India is form your Dedicated team. Don’t outsource under a good management professional who is learned enough about offshore-onsite operational needs.

      Sudhir Singh

  4. QA Professional says:

    Zhenya,

    I cannot believe how exactly your opinions and experiences mirror mine. I have worked with some top talent in the India outsourcing game and they are usually the person who is tabbed as the lead and do a lot of travel and/or live here in the US. They are the sort of talent that you’d like to steal. The rest are usually orders of magnitude lower.

    I’ve experienced the run around bit when you try to get a clear answer on delivery dates, rates, team composition, etc. At least a third of the time, one of the best talents on the outsourcing team gets reallocated to another project during the time of my engagement with the team. At least 75% of the time, I’ve had to ask them to fire one or more of the engineers from our engagement because they were totally unproductive and what they produced was not usable. It’s tough to get a good engagement out of India outsourcing.

    My take is that most of the really talented engineers are working for big firms. Microsoft, Google, IBM, Yahoo, et al. all have a big presence in India and they are snapping up the top talent (not to mention the talent here Stateside).

    Now I have actually run into horrible experience with a US based outsourcing firm with US employees. A horrible experience, nothing worse than being lied to and seeing obviously sub-par work being generated with no illusions of things being lost in translation or because of time gaps. That was just a bad firm with no ethics nor decent talent.

    I think that India Outsourcing is experiencing an ever increasing talent drain, while trying to still maintain increasing rates for their service. That lack of value alone will be enough to kill off the industry. Just like the old, expensive “Pay us to help you find a job” staffing agency.

    Good read!

    • Michael Young says:

      QA the learning for you in this is primarily in the contract and the governance and your own companies ability to negotiate the right outcome. In any outsourcing or off-shoring agreement I have managed we have always named both critical staff and critical positions in the contract and under no circumstances can the service provider change either the individual or the role without our agreement. I can tell you that this has worked for us in every instance. In regard to the “invisible” talent, again we have always ensured that we know where the work is being done offshore, we have always visited the facility and then we have ensured that dates, team composition etc is included in the contract. Post that regular governance meetings involving the right local staff and the offshore Executives has ensured the right result. What you raise is less about India and more about the correct practice to deliver a major project with resources that are not inhouse.

      • QA Professional says:

        I would agree with most of what you say. The problem is that too many companies expect or behave like there is less work involved in setting up a relationship with an outsourcing firm (onshore or offshore). It takes a high degree of scrutiny, maintenance and communication; more so for an offshore outsourcing firm. I feel the fact that it takes such a large amount of management is another reason why it might be doomed. Also, many people think that one size fits all for outsourcing…not every outsourcing firm has adequate experience for all types of tech work, it would seem. But US corporations still hire without performing adequate due-diligence. Same sort of thing occurs when hiring a staffing agency, often times, it’s more work to specifically tailor a good job req and vet the candidates that are being sent from the agency. But a big portion of that is the client’s fault for not putting in the effort of understanding their own requirements and what they want from a staffing agency (besides “hire the perfect person”) before entering into an agreement.

        Sorry for rambling. Your points are well-taken. I do feel that this experience (India outsourcing) often causes more work than it’s worth in order to get the desired results. Just from my experience at more than 5 different companies.

        • Michael Young says:

          QA your point on organisations thinking there is “less work” involved is spot on, the same for companies that outsource a problem and just expect it to magically be fixed. It does take a different approach and attitude and any organisation looking at using outsourcers needs to be crystal clear on why they are so that they can engage the right provider for them as your point on not every outsourcing firm having adequate experience for all types of work is also correct.

        • Martin Vahi says:

          Oh boy. Here’s my blog post with a title The Basics of the Recruitment of Software Developers, Episode 0.

          The topic, “How to hire Software Developers”, is like weather for casual chat or sex for music industry, but, that’s my 1 cent to the line of though that is presented by the commentator “QA Professional”.

      • Anil Kumar says:

        Well said. The customer needs to define/verify requirements and back end processes. With companies like GE, Oracle and IBM constantly growing, the negative side of outsourcing needs to be managed through process definitions and controls.

  5. Aleksey says:

    A lot of what Zhenya said in this blog post recalls my experience of working with outsourced teams in India. Undoubtedly, cultural fit is as important as technical skill level for any outsourced partner. My advise to software development companies in India is to find ways to earn respect from their US customers to be treated as a trusted partner and not a risky but cheap vendor.

  6. Dmitry says:

    Waiting for comparison between India and East Europe!

  7. Sean says:

    India is an outsourcing centre, no doubt. It has a vast pool of talent but talent spotting should be based on requirements. One of them obviously is low-cost. If this requirement takes precedence over others, then you might as well shut shop because what this means is that you hire the cheapest talent and then expect the world of them.

    Most outsourcing companies will showcase their talent like a restaurant menu card- i.e. skills and price. It is for the business to test this talent before putting it to use. Most companies miss this vital step. Then, of course like all other global companies, outsourcing companies in India too display their best resources to secure business and then move them over to another project. This is something IBM, Microsoft or Oracle also do, albeit their bargaining power would later sweep it under the carpet or suddenly a certain term or clause pops out of their thousand line fine print of terms & conditions and then it all quiet all right.

    While companies accept cheap rates very easily, they do not accept the fact that not everybody in a outsourcing company is a rare pool of talent waiting to happen.There is bound to be a mix of resources that are highly skilled and others likely to be less skilled. This should be spotted by the outsourcing company and not the provider. There are metrics that experienced businesses have brought out in the past suggesting what percentage of skilled labour can be expected in a team.

    In my experience where outsourcing companies have done their due diligence and worked out the market rates for a pool of talent, they have not been disappointed. Please note, they have paid market rates for outsourced services and not real market rates. Market rates for outsourced services are relatively lower to the real market rates thus reflecting the benefits of outsourcing. But if clients are going for the lowest cost, then they are invariably lured in to the lowest skilled services.

    While doing research on market rates for outsourcing services, companies should ensure they have an experienced outsourcing facilitator who can advise them on the cost / benefit trade-off. This is not every company manager’s cup of tea. It requires in-depth and updated knowledge of resourcing and costs in countries like India.

    While motivation of resources in India and employee/project turnover rate is mentioned, little thought has gone in to thinking about inflation levels and the cost of living in India. While silicon valley staff drive in to work in the comfort of a car, the cost of living in India forces people to travel on 2 -wheelers and crowded buses and live in expensive and cramped shared accommodation. Not to mention the odd working hours. This wide disparity is not noticed by the employer nor by the client. Motivating resources also means taking economic problems off their mind so they can focus on developing their skills. So while client are itching to fire people out of projects each day, they might as well give a thought to the living conditions and how exactly are resources to be motivated while living in these conditions. It is then natural that employees want to move out of jobs and require promotions in order to earn a decent living. This can be perceived as greed by some but is reality for some others.

    Strangely, a friend posted quoted this on facebook this morning

    ‘You gotta stick to your imagination – that’s the way out of this swamp.’

    This is true for resources in some of India’s outsourcing centres.

    Below is the link to my earlier blog on outsourcing.

    http://orbitguardian.co.uk/wp/outsourcing-finance-accounting/

  8. Vednidhi Bharadwaj says:

    Hi Zhenya,

    No pun intended , but before writing such an article, you should think thrice.
    I would like to give you a few research point. What was the amount of money you were spending on getting your projects done? . Of course what you pay, is what you get. If you want to spend only 10$ an hour in US / India , no matter where you get your projects done , you will of course get same quality.

    India is a world leader in IT , having MNCs like Wipro, Infosys, TCS . I myself was associated with Wipro , and I know how much effort we were putting to give the delivery in time and with quality.
    We were working for biggest U.S. pharma company, cant name it due to NDA. Today more than 48 % of technical innovations and solutions are being provided by India in one way or other. So before writing a article on such a popular place, where many people will read your opinion, You should research well and write about all the pros and cons of a thing , rather than being biased.

    I recently came back to India from Hongkong , after a year long assignment, And met a lot of people there from U.S. , U.K, China and Japan, in our project with Alkatel – Lucent. And our Indian onsite team was praised a lot for making the project even possible , We have made a breakthrough in Vo-LTE implementation, very soon you may get to know its details in Alkatel-Lucent paper.

    Hope you are intellectual enough , to understand my view point. You should strictly refrain from writing a catchy article and gaining comments for your blog. In my view , rather than giving some benefit to your website/blog , It will do more harm.

    • Vednidhi, I thank you for your comment. While you clearly pointed out what I should and shouldn’t do you didn’t object to any of the statements I made. This leads me to believe that even you agree with my points.

      • Sean says:

        Hi Zhenya

        Let’s face it, without understanding the dynamics of outsourcing (economics & social) in India, you just joined the gang in beating Indian outsourcing companies down. It takes a lot to grow. It would have been better if you chose to portray ground realities rather than joining the frustrated bandwagon of customers who have assumed India to be the residence of global servants.

        Kind Regards

        • Sunny says:

          Wow!!! well said.

        • Blogger says:

          Zhenya’s, What does a snake charmer’s picture or a overcrowded jeep’s picture got to do with India Outsourcing anyway.? So should this be enough for me to judge your intellect? No right?
          Similarly , just because you had a bad experience with outsourcing in India which I presume and that can happen to any given business anywhere in the world, doesn’t give you the authority to generalize negatively about a nation which has been outsourcing IT successfully for 25 yrs now. And do you mean to say big giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon,IBM who have set up their Offices in various cities in India are doing social service ? Of Course not ! they are getting more than what they paying for and so they continue to run their businesses successfully here in India. By the way, just to add few points to your in-dept research.about how Indians miss the big picture!..The New Microsoft CEO is also an Indian, guess Bill Gates didn’t find a suitable American like you for the post, 35% of NASA scientist are Indians are just few examples about how Indians are!

          • Alex says:

            Hey Blogger ,

            Thats the main point, and you are simply proving it 🙂

            Intelligent indians are not living nor staying in India anymore .. almost (if not all) of them are in UK, USA, Canada, and some other parts of Europe living and working there, or running their own business, recruiting local European and/or American staff (again not Indians, guess why?) 🙂

            Remains for India nothing ..!

            In conclusion, if you are seeking for a “cheap” just cheap, crappy nulled applications that you can find yourself in google for free, then .. delays.. delays.. and .. delays, no matter what quality, or illegal cheap types of work.. some times you will be paying EU and/or American prices living charges ;P India is your way!

            Be aware, that lately (in the last 10 years), you will discover some websites pretending to be a USA, or UK companies, when in real are based in India, this do this to increase fees as European and American standards.. the most funny part, they choose European and American nick names for themselves, when they write english they write in a wrong way .. lol .:D

            I believe people in India are “very lazy” population, I could imagine how lazy they are .. same about thinking, and working too .. sorry no offense.. discussing facts too.

            If you are seeking for a serious good-high quality works, stay away from India! They will f**k you everything.

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            Why is then IBM, Mircosoft, HP, Google, Amazon, GE and many many more having large teams some of them crossing more than 100 K in India and that to not just doing coding but much high value chain work? Beyond these large names there are more than 100 mid size companies and many with expertise in one or other niche.

            The lazy remark speaks all about your bias. If you fail in outsourcing to India, the responsibility lies on person managing outsourcing. It means you ended up hiring a low cost, and low quality team with not checks and balances.

            It will be better to base the arguments on outsourcing as subject rather than on culture etc. to be of use to those interested in outsourcing.

            Sudhir

          • Paul says:

            A couple of points:

            1- I have always struggled with the argument that IBM is recruiting 100,000 developers in India. The reason I struggle is that 100,000 can build a blinking lot of software. I mean, MS-DOS was written by 6 programmers and it was quite comprehensive (for it’s day). jQuery was written by one guy. Bootstrap a couple of guys. Facebook by one guy (initially). So what could 100,000 do! I have this feeling (and have seen it) that it takes 4+ developers in India for 1 in USA/UK. True there are a small percentage of great developers in India and some awful developers in USA/UK, but on average that statement holds true from my experience.

            2- I have started working with a local company here in UK and I overheard developers talking about Offshore to India and they were saying, “people don’t really outsource to India these days much do they”. Now I know the stats are there that people do, but I think there is a perception from all the developers I talk over here that offshore in India was very last decade and all the decent ones have left India or taken on by big corporates (IBM, Oracle etc) who mask the true picture by fronting with suits.

            Summary – I totally agree with Zheyna that India is doomed, but for another reason. It lacks the ability to truly innovate to the extent of USA/UK and relies on churning out terrible code that is being unmasked daily.

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            Ok, so the whole world just needs about 300 programmers. And the developers are needed just to write new products. That is the conclusion.

            I helped some UK companies offshore to India and they are solidly stuck up here for reasons of value they enjoyed and whenever needs to extend team, they do it in India. IT is not more than 5 months now we got a fresh product team assembled.

            Any statistics can tell you that India still leads in offshoring, yes there is competition, but India has matured in IT Industry. The problems people mentioning here are all of Micro-outsourcing experiences or from mismanagement of outsourcing. It has nothing to do with how Indian people walk. Outsourcing does fail in Indian as much as it does in any other country.

            We can manage offshoring for any one small or large organization and convert real value with high quality.

            Sudhir

          • Rohit says:

            @Alex – You say that “Intelligent Indians are not living nor staying in India anymore…..”

            So what’s preventing “highly-intelligent” Russians from world-domination ?

            http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/11/powerful-indians-silicon-valley

      • Daniel Sharp says:

        India’s good if you’re looking for cheap development of small-mid size applications where you are backed by an in-house hindi speaking Project Manager and an in-house QA team that’s constantly spoon feeding, harassing and testing the produce throughout the development process.

        Start discussing your project with them and all they’re interested in is talking you into sourcing more business for them.

        Delays and communication blackouts are always backed by excuses like :

        Mai grundmather died
        O Mai Gaad Tee flud washed awey the entire country yaaaaarrr (yaar I figured out is a convenient equivalent of buddy)

        Floods, family demises, power outages, marriage, strikes and constant official holidays are a common excuse.

        The application is supposed to be “Good Far Deeeploimant” even though it’s full of bugs which “supposedly” are issues that can be resolved with “AYE MEENUT”.

        So we decided to actually go on-site and I became the scape goat ending up in Bangalore.

        Figured out:

        1. 99.9% of the developers and project managers DO NOT even read the project brief before they start work.
        2. Zero quality standards
        3. Everything is copy pasted, constantly googled and copied.
        4. Developers have ZERO skills and once they’re stuck it’s all down to trial and error. The first thing that they look for is similar open source application from where they can copy, paste and edit the code.
        5. Requirement analysis and requirement’s engineering is NON-EXISTENT.
        6. 98% of the companies don’t even have a QA department.
        7. 100% of the companies are using pirated software and hence have no access to support and updates.
        8. Zero professionalism and absolutely no consideration to personal hygiene.

        Verdict: Nightmare.

        Eventually took a huge loss and moved to Pakistan & Russia, which are comparatively expensive options however worth it.

        • Charles says:

          “India’s good if you’re looking for cheap development of small-mid size applications where you are backed by an in-house hindi speaking Project Manager and an in-house QA team that’s constantly spoon feeding, harassing and testing the produce throughout the development process.”

          I can second this, every smaller company I’ve worked with outsourced the bulk of the application work to India….then had a team or 4-5 people onsite test and debug it for 3-4 months……Basic applications at that

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            Most comments here seems to be emanating from petty outsourcing where freelancers or small unknown companies are hired or if all that was taken care there was no on to manage outsourcing. If you just want a bunch of coders, what do you expect the result would be. The fact that there is a distaste shown for QA teams proves this point. Indian IT industry is matured now and even smaller players want to follow some Quality standards. And there so many who would follow agile methodology.

            If you want every thing bundled in one go, all skill sets, proven quality and excellent communication skills etc. one should hire an experiences mid size company (even some small may be good), keep cost a secondary factor. Over and above this there has to be a due diligence framework.

            The good results can be obtained when you take a long term approach.

            I have not seen innumerable successful outsourcing experience, very creative and passionate teams. All this worked wonders because we add a layer of leadership. So applies to testing.

            There are smaller companies who will have a complete factory approach to production of software including testing and there are others who just code. You have to account for what you want when outsourcing. However, a bias that any thing coming out of developing world programmers will need to be tested has no other solution then having just coding done offshore and testing kept as onshore work. Yet, experience may differ. These things are never universal.

        • Reginald Winthorp says:

          @Daniel

          I have had the same experience with nearly everything you mention. I agree whole heartedly.

          The main reason that our company originally began and now continues to outsource, is up front, it makes the executives appear as they are saving the company money, and they are, on paper at that moment.

          The reality is that we have taken on higher turnover, lower quality developers that have increased our technical debt, increased our bug count, and devalued and declined our business.

          Right on with #1 through #5.

          I actually sat in a demo recently with a dev that was given the task of writing an application that shared files on the native windows system, and the file that he shared in this demo was

          “MS_C#_coding_examples.pdf”

          Not a single thought of developing an application based on the standards represented to him. And that is the case with 99% of the people that we have outsourced to. No thought for existing architecture. No thought for innovation. The only thought is they want to have “manager” in their title within one to two years, and if not, they move on, making an opening for one of the many people who have just graduated from one of the many (self described) “finest technical schools”, for an entry level wage, and no real world experience.

          I wish that supposed brilliant managers could recognize the true expense of outsourcing and getting stuck in this cycle. Because it is not the up front cheap salary that saves them anything. The reality is having code written and repaired a dozen times or more, at the cost of customers, and higher waged experienced developers. That drives profits down, and makes these managers think that more outsourcing will solve it.

          We’re starting to move some of our failed development from India, to China and Prague, to much talent and success. I doubt we will be able to make up quick enough for years of sub par work.

        • venu varma says:

          i accept your arguments about quality.Most of the Indian companies are not ready to accept the fact that they are providing low quality services.

          • Martin Vahi says:

            Can You blaim any company, including North-European ones, for offering, what the market demands? The market demands crap even in Europe.

            Supposedly Japanese executives have a saying that the reason, why the Japanese companies are so good at offering high quality products is that the companies have _high quality clients_.

        • Chester says:

          The Indians under discussion here are obviously the people you hire through online freelancing sites for 5-10$ per hour. Even from that the actual person gets paid 2 or 3$ per hour, rest goes to company’s coffers. Please note – “Good software-engineers in good-companies in India don’t work for that kind of salary in India”. I’ve been there for 2 years and Prove me wrong, the “minimum” annual salary package a good software engineer in a good company (or even a good software-tester) takes home is “minimum” 10-12 Lacs per annum (1800-2000$ per month on an average). I am talking about just the minimum package, better ones get 15-20 lacs or more per annum. So, next time you hire someone for 5-10$ and start complaining, just hire someone for that kind of wage here your next-door and start complaining. You get what you pay for, isn’t that obvious. And where the heck you get “cheap” and “highly-qualified” Pakistan/Russian Engineers – please share with us, as a huge number of people would be interested in hiring them. possibly, all of them will end-up being hired in a matter of minutes.

          • LewisA says:

            For all, non Indians… FYI, take the case of any Indian, they can speak/Read/Write min four languages, In India there are 822 languages… mind you they are not dialects as you see in Europe or elsewhere, Regarding outsourcing Industry… you will get what you paid for that is true all over seven continents, Culture plays a major role.. People respect elders and their advice while taking decesions escalation matrix is followed even in case of siblings and “No” is hard to come by

        • BrownIndian says:

          @Daniel

          You are a joke. You highlight you immaturity by
          i) throwing in numbers like 98%, 99.9% and 100%. 🙂 I am glad you spend the several hundred man years needed to do that kind of exhaustive research.
          ii) making fun of people’s accents in a derogatory manner. Perhaps you are a redneck racist ?

          Some of the points you make do have merit in the context that they are true anywhere in the world if you choose to engage with low-quality partners.

          But your blanket negativity is surprising and irrational. If you go to NY, take a look at a few homeless people and call NY a city of the shitty homeless, then, the problem obviously lies with you.

    • Alex says:

      “If you want to spend only 10$ an hour in US / India” – if you’re willing to spend the same money outsourcing, hen what is the point of doing that?
      Everybody of us knows that outsourcing is to spend less money.

      • Michael Young says:

        Alex you are wrong. I don’t doubt that there are many companies that use outsourcing to reduce cost. However there are just as many that use outsourcing to access skills they otherwise would not have available, that use it to gain a flexible workforce, that use it to increase the ability to respond to the marketplace quickly. What I know from my own experience is that we invested more money willingly so that we could provide an even better service to our customers than we could have with a restricted internal workforce.

        • QA Professional says:

          Michael,

          The fact that you’re experience is in orgs which were not looking at outsourcing as, primarily, a way to get more bodies for less money is probably why you’ve had more success than some of us.

          Normally, I’ve seen folks use it as a cheap way to get more people quickly. Put all of your worries on woes on the shoulder of the outsourcing firm’s project manager and on the other side of the project all will be just as you wished. Of course, these unicorn wishes normally end up delivering skunks.

          • Michael Young says:

            QA I totally agree with you and whenever I can I advise companies against it when the major reason put forward is to either reduce cost or remove a problem area – you are just asking for trouble when that is the case.

        • Alex says:

          You may think that I might be wrong, but I’ve been on both sides many times, and know what I am talking about. It is always all about saving money.
          If you think that there are not enough talents in, say, USA, then look on how the recruiting is going on these days. Recruiters filter people by set of keywords, push candidates to add specific skills into their resumes, etc. This way, they miss the right candidates, because those candidates do not have enough buzz words in their resumes. Then, recruiters send guys with buzz-wordy resumes to their clients for interviews. The clients either hire those candidates because they did not do the interviews properly, or do refuse those candidates.
          Then, the consulting companies stack up on top of each other to bite off their profits off a single candidate the way the consultant either gets very low pay, or the client’s bill rate skyrocketing.
          All these makes the industry think that there is not enough local talents for an affordable price. So, they either apply for H1Bs for more cheap people from overseas, or hire an off-shore company.

          This is purely my own and my friends’ observations.

          P.S. Just to support the author’s viewpoint: the team, that I was hired to manage remotely, is divided into two “casts”, where the top one writes the code, and the lower one writes so-called “unit” tests. The “code writers” produce untestable code, and the “test writers”, being unable to make the code testable, working hard “to please the code” with their tests. There are many other things I already know about that team, and many more to learn about them.

          • Michael Young says:

            Again when you state “It is always all about saving money” you are wrong – it is not always the case. It may be in the companies you have worked for and thats a shame as it is not reflective of the total industry. As I have said here in previous posts in any outsourcing or offshoring I have been engaged in our criteria have been many and because of this our outcomes have been successful on many levels. And the quality of the delivery that we have experienced has exceeded anything we had seen previously from the traditional onshore vendors or internally.

          • QA Professional says:

            I have actually seen this in action, Alex…multiple times. You’re not alone in that experience. I wish the companies I’ve worked with had the more noble goal of actually filling a skills gap with outsourcing. However, it was to try to get a project done quicker, for cheaper with numbers. In fact some of these companies would also attempt to bring in contractors late in a project to get things wrapped up with numbers; both of which failed to achieve the desired result.

        • Charles says:

          “However there are just as many that use outsourcing to access skills they otherwise would not have available”

          That is a direct result of outsourcing to reduce cost.

    • Chitral Cheetah says:

      Vednidhi,

      The moment I see Alkatel instead of Alcatel, not once but twice I find it a bit hard to believe some of your anecdotal claims. Zhenya, you are right on the money.

  9. Alex says:

    Michael, could you please share the name of the company that uses overseas employees for their talent and pays them the same money as it would in the US? I have no doubt that you can do that without causing any harm to the company, as these going to be good news.

    • Michael Young says:

      Alex, I’m not sure what you are referring to. Firstly you clearly have a US perspective which is fine, however you’ve assumed a number of us are from the US which we are not, mine for example is a global perspective with employees in a number of countries. You also refer to salary comparisons which is never the sole comparison when looking at offshore or outsource costs, it is only one aspect of any budget. Salary costs are always driven by the market rate in any country and our approach in any offshoring or outsourcing agreement is ensure that rather than lagging the market we are at the top end positioned just behind the market leader. To give you a classic comparison a resource in an Australian capital city is more expensive than a resource in an American city which is more expensive in Indian capital city – none of this actually relates to skills … simply because it costs more to hire an Australian employee does not mean that the Australian employee is better skilled than the American , it just means the market conditions are different. And again if any company approaches outsourcing purely to save money then they are shortsighted and at huge risk of failure – I’ve already stated how this should be approached to ensure success.

      • Alex says:

        Mike, my experience is not purely American. I am myself from Russia, worked for IBS/Luxoft (client DELL EMEA), zTrace (off-shore development), Deutsche Bank (off-shore development center), GEMPLUS (off-shore R&D). Dell had its development center in India and moved to Russia to have less time difference for almost the same low price. Fired a bunch of local guys in the UK because of that. ZTrace was a startup that could not afford having people in the US. Deutsche Bank fired nearly 50% of their developers in London to outsource their work to Russia. I’ve spent almost 3 months there receiving the project and seeing people leaving the company every day. My team initially consisted of 10 devs local to the UK, and then the project moved to Russia to employ 4 guys – us Russians. GEMPLUS went through the re-org to outsource a bunch of projects to Russia and Singapore.
        Here in the US I’ve observed the same things, just from the other side of the situation.

        Yes, the costs depend on many factors, including but not limited to a geographical location, country, size of the city. Correct me if I am wrong, but I’ve never heard that about any of Indian, Chinese, Russian, Pakistani company to outsource a project to the UK, France, or US.
        Did you?
        Once again, this is all about money.

  10. I agree with the author for most part, and I do not really understand the comments like “..this is not true because…. India is the World leader in IT…”. This leadership, or perceived leadership, in a way is one of the roots of the problem and the analogy with the Silicon Valley boom years is right on the spot.

    You are going to India, fishing for a talent precisely because of its leadership status, but it is foolish to ignore the risk factor. There is just too many companies, too many possibilities, too many uncertainties, and not enough control that you can effectively exercise, and this makes your chances to stumble upon a decent and reliable development partner smaller than in other countries.

    At the same time, no argument against the investment that has to be made into any relationship, including outsourcing. You do not do that and you are gambling – pure and simple. But your gambling odds in the House of India are diminishing every year for exactly the reasons listed in this article.

    In http://www.sweetrush.com we often argue about the pros and cons of using Indian outsourcing, so this set of con arguments is coming at the right time for us to enter into the outsourcing consideration.

    Kudos to the author.

  11. Paul Halstead says:

    I agree with the observations. I have outsourced in India, China and Eastern Europe. I have found the prices in India to be almost equal to what you have to pay in the US. Cheaper prices are available in China and Eastern Europe but the China deals come with a cultural price (language being #1). I have had better results from firms in Eastern Europe.

    To the guy who says it is about finding resources that are not available in the US, you need to look at your HR screening process. We are too small to have a formal HR function and have more good candidates responding to us than we can employ. My personal experience has been that in HRs eyes, people over a certain age need not apply and the software screening tools drop many well qualified applicants.

    For most firms it is about cost

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Do not outsource to a third party. Even for third parties lot of non-quality small players will give vanilla experience only. This in stark negation of the fact that Indian Industry is matured more than any other in world.

      If you want to really have a look at value proposition, use our Offshore Advisory. We can offer you managed Offshore centers. We go beyond coding. We dig in to customer satisfaction, real measurable value.

      Sudhir

  12. Paul says:

    One point that Zhenya missed is the problems with untruths. I know in business sometime people may dress things up a bit, but in India they just plainly lie about a lot of stuff. Whether it is who is working on a project (junior prof efforts in the name of a senior), what effort has been put in (falsified time sheets) or what on earth is really going on. From my experience they seem to make more effort actually trying to fool the customer rather than just doing the work!

  13. Anurag says:

    When it comes to offshoring, customers have ‘throw over the wall mentality’ and expectation that the offshore workers will deliver by some auto magic. As an outsourcer to India, you only have one metric in mind and that is cost. Your cost have to be low and lower every year. Offshore players are more arm twisted in reducing the price and become a single point of blame when something goes wrong. Do we know of any failed offshore project where the onsite customer messed up?

    Despite of unhealthy attitude of IT customers, Indian offshore IT industry is doing a pretty decent job. You get what you pay for. Google and Amazon also run large delivery centres in India and they are pretty happy.

    The problem with usual offshoring is that the IT managers at onsite locations made their IT super expensive by hiring expensive consultants, expensive products and loads of legacy systems which could never be modernized due to price card involved.

    With rising IT costs and business pressure, these managers were about to become a saga of epic failure and were on verge of getting kicked out by their board and C level executives. They then discovered offshoring as a way to their career redemption by promising great value for money but greediness and incompetence took over here as well. They want to lower costs because they promised a world to their management but since they were incompetent managing large parties onsite and same holds good for managing parties offshore. So now they suffer and to justify their fat salaries and existence they found a convenient scapegoat i.e. Indian IT industry.

    I think the author of this blog has written a biased article in a bad professional spirit.

    • Alex says:

      Anurag,
      This is simply brilliant, you’ve just said the same thing as it it was said by the blog author: “You get what you pay for”.
      The truth is that the results do not worth the price and efforts, period. If the company needs ridiculously bad quality product to be built for the low price and/or wants serious headaches with the offshore team, then – yes, go for it! I believe, everybody understands that you are hopelessly trying to protect your off-shore business or your job. Well, I give you credit for that. But, anyway, this does not make the things any better.

  14. Genaro says:

    I agree with all your comment Zhenya

    • Alex says:

      One more thing: never put an Indian guy to manage the communications with the Indian offshore.
      Never! This is going to be more damage than ever.

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        This is a very targeted blog on India. Rather than positively comparing locations, some one just chose to do a negative publicity.

  15. vasem says:

    I dont find it true , perhaps the author is a Russian National trying to defame the Outsourcing Hub and Gain popularity for Russian IT Outsourcing (Kazak)

    • Paul says:

      I doubt it very much. According to LinkedIn Zhenya is from LA. In fact, you’re perhaps in the Indian Outsourcer business trying to protect your interests.

      Anyways, what Zhenya says is very true and recognised by many. If you have ever tried outsourcing to India yourself you would recognise the issues he has mentioned and see why all who have done so end up bald 🙂

  16. Tabish Naeem says:

    This is primarily because after PHP was introduced every college drop or guys trying to fund their households while studying learned copy/paste PHP. Most of them have no core programming concepts. How they program is download and edit cracked scripts/code, google/stackoverflow for an issue, copy/paste different versions…. eventually its all trial and error.

    This is also the reason why most complex projects being outsourced to India fail due to poor quality and delays.

  17. Paul says:

    A client of mine (from USA) tried outsourcing to India and complained over their “Nickel and Dime” mentality. In the end they gave up and chose Argentina. I know from evidence that this is working out really well. Also I know that in USA they want work done quickly, good quality and less hassle. These three factors seem mutually exclusive for India.

  18. Alex says:

    Hey ..

    I believe this is not just an opinion, Russians are much better than Indians in the factor of IT, and much more stronger than Indians .. No doubt on this!

    Let not take own opinions, let see what others are saying, as example, Former President of Intel, Steve Chase :

    “Inside Intel we have an expression: If you have something tough, give it to the Americans. If you have something difficult, give it to the Indians. If you have something impossible, give it to the Russians.” ..

    Now is very clear 🙂

    Cheerz!

    • Tabish Naeem says:

      I would definitely agree with Alex.

      We have used developers from Kazakhstan TWICE for two complex projects (GIS platform and an Augmented Reality Solutions) as we couldn’t find enough developers in Pakistan who had experience with development on these avenues. We only managed to hire 15 developers experienced with developing GIS and Augmented Reality solutions in Pakistan.

      The Project Manager, an American, pushed the CEO to start recruiting in Russia which we did eventually.

      I have 20 years of development experience. I have never seen projects this complex getting developed so smoothly. The Kazakhs were beasts with literally elite coding skills. There was communication issues as the developers had a hard time communicating in English which was resolved by hiring a Russian Project Co-ordinator.

      The project was a success and really added value to our local teams.

      To this day we work in close collaboration with developers from Kazakhstan/Russia.

      Moral of the story: Ruskie Developers = Highly Recommended.

    • Rohit says:

      Intel well Intel… do you actually know who designed your INTEL PENTIUM PROCESSOR ?

      It was invented by VINOD DHAM, an Indian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Dham

      USB Port was invented by Ajay Bhatt, an Indian

      CEO of Microsoft ? SATYA NADELLA, an Indian

      Do you know who virtually run Google, Android and all Google products now ? SUNDAR PICHAI, an Indian.
      http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7067115/google-ceo-larry-page-promotes-sundar-pichai-to-lead-products

      CEO of ADOBE SYSTEMS, SHANTANU NARAYAN, an Indian.

      Along with James Gosling, who created SUN MICROSYSTEMS AND JAVA ?
      VINOD KHOSLA, an Indian.

      Thomas Kurian, Oracle Corp. Vice president.

      Gurdeep Singh Pall, head of the Skype……….. so on go google………….I am already tired and we are still talking only about software…………

      http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/11/powerful-indians-silicon-valley

      • Paul says:

        I don’t subscribe to that point of view that Indians have made so many contributions to IT that they are so awesome!

        There are approx. 1.2 billion Indians and about 7 billion people on the planet. That means 17% of the population are from India. As India are hugely dependant on providing IT services it means that probably about 1 in 5 people in IT are from India.

        Therefore I would expect a huge influence and it’s influence is still small in comparison to the contribution of USA with a population of 0.3 billion (4% of the world population).

        Having said that China’s population is 1.3 billion and they have little influence on Software, but their influence on hardware is enormous.

        In summary, I would say the potential for India is still there, but it needs to sort itself out or be doomed as Zhyena stated. India majorly depends on non-Indians to provide services to them, but their customers are progressively becoming more disillusioned, hence the heated and frustrating debate. The company I work for would not touch India with a barge pole and use other countries for offshore development.

  19. JD says:

    Hi
    I am an Indian myself, and working in US, I do somewhat agree with you. but still i dont think India outsourcing is doomed.
    Basic problem is Indians by nature are hardworking and there is huge middle class people who just want to earn there living by some means.
    At the same time most of the Indian’s are not risk takers, or does not think about big picuture, they just think about today and may be some for tommorow but not beyound that. and that is the reason that while being so much skilled people in IT we dont see that much INVENTION or something new coming up from India. All big major software product companies are still in US. India is just providing B level service, and cashing on its vast pool of labor.
    This has to do with Indian society too, its not just IT industry.
    But if you are making such opinion then it should be realy time for indian managers to think upon that why you arrived at such opinion, so US is not getting that quality experience what it should expect. Indian IT should pause for a while and think upon this, but all of them just want to cash in the moment not thinking about where the future is.

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      I think this argument is totally baseless. If one goes and hires freelancers or small operators without verification, this is what will happen in any country.

      Outsourcing needs outsourcing management.

      If Indian outsourcing was crap, the US major companies would have not made so much money out here.

    • Alex says:

      Exactly!

  20. James Wilson says:

    Hi,
    Thanks for the share.I think that the main reason why sourcing to India is not getting so much importance is the time difference factor.

  21. David says:

    The problem of non-delivery with Indian offshoring is not confined to the US.

    In Australia I have witnessed two large companies who invested in projects $50M+ and $150M+ to scrap the projects after investing in Indian Offshoring.

    Too often, the Indian side of the equation blame it on lack of management on the part of the client.

    However, we are usually talking about organisations that have recruited a large senior IT team of architects, program managers and senior consultants from the Big 5.

    No, it’s not management of the offshore team – the business model doesn’t work.

    If an organisation doesn’t believe that a moderately sized, but highly qualified staff can be hired domestically to complete a project; what makes it believe that recruiting from a larger pool of entry-to-mid-level qualified staff will solve the problem?

    The selling point of India Offshoring is that somehow you’re going to makeup for the technical skills gap by hiring a larger number of less experienced staff – as if you can magically add the individual experience years to a higher total.

    This is of course, is the age-old problem of the Mythical Man Month.

    Team efficiency grows from synergy and that takes time, months and sometimes years.

    You’ll find that a handful of experts covering the technology and business domains are the pillars in a successful IT project – they are the real doers and not the talkers.

    Experts are formed from their many real years of application of their specialty – you can’t teach someone to become an expert – they do it on their own.

    But how else will a large Indian IT body shop sell you an army of programmers/testers/architects/managers on a “blended rate”?

    Do you really believe that experience is additive across individuals who have never worked together before, who don’t know your business and who don’t hold your values?

    And who verifies the qualifications and experience of the individuals, an independent third-party agency? It’s the same offshoring company saying trust us, we wouldn’t lie to you?

    Do we really take pride in being an IT professional looking after the long term interests of clients and the reputation of our profession; or are we in it to grab as much money as possible and leave someone else holding the bag?

    • Michael says:

      “the business model doesn’t work” – actually it does and it works extremely well for those organisations that can manage large scale operations with diverse resources of which the top twenty companies in Australia in regard to IT spend all do. Of course there are many challenges but in a number of ways what I have seen and experienced is that is forces the domestic operation to be more disciplined in the way it structures and runs its major programs. Your comment “who verifies the qualifications and experience etc” is a classic comment from someone outside looking in. The well run operations use tight governance that is structured into the contract when it comes to resourcing and skills and in doing so have sufficient control over the process. It doesn’t matter whether you outsource to India or to the likes of IBM locally , the process needs to be the same. There is an art and a discipline to do this successfully that thankfully the largest companies in Australia generally have mastered – the spend on overseas outsourcing continues at double digit growth. “Do we really take pride etc” , yes we do and that why we need to ensure that we have the mix right, I have advised and guided a number of companies how to get this right and I have also advised companies not to offshore when it is clear they are not capable of managing it successfully. If I have learnt one thing in the past 20 years of working in this industry there is not just one way of doing this that works or fails, it is adaptive to the company and the outsource provider on an individual basis, if someone tries to take a rubber stamp approach they will fail , if they do this properly then the rewards are there for all. Finally for anyone that thinks the major IT programs of today can be delivered with just local domestic resources anywhere in the world then you are living in a place that no longer exists.

      • Paul says:

        Michael,

        It seems like you are blaming the customer! This is a common message from Indian Outsourcers. They are the masters of excuses.

        Personally, I have seen outsourcing work, but it was when the Indian team was completely spoon fed and tracked to the minute — basically over-tracked and over-managed. And I am not sure if it is a commercial success (it is more expensive, just a different cost centre and an India outfit makes a load of money and the UK guys are left with a dog to maintain).

        • Michael says:

          Paul if you read what I have written I am not laying “blame”. What I point out is that there is a thriving outsourcing industry today globally that does work and within that industry there are failures also but not to the degree that some of the posters might try and portray. And Indian companies are not the masters of excuses at all, far from it.

      • David says:

        It’s funny that you mention IBM, isn’t Bridgestone suing IBM primarily because it offshored work to India and the result was “sub-standard”; and that was just implementing SAP.

        If I outsource to a local company to customise off the shelf software, I expect them to staff the project with local resources; I don’t want to risk my organisation’s precious data – including key supplier, pricing structure and customer information to be sold out to my competitors?

        What strategic or real need is there in offshoring with the state of software availability today that allows a small team to deliver 10 to 100 times faster than say 10 years ago?

        Software too complex? – Software architecture is all about decomposing software complexity and many advancements have been made in different fields in closed and open source

        Too many modules? – Go to a Domain Driven Architecture and allow fast creation of individual
        components containing specific customisations- this is why frameworks like Ruby on Rails are so popular

        Not enough local talent? – So how many frameworks and innovative software was 100% developed offshore versus domestic – what did your organisation do historically when you relied on domestic resources?

        In one of the projects I saw first hand, the source code was purchased from a local company – the local company gave their honest assessment that the customisation requested were beyond their ability given the initial short time frame (one year.)

        So here comes the Indian Team’s promise – yes, they’ll do all the customisations, they can dedicate up to 500 staff to fulfil the requirements in the timespan.

        4 years later and the project was over budget by 200% and non-delivery resulted in the resignation of the CEO and CIO – the non-functional requirements weren’t met.

        Ironically the primary driver of the project was to replace the existing system because of load/performance concerns – the existing system was 100% developed locally and handling a customer base of 6 million.

        Throughout the process the justification was that there was no hope of the current system meeting the growth requirements; but when the new system was delivered it couldn’t even handle a 100K customer base with 10 real administrative users – this is the norm – if you give a spec and functionality is demonstrable by the contractor then you have no legal recourse even if the software is unusable.

        The Offshore team ran out of excuses – “not enough documentation” (the local team was doubled in presence to support the offshore team); “not enough experience with your systems” (a complement of the Offshore team was on-shored and given training in the systems and third-party software); “we can’t to do some of the integrations” (local consulting firms were employed to implement the “complex” integrations).

        The project is currently being reevaluated – yes, it’s an ongoing sunk cost, much like the US healthcare.gov – but a business consultancy has been called in to reevaluate the “business model”.

        The project failure is not considered a technical IT failure but a readjustment – that particular organisation is now talking about using the same Indian Offshore company to upgrade the existing system stack (something the in-house IT teams suggested from the beginning).

        The problem with Indian Offshoring is that it does generate a lot of money for local consultancies because it’s a convenient and unproven theory accepted by non-technical management – “you need outsourcing to deliver in IT”.

        It’s time to question this false understanding of how software development works – it’s not like the construction industry where you physically need more bodies to do the work.

        High profile IT failures are due to lack of technical leadership – you need the few but truly expert designers to create a software base which can deliver with fewer programmers/testers/etc.

        The Indian Offshoring model is opposite to good software design and planning because they simply won’t be able to sell as many bodies using software that improves development productivity by orders of magnitude.

        • Michael says:

          David it really is a shame that the only examples you are aware of are failures and that this naturally then forms your opinion, the facts however are clearly in favour of an industry that has now been operating at scale for well over 15 years with its proportional share of both success and failures and continued growth and demand. Cheers.

          • David says:

            The examples are there to illustrate and analyse the root issues discussed; which sadly you haven’t addressed.

            If you have evidence the model has been so successful and have experienced such successful projects; can you illustrate it with your own example?

            How did you resolve the issues discussed that have grappled huge multi-nationals and world-wide projects in millions to the ground?

            If the only examples of successful IT Offshoring are small-scale call-centres, low-level technical support, or spoon-feeding designs to programmers; that doesn’t constitute a successful IT model, offshoring is supposed to solve large scale projects for end-to-end delivery.

            Would you outsource a magazine to writers who come back to you and say, sure, we’ll write the articles, just give us the theme, and paragraph summaries and also the key words of each sentence? This is infact, what an offshoring team falls back to when they don’t deliver – the full requirements, design, algorithms and test cases must be provided to them for a fixed contract.

            Design is the responsibility of the programmer, code is design, if it takes specifying requirements and design to algorithms and method names and test cases then you might as well have done the whole work yourself.

            If the model was a such a success; then we would be replete with best practice centres all over the world, collating the successful implementations and providing certification for offshoring management – but not even local IT consultancies would dare put a percentage success on paper for an offshoring model.

            And where are the testimonials of success – why are organisations reconsidering their offshore position and not testifying of the outstanding success and factors contributing to it?

          • Michael says:

            David there are plenty of successful companies in this space as evidenced by the growth of the industry which was the point of the original article. As much as you may wish the industry away for whatever your personal reasons are it is not happening. A simple google search will give you an understanding of the size and growth as will a search of the revenues and clients of the major service providers out of India ( or Eastern Europe for that matter). Cheers.

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            India outsourcing is not doomed and there are huge number of innovative players. Whereas there is competition, from Russia and eastern Europe, No one is close to the maturity of industry which India has, the quality it delivers as a country. There are large number of failures in outsourcing in any country even when it is outsourced in home country itself. No outsourcing experience are successful without an effective outsourcing management.

            Among offshoring Destination India is still the leader and for no non-sense reason but because it is a hub of quality manpower.

            If you happen to come across a bad experience, it is either you are bent upon saving 80% cost (rather than 40%-50%) or you “mismanaged” outsourcing. It has noting to do with Indian people, culture, climate, the country side rides etc..

            Sudhir Singh

          • David says:

            India as correctly pointed out has a large share, if not the largest of the offshoring model.

            However, my concerns have nothing to do with specific countries but a business model which is flawed.

            Growth in a business model is not proof of it’s success; just as the growth in the derivative markets for the US subprime loans resulted in an economic bubble that burst.

            There are real dangers when a business model is so hyped that it leads to unsustainable growth.

            The IT Offshoring Model has been over-sold as a quick fix for businesses looking to expand or take advantage of opportunities in a short time-frame.

            They are sold on the idea that an IT delivery model is the magic bullet that has effectively torn down the barriers of entry into markets.

            The myth is further sustained by promises of limitless resources and opportunities presented to them by this new model – i.e., no matter what your primary business is, you can build in next to no-time a customer service centre, automate supply-chain management, retail to the vast online community for pennies per transaction.

            This in turn has attracted vast venture capital funding into businesses that have joined the bandwagon.

            But what happens when the bubble bursts?

            The emerging visibility of government investigations and law suits over IT costs and non-delivery is an early sign of the business model breaking down.

            This is going to hurt IT in general not just India and other large offshoring nations.

            The credibility of the IT sector will be put into question; IT roles and salaries will be scrutinised; why should general businesses pay three to four times more for an IT resource and still wear the risk of non-delivery?

    • DancesWithWolves says:

      I applaud the author for his observation, insight, and yes, courage as some of his thoughts may be perceived to be politically incorrect.

      As someone with 20 plus years of experience in the IT industry, my assessment is that the outsourcing model has had its share of abysmal failures, and accordingly, the model is undergoing fundamental changes. The fact of the matter is that the total cost of ownership of most outsourced projects are much higher than in-sourced projects (there are numerous studies, just Google it). Only disclaimer I would make to this are well defined cookie-cutter, sausage-machine type of projects.

      There are also inherent issues with Indian outsourced model, as many posters pointed out. Embellishing CVs be employees are the norm; and whereas there’s no doubt that India has its share of talents, the bulk of the workers put on outsourced projects are below average. Then there’s the issue of phantom time sheets, billing for higher grade employees for work done by clue-less grads, needing rework, and the soft issues like the language/accent and, yes, cultural barriers. Finally, in my experience, the pursuit of excellence, and respect for and adherence to architecture, order, aesthetics and the like are virtually non-existent with outsourced workers, notwithstanding the real talents that Indian IT industry has. Part of this pervasive poor workmanship is the very business model which promote expediency over quality, but part may be cultural. Indeed, I found the quality and workmanship of IT artefacts of East Europeans and Argentinians, for example, are vastly superior to the Indians”. It’s time the captains of IT industry pause and reflect.

  22. Amitav Chaudhuri says:

    Hi,

    I am from India, exploring ways to expand my engineering services business outside India. Sad to see so much evidence of poor quality work from India! Maybe there are good experiences too, but the happy guys aren’t blogging :))

    I feel a “outcome” based model – you pay a predecided fee if the product works or meets agreed parameters – will work better. Most outsourced work coming to India seems to be on a “time and materials” model, where you agreed to pay for the hours worked, even if you got poor stuff. Within India, outcome models form the majority of business outsourcing contracts.

    • Paul says:

      The “outcome” model is a good idea, but beware often outsourcers have quite a few projects on the go, so don’t care much if some fail, as long as they don’t lose too much money. Also you may end up wasting time both when you have to rework locally and also arguing about acceptance criteria at the beginning and end.

    • Michael says:

      The ‘outcome’ model actually underlines the problem of India outsourcing. This model would work quite well at a factory where a customer would pay only for quality made widgets. Software creation is a process of art as much as science. It’s very different from producing widgets.

  23. Saad Ali says:

    Totally agree with Zhenya. Many UK based companies have withdrawn from outsourcing in India and most now promote “banners in bold letters” of local call centres.

    S Ali

  24. Anonymouse says:

    India IT: Scraps thrown by greedy Western corporate execs in exchange for shoddy outsourced work and unintelligible English.

    China IT: Taobao, largest online B2B and B2C marketplace in the world with robust consumer protection, payment system and feedback, products bought there reaches your doorstep in 3 days with free shipping despite thousands of miles away. The only thing that is stopping it from dominating the world is because the West doesn’t speak Chinese. Doesn’t have the need to harp upon how good their IT skills are every single day.

    Now please tell me which IT industry is more impressive.

    • Charles says:

      A lot of negative complaints I’ve seen about Chinese IT is that they lack creativity. Its not all sunshine and rainbows over there either.

    • Martin Vahi says:

      Isn’t the reason, why the majority of really smart western developers join only start-ups, not big corporations, that creativity, if combined with thorough implementation, is forbidden in the Western Corporations? What regards to the fact that doing things thoroughly takes time and planning and therefore costs, then there is a rumor that one of the main reasons, why the Swedes receive/deliver fine quality with not cheap, but tolerable, prices is that they have patience and that they have calm long term planning.

      Software development, if done thoroughly, is literally like research: it is a walk in the unknown. If it weren’t, it might be automated to the point that it could be doable with a click of a button, like copying files from one folder to another. I’m very biased by writing this and not all software developers, even experienced ones, share my views, but my opinion is that software development should be done AHEAD OF THE TIME, WHEN THE NEED ARISES. That means ability to see things years ahead.

      Can anyone explain, why the IT-industry executives do not want to learn from scientific community, like the nuclear scientists at CERN, who just can not do their science projects without quality software? They might just take a visit to CERN or the American counterpart, Fermilab, and ask the scientists, how do the scientists plan their software projects that absolutely deliver and are long-term projects. Given that the executives travel around the world anyway, then that would be only a few trips. Even NASA and the European Space Agency depend on a lot of very “complex” software and get their things done. Boeing and AirBus also get their software to a point that planes do not fall out of the sky. Yet, there is articles upon articles upon blog posts upon vlogs upon tweets on the topic of how to get an “Enterprise system” (as if the data sets in CERN or Fermilab were any smaller or simpler) to be developed so that its cost would be tolerable and that the quality of the work would actually be sufficient to do the job. The Internet was developed in CERN. Supercomputers (read: predecessors of modern data centers) were used by nuclear physicists. Modern version of Big Data (measurements from experiments) was pioneered in nuclear physics labs. Yet, there are still all those “IT-business discussions” about, how to get at least some working software for some tolerable money in situations, where the absolute amount of money is in millions of euros/dollars. For Christ sake, the people, who work for scientists can build a hell of a lot of actually working software for that kind of money.

      May be the issue here is that it is not possible to sell fine tools to (executive) monkeys in the jungle (of corporate software development), even if the monkeys are loaded and can afford anything in big quantities.

      • RK Sharma says:

        Martin

        You made some good points but seem you don’t know how and why Indian outsourcing industry works. My suggest read a book as below, it will tell you more than what you know and will answer your questions like where should you target and where do Indian body shopping and outsourcing industries target

        The rise of South Indians: Invisible dimension in decline of jobs for Americans in US economy

        amzn.to/1oTuFNJ

  25. ITProfessional says:

    I have been in the Outsourcing Industry as an IT professional for 20 Years. I have worked in IT for more than 25 Years. The experience of the author is consistent with what I have experienced – not to say that individuals in India in any way should be critisized. From expecting staff in India to work night shift while they raise a family (not only the Traditional western Male who worked night shift but BOTH parents). TO working India Day shift and part of the Western Day shift so they work 12-14 hours a day. To simply a poor level of delviery quality. TO the need to have team locally spend so much time managing the offshore team at every Level it becomes ridicoulous and not cost effective. I see no value in this model. Talk about a poor Customer experience. The only individuals that benifit are a select few of Corporate Leaders who strip value from thier employees and reap profits from thier customers.

    • Bill H. says:

      That was really well said! The customers are catching as to prevent this select few from taking advantage of these employees and you are right what ever happened to good and true customer service. Without the customer there is nothing anyway at the end of the day.

      Bill.

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        This page is run by Anti India lobby, So nothing here is useful, comparative, result oriented. It is just a propaganda. I can give you more than 50 success case studies and also quote many failures in US to US outsourcing.

        Sudhir

        • Charles says:

          Sudir,

          You are not doing yourself any favors by constantly promoting your obviously biased view. You are actually giving a living example of some of the complaints I’ve seen posted.

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            Charls, I am sure you have not read all my comments, specially the first one on September 25, 2013 at 9:30 pm.

            When I wrote this aggressive comment, you replied on, I had seen so many people just liking the negatives embedded in original blog. Also I did not like the way connection between cultural aspects of India were interwoven in the blog.

            I hardly saw a meager reference to success in outsourcing to India by a meager few. India is even today after increased competition from many other offshoring location is a leader. that is no without reason. In fact the kind of work that is being done in India now has graduated much far from vanilla coding.

            I would have loved if the blog pointed out how to succeeded in India or a comparative study. Since it just out rightly rejects Indian after and quotes 15 years of experience, it deserves to be taken head on.

            In majority of cases where we saw difference between delivery and desire, we know that leaving a few it was all because of bias towards developing countries and arrogance of we are the best. Today’s, world is not more in that era that we are best. There is competition every sphere. So also in offshore destinations. So, from Indian side we know we need to bridge the gap of cost arbitrage which is slowly slipping away.

            Yet, I can assure you if one does not take a short term tactical approach, India is doing very well and even in terms of cost, there is a way by not going to Bangalore of Hyderabad for every thing and trying a good team in secondary and territory cities, where employee turnover is less know a problem. For work ethics, communication and quality etc. one should rely on leadership and sticking to a process.

            To conclude I am sure, when we are in a competitive world we need to be attentive and respond. It would be unwise to leave the generalization being done on one persons experience or a few experience.

  26. Mark says:

    Zhenya,

    Nice attempt there, trying to smear an entire country of 1.2 billion people by posting pictures of a snake charmer and an over-crowded jeep, which have NO relevance to IT or outsourcing whatsoever. Before racially vilifying an entire nation, you should look at YOUR OWN HORRENDOUS grammar and poor communication skills. What third-world hellhole did you immigrate to the US from? Some country in Eastern Europe I take it?

    • Alex says:

      Mark, you may be trying to defend your country, but doing it in a very immature way. You haven’t addressed any issues brought up by the author or others, but simply decided to reserve to personal attacks. Kudos to the author for not deleting your ugly comment. Unfortunately, Mark, you haven’t brought anything useful to this discussion.

      • Ash says:

        Agree with you Alex, I am an Indian and involved in an IT start up in India.

        I currently live and work in Australia ,given my technical background I decided to get on board a startup and explore options in India.

        I must say it has been very disappointing so far, fake CV’s, people giving fake interviews on phones and skype chats. To an extent where a lot of senior managers in big IT firms are leaching and subcontracting work to their dummy firms, which is a conflict of interest if you ask me , but its all OK in India.

        To be honest I still have to meet an IT professional or an engineer for that matter from India who is as good as his/her CV.

        And to those who are trying to say Indian’s are CEO’s and inventors and so on .. you guys need a wake up call, they are what they are in US.,. they went there got a fair go by that country (equal opportunity etc etc) and made something out of themselves!! the other 1.2 billion are still back home , trying to make a living what ever way they can! dodgy or non dodgy!

        God help us!

    • Sue says:

      U are a big racist.if u don’t like Indians don’t outsource your work. Did we beg to u? Yes we are unique and we are proud of that.we are Not like having multiple partners and leaving parents in the care homes to enjoy own life and end up in care homes with dementia .

  27. Amit Patekar says:

    After reading all 71 comments its very clear that Project outcome is 100% product of good selection of resources, good management. Outsourcing has its own pros and cons.

  28. Mark H says:

    Most of the points you make I agree with. The points I would add are around the differences in process. If a company has a Job Role to fit their organisation it does not mean this same Job Role is available in offshore, and follows the same processes as offshore. At my current company, a Software Engineer according to the companies SDLC is expected to be all of these : Requirements Analyst, Architect, Software Design, Coder and Tester (I know, laughable isn’t it !), but that is defined in the process. The problems occur when you try and get a single off-shore engineer that has those qualities – Impossible. You will end up paying for individual offshore people for each one of those functions, or in the least three + one manager. The net result will be an increase in cost, not a reduction. Each of these offshore people will require training, in the domain problem being solved each with some form of communication impact. The company will require a complex communication infrastructure (VPN’s to access company resources), as well as careful review process changes to ensure work is of sufficient quality. OK,you will have access to these skills, the offshore company will find them for you – no doubt in that, but I’ll bet this will come at one huge cost. The company will finally realise they were on to a good thing in the first place employing multi-skilled, competent, people who speak the same language to the same level, and finally realise the whole outsource to India thing has cost them, not saved them. But of course, on paper, it all looks very tempting to use this model, – how can we lose, loads of cheap resources must mean higher production – right?

    • Paul says:

      Mark,

      You have a very good point, but I think in many western companies we do not expect junior developers to be analysts and architects. Or well we certainly give them support. In India, in the main, the quality of developers is much lower although they are often palmed off as much better than they really are, without support, so they cannot cope with multi disciplines and sink. In fact, by the time they have the depth in development to handle all those roles they want to be managers.

      This multidisciplinary approach in an individual is very valuable and efficient as it means the developer really understands what they are doing.

      I have seen many times 3 or 4 Indian developers working together but they do not seem to know what they are doing, perhaps because they are lacking these combined disciplines even as a small team. The result is often “throw it in the bin and redo it yourself as is quicker than explaining to 4 people!”

      Paul

      • Charles says:

        “You have a very good point, but I think in many western companies we do not expect junior developers to be analysts and architects.”

        I have to challenge that…..Half the job specs I’ve seen for entry-junior level roles are well defined senior level roles with only a name change.

        Companies can’t seem to find God to develop their software for pennies, and many don’t seem to want to get rid of that unrealistic wish list. Some companies just give a recruiter 2 sentences to work with. The result? More outsourcing. The Problem? The “Yes” issue mentioned above.

        Two of the Indian run American based companies I’ve worked for hired me before they even got the contract. So I imagined `when asked if they had resource X, they said yes…when they clearly didn’t. Problem with this? Both contracts were dropped and I was sitting around useless or given other tasks to do.

        Anyway, my point is that the above quote is EXACTLY the issue.

        American companies want highly qualified multi-skill set and experienced developers to work for them, for cheap. When they can’t find them they try to settle for “less” while still keeping up the most if not all the required skills/environment demands. That is a hazard that can easily away entry and junior level people.

        I personally wouldn’t go for a contract/job where I’m missing over 25% of the skill-sets, I don’t really care if I could do it as I simply don’t need the stress and demoralizing environment.
        On the Indian side of things they’ll tell companies what they want to hear and then race to find the resources.

        You can’t simply put inexperienced people in a position that requires experience, you are suppose to build teams, train people, etc. This concept declined significantly starting decades ago with the rampant outsourcing.

        This is why we have a barbell market, rising senior level salaries, extremely high IT demand, etc.

  29. Rohit says:

    No one is doing any favors to anybody here. Outsourcing is a business decision, driven by business goals. If any company believes they can get better services at similar or lower cost they should take their business to that place, be it America, India, Eastern Europe , Africa or any other place. Its that simple. I read many such opinion pieces about Indian IT, and how it is too costly and so on.However, outsourcing companies in India continue to grow. I dont think anybody gives them business because they like these companies, these companies grow because they offer a service, the standard of which is at least good enough in most cases,at a price which is difficult to match. In short, if you can find a better deal, go get it!!

  30. Offshore Software Development says:

    As far as call centres and large scale applications are concerned Indian outsourcing industry’s definitely doomed unless their government starts some extensive training programs on a macro level. However, when it comes to call centres Bangalore still remains and sustains it’s position as the major player in the league closely followed by Philippines. The filipinos have been found to be more trainable as compared to the Indians when it comes to this flank of industry.

    Pointed to be noted is, if the work force was as good as the work force in the first world, would they be costing you what they cost right now? 😉

    Russians and Pakistanis are good but are they competitive when it comes to pricing if compared with the Indians. I don’t think so.

  31. Anil Kumar says:

    India is still a corrupt country. Some of this corruption has seeped into the private sector with nepotism as the main form of corruption in the private sector. This does hit work culture.

    However, for companies outsourcing work to India, strong processes help. In general large well organized outsources get a better bang for their buck..they also are willing to pay more.

    If you pay peanuts..you will get monkeys.

    In short, keep your outsource partner on a tight leash through well defined processes and requirements management.

    Otherwise, Zenya, prepared to be ripped off by a corrupt Indian

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Dear ANil Kumar,

      I do not know you back ground. Where did you grow up? If you have grown up in India you will never ever write those words as we do not start abusing our own Mother. You certainly have no sense where and what you are talking about. Zenya can not appreciate the culture that India is. But did not expect an Anil Kumar will also start doing same thing.

      There is no link between corruption and and IT Outsourcing to India. We know our problems but non of those problems ave any thing to do with Outsourcing to India. In fact Russia has more problems then us now. Easter Europe is ridden with problems, So is south Africa or Latin America. If there is widespread prostitution in one of those country will a guy come and say, we are ridden with …..these things and to hell with you if you outsource.

      I am ready to face both of you Zenya and Anil kumar also.

      1. IT Industry has grown in India for its Natural strength of Science and Mathematics.
      2. The Indian government in 1986 came out with a policy and then in 1992 formed a special organization which was given mandate of promoting IT exports. I worked there and until I left in 2000 it was a 100% clean organization, with lot of young and passionate people like me supported the Industry. Mainly it was a policy of facilitate with non-interference.
      3. There is failure of outsourcing in every country. It has nothing to with India and Indian culture. Does Zenya have figures of what is Industry standard of faliure of outsourcing and then an global figure of how many failed where. He is just shooting in dark and trying to tell the old snake charmer stroy of India.
      4. A large amount of R&D work (high in value chain) started happening in India by companies like Motrola and Texas instrument in late 1990 even before Industry in India became mature.
      5. India today provides has moved ahead of typical coding and non-core work outsourcing that has happens in eastern Europe or china.
      6. Despite distances of Offshore India has much large number of success stories than faliure.

      The gentlemen discussing here are all bitten by a bug of directly hiring a freelancer or a small company without a trust builder in between or using an outsourcing expert. The main cause of their failure is inability to manage outsourcing and not how Indian wear and walk.

      Anil Kumar, in India for people like me Mother and Motherland means same thing. And those who abuse motherland, you know what they are called.

      Sorry to be harsh, but it is difficult to stop and the way you started you needed it.

      Zenya we know you have started this blog in your extreme distaste for India. But that doesn’t help.

      Regards

      Sudhir Singh

      • John says:

        Nobody is reading your lengthy comments anymore 🙂
        Your nationalist attitude is sick.

        • Sudhir Singh says:

          At least you have read them.

          Well my any attitude may be Sick, but this blog is a place for those who are deadly against Outsourcing to India and gives them a opportunity to vent out. Nothing else.

          For all those who have been bashing India here on this blog, To an extent that some people are also using it to denigrate Indian culture and indulging in racial remarks here. There was a Gentleman explaining in past about Ravana being killed by Rama and trying to paint north and south divide. So, what is this Blog serving?

          There are two just fresh news items for those who want to denigrade India.

          1. Just yesterday an Indian Space department launched 5 satellite belonging to France, Germany, 2 from Canada and Singapore using PSLV C-23.

          2. From CISCO – very fresh today’s news item in Times of India says” Its Globalization Centre East, established in Bangalore in 2007 at a cost of $1 billion, is now one of its showcase investments, and Cisco calls it its second global headquarters.. Read full story at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Cisco-needs-to-align-with-Indian-governments-goals/articleshow/37551233.cms

          Time to feel more zealous of India.

          No one can take away from me my right to defend my Nation on logical grounds.

          However, this blog should not be used for the purpose it is being done now by some. And the responsibility clearly lies with the Author and creator of the Blog.

          I expect Zenaya will stop the adverse comments about India’s culture and traditions here in the blog and stick it to purely on Outsourcing as a Subject.

          I am sure you are going to read again. And I won’t allow you to spill venom here. I will respond with fitting reply.

          Cheers !

          • Paul says:

            I agree with Sudhir that this should not be a forum to bash India. Really that is just not appropriate.

            I understand why this has happened. One of the big issues companies suffer from has been the cultural differences and that quickly becomes related to India as a country and the bashing starts & escalates.

  32. Suneet says:

    Sudhir, if you want to participate in a discussion, why not do it in an honest way. Attacking everyone who you don’t disagree doesn’t give much credibility to what you say. While corruption may have nothing to do with IT in our country we all know that outsourcing is not what it used to be. The old school of engineers have left the country. They are all working in US on either h1 visas or after getting a green card. IT degree became just a way to make money and leave for US.

    Granted we did it to ourselves. We all ran after a quick buck and honestly how much do we care about a client we are working for? We might care about the company but ultimately we care out our job only.

    Zhenya’s blog touched on some hot topics. Evidence of this is that it generated such a discussion. Zhenya’s blog is not about India. This is the only article on his site about our country. All the rest is about outsourcing and development. He by the way has a similar article about Eastern Europe Outsourcing. http://www.rozinskiy.com/collison-path-eastern-european-outsourcing/ Yes, Zhenya may not be very objective in his view of India, but give him credit for raising valid concerns.

    If India was such a genius country for IT industry how come we are not a birth place of any significant IT company? Every major US IT business has someone in high ranks from India, but they are all in America. Because that’s where the best go. Only those that didn’t make it or new to business are still working in outsourcing in India.

    Sorry to be harsh, but we need to face the reality if we want to see any changes.

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Sumeet, What is honesty man?

      I many comments on this blog. Read them all. There is a content.

      Calling whole country corrupt out of blue is not honesty. You are mistaken that every one goes to US.

      There is no burning issue Zenya has raised. It is a anti-india lobby blog or may be the lobby that is anti-offshoring.

      I only agree on one point you raised, that is India has not produced a Google or Microsoft yet. There are problems of business environment but one does not start abusing the whole country like that. India is serving today Googles and Microsoft with thousands of engineers. Bill Gates does both he uses the engineers in India and then he goes and work for the problems in India through his foundation on poverty, education and health.

      On merit the discussion of Outsourcing, you can not rule every thing on one or few experiences.

      India by all means is doing good, there is tough competition all over the world on trivial outsourcing. India is much ahead on value chain though it has taken a some beating on rising costs, yet there are so many ways to retain both cost and quality advantage and work in India with a highly trained and skilled manpower.

      I earn my bread and butter thinking, talking, writing and executing offshoring and outsourcing. I have several success stories up my sleeves.

      Point raised by Zenaya are mostly targeted our cultural setting not on substance of the Subject called Outsourcing.

      I will not tolerate any one abusing India that is for sure, for us Mother and Motherland means same thing.

    • Suneet says:

      Sudhir, I am begining to think that you are being paid by someone to defend India no matter what. I love my country as much as you, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t see flaws. You keep accusing everyone around and trying to find an agenda in this blog. First you called it anti India but you chose to ignore that only one article out of few dozen even mentions India, second you are calling this an anti outsourcing blog and again you choose to ignore that the entire site is about making outsourcing work. You didn’t even bother to check that Zhenya’s job is managing outsourcing.

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        If you love your country, you need no one to pay you. Can you point one instance other than Anil, I really pointed on any one personally. This blog is only taking petty issues that does no service to outsourcing but serves only one interest that is for people to be afraid of outsourcing to India.

        Well if his job is managing outsourcing and he ever did outsource some thing to India, he miserably failed to so as a manager. Honesty of a profession is not to single out a country based on some subjective experiences. The blog is definitely Anti India and is highly subjective.

        You are not doing service either to Outsourcing subject or India by your words here.

  33. Suneet says:

    Unlike you, I am not here with an agenda to defend anything at all. I came across this blog for my own learning about outsourcing and other related subjects. I am thankful to the author for taking time and write his thoughts and describe his experience. I don’t have to agree with everything Zhenya says to consider it useful. As for Zhenya’s failures, who am I to judge. Looks like he’s had a pretty successful career http://www.linkedin.com/in/rozinskiy/ and even published several books http://www.amazon.com/Zhenya-Rozinskiy/e/B00FGK6HO2

  34. Jonny says:

    Sudhir, thank you so very much for stating your strong opinion and defending your country. Anyone who had any doubt about India or had any concerns about Zhenya’s article can now make an easy decision. Your immature angry posts demonstrate the quality of Indian average workforce. Your unwillingness to consider that there is at least some validity to Zhenya’s post clearly indicate the open-mindedness of an average India workforce. Your inability to argue a point without personal attacks indicate the level of communication one would expect in India. Thank you, Sudhir, for making a choice so easy.

    Oh, one comment – a recent conversation with a very senior technical leader of a very large software development company who manages a team of about 50 people in India.
    – If money weren’t an issue how many people would you need to hire locally in US to do the same job
    – About six, and I would get more done.

    Sudhir, keep writing. People need your point of view, they need someone to help them make a decision.

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Where is the anger. I gave you arguments on merit. Outsourcing should be discussed on things to do with outsourcing not with bias of a culture. I did show my anger to one Mr. Anil Kumar on this blog as he literally went abusive to his ow country.

      I am ready to discuss if some one wants comparative study of offshoring destination rather blast specific country just in hatred. As a subject matter expert I am open to work in any global location with my clients. My interested are not limited to India in outsourcing. In that context, I strongly disapprove the way this blog has been written.

      Sudhir

  35. Jonny says:

    Sudhir, I question your professionalism in software outsourcing. We are in business of dealing with people. Culture is what defines it. If you believe that culture of a country or its people has anything to do with this business you are missing a point.

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      That is true. In front of you my professional quality is exhausted and I really need to learn from you importance of cross-cultural discourse in outsourcing. I am listening.

  36. Jonny says:

    If you are ready to listen, start by reading the blog above and comments. It gives a pretty good perspective on what most of us think of culture and why India is failing in the world of outsourcing. Numbers you have provided are meaningless. India is a country of great engineers, doctors, and scientists. People of India are smart and hard working. Just like in group of people some are great and others are not so much. A handmade suit is better than a serial production. Once a factory goes after cheap labor and profits that mediocre mass production suite becomes simply unusable. In a short time a brand can go from a custom tailored exclusive suit to one sold on bazaars around the world. That’s what happened to India, unfortunately. Providing an example of few dozen Indians that reached a top in their field is hardly something to be proud of for a country of 1.2 Billion people

    • venu varma says:

      i agree with you jonny.there are major flaws in Indian outsourcing companies..we should be ready to accept them and our consultants should be given process training first..

  37. Good Times says:

    Zhenya’s post is spot on. I’ve been a developer for well over 20 years and so I’ve had a chance to see this offshoring trend begin, flourish, and now begin to wither. Let’s be honest, the appeal to go offshore has nothing to do with getting good people on a project and everything to do with driving costs towards the floor as much as possible to free up some bonus money for management.

    I have seen many offhored projects as well as H1B workers from India. I’m sure there must be some good experiences out there – but I haven’t seen any. In each and every single case I saw, the projects that chose this route ended in complete and irredeemable disaster – and ironically far more expensive than needed in the end.

    It’s clear to me that people who choose this strategy do so with little, if any understanding of what it takes to build good software. The explosion of these low wage workers has not only driven down wages, but it has also drastically lowered the bar for quality. 15 years ago I would have been fired on the spot and escorted out of the building for so much as checking in code that today would happily go into production. Managers now think it’s normal to have devastatingly slow queries, web sites that crash, and frequent resets on servers.

    Although I’m concerned about the livelyhood of developers, I’m far more concerned that US companies have hamstrung their critical operations with lousy software when they should be deriving a substantial competitive advantage.

    • Martin Vahi says:

      The Soviet Union collapsed due to economic reasons. I guess that if the corporate America has flooded its business critical areas with crappy software, then it’s going to be interesting to see, how many new “Detroit-s” and “General Electrics-es” will emerge, specially given, how critical software is to modern business. The ever-popular “agile development” does not give much opportunity to do thorough, long-term, planning.

      One of the developers of Netscape, who has become a Silicon Valley venture capital executive, Marc Andreessen, admits publicly, that the venture capital is capable of financing only projects that take at most about a few years to develop and therefore depend heavily on the long-term R&D that governments finance.

  38. Suman Kumar Luthra says:

    Possibly it is incorrect to paint the entire software industry with one color based on few individual’s experience. We have to see the success stories too. some of the points raised by Zhenya are spot on though. Here is my 2 cents (sorry if it is repetitive):

    1. The talent pool in tier -I Indian outsourcing destinations is indeed big, but so is the number of organisations vying to attract them. And the cream of this talent is going to the MNC R&D captive centres not outsourcing companies. Go to the CS and EE departments of Tier-I technical universities and see how much talent is being attracted by MNCs and their captive centers. Probably more than 80%.

    2. The quality of the resource pool is indeed varied. I do not accept the point that all brilliant engineers land up in US and the all the not so good ones are left behind. Personally I have seen qualified Indian engineers (MS in US) on deputation to India and with reasonable experience having very poor functional skills. Given a choice I would never hire such people for my team. We can hire locals at 1/4th to 1/2 of their cost with similar or better skills. And there are so many engineers returning from US back to India after long stints in education and professional practice.

    3. Indian Middle class has traditionally used education as a means to earn money and that’s why so many of them are in IT industry. Not as a tool to do something which is the right attitude. But these mindsets are fast changing as India continues to develop.

    4. In Indian software industry, self skill & competency development is not so good. It is influenced by the type of projects we do here. And most are busy earning money, handling family chores and buying real estate. In technology sector, one must constantly upgrade skills to succeed long term. This situation leads to stagnation and mid-life career crisis in many cases.

    5. Because the market is big and demand for skilled people high, their is always attrition. IMO 10%, 20% or 50% is just a number. The goal should be to minimise key member attrition (those who do most or the most challenging work). For this good MNCs and outsourcing companies have developed comprehensive strategies to attract, manage and retain them.

    6. Work ethics and communication ability is highly influenced by what environment you work in. If the organisation you deal with has been around for a while, probably they would have developed good ethics and culture.

    There are good and not so good engineers here. I think before you outsource something very challenging to India, you better check whether the company’s team here has the manpower and skills to handle it. Especially when you deal with small company. Just playing on the cost factor might lead you straight into sure fire disaster.

  39. AS says:

    Keep beating your chest against outsourcing to India but in reality more and more work is shipped to India:
    http://profit.ndtv.com/news/corporates/article-tech-mahindra-to-manage-it-infrastructure-for-volvo-car-group-383184?pfrom=home-business

  40. Abhay Singh says:

    India is renowned for its technical IT talent.India has a large numbers of educated workers, which is one of the major benefits of outsourcing to India. India provides engineering,IT support, technical and back office business support and services to America and other western countries at lower cost.Due to the lower cost of living in India, American companies are able to save hundreds of millions of dollars.
    India has the main advantage of time zone differences compared to other countries, which benefits many companies. Work sent to India by the end of the day in the USA is completed during daytime in India and sent back.

  41. Arnab says:

    What do u american think? Do you think brilliant indian engineers would go to those cheap outsourcing companies to do your cheap labor kind of work,where there is hardly any scope for innovation and imagination just to earn bread n butter. The truth is that, the worst indian professionals with very poor educational background(probably with minimum iq too),most of whom won’t get job anywhere else go there. Brilliant indian software peoples are currently ruling your silicon valley.If you see then you can see many indian(most of IITians) like sun microsystem founder vinod khosla.And who is now the CEO of microsoft?An indian again…

    • Paul says:

      This is exactly the new Indian arrogance I’ve been talking about. I’ve seen a lot in Bangalore and it has grown exponentially over the last 4 years.

      • IndiaIT says:

        Indian arrogance? Are you suggesting that Americans are the most humble people on the planet? It seems that you can’t believe that somebody can be as good or perhaps better than you. American arrogance is legendary and well documented by historians and journalists.

        • Paul Bartlett says:

          I am not from America and I am not saying whether they are arrogant or not, but what I am saying is that India used to be a very humble society, but it is sadly losing that and the level of arrogance is increasing.

          So often I hear the statement “Without Indians silicon valley would be nothing” or “Look at the new Indian CEO of Microsoft”.

          Reality for me is that I have been in IT for more than 30 years and I believe a majority of innovation is done in America, usually by Americans. Then in Europe by Europeans. Some really great stuff in Russia and China. The level of innovation from India, considering the size of it’s trumpet is embarrassing.

          • Sudhir Singh says:

            When I first encountered this blog on Internet, I thought, I debate with people on issues to do with outsourcing and offshoring.

            This has proved wrong. soon I have realized that this was a post dedicated to India haters or people, perhaps people who have been hit hard by highly talented Indian technical manpower.

            This blog actually deflects attention from real issues by bringing to core the cultural issues that too those which does not effect IT industry at all.

            Paul, you are just spreading that that Anti-India slogan, wherever you belong to it does not matter.

          • venu varma says:

            hi paul..i agree with you.i am associated with a European SAP & Cloud management consulting company for Indian market.We are trying to advise Indian companies to get better training but most of them are interested to get training from cheap low quality trainers for their employees which is the major reason for low quality outsourcing output…Most of the Indian software senior management are too egoistic to accept the fact that they have a flawed process.They want everything cheap which is not going to work out…off late all the Indian companies are using Cloud as a marketing concept but can any one really tell how many world class cloud evangelists are in India?..its high time we start innovating…work together with world class architects and try to define a perfect process for working with Overseas clients

          • PuruGrover says:

            Yep. It’s weird for some of us Indians as well when we hear that. I always end up asking them… Wow, so did you actually build silicon valley?

            Maybe that’s why I’m not much of a people person 🙂

            The best developers I have seen (some of my team mates) back home – are the guys who look at the BS happening around them and say – screw you guys, I just want to write some good code. Something I can add to the application as my own.

            That’s always worked for me.

          • Ash says:

            Paul,

            Could you not try and embarrass us please haha ( I am Indian btw)

            I agree with what your saying , it is a monkey see money do society! I still don’t know what we Indian’s need to defend here when most of the observations are pretty spot on!

            No harm in acknowledging what our work culture, it is what it is and we must change it rather then defend it for no reason what so ever!

            No wander it will take another decade before we get this point ! haha

      • Arnab says:

        Paul,
        Little bit arrogance is good.Sometimes it helps to improve. isn’t it? Please don’t get offended as my words may seem a bit harsh , but what i said is true and what i’ve seen from my personal experience. After all we indian started to dream to come out from a nation being known as “cheap labor”/”cyber-coolie”/”code monkey” and contribute something really good in software and tech domain.So, this
        is the time to call a spade a spade rather than being proud for being the largest service provider of the world, which is nothing to be proud of…

  42. Rajesh says:

    “Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate. You’ll notice that weeks and months go by with very little progress being made. Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little.”
    How can u stereotype all indian employee by seeing a few guy in the outsource industry.
    People can be motivated by two things.1) money/social status 2) quality of the work itself/learning opportunity(aka job satisfaction) etc. Do u provide anyone of these?…ask urself. You give peanuts and expect huge things.about Social status? I myself worked few years there and know what crap is going on there.Now,everyone know that those with no skill and competency join these IT companies.And about quality of work speaking less is better..No scope of learning,developing good skill,Doing some crappy QA, maintenance,backoffice,techsupport, repetitive coding job which can be done by any indian 8th standard student with 2 months software crash course. In very short merely you export some clerical job and which are done under “engineering ” tag. So, how can one expect good engineers with skill ,knowledge and motivation to join and sustain in these companies. You outsource your those jobs to any country u’ll see the same scenario if not worse.

  43. SD says:

    Hi,
    Very biased and Very funny article 🙂 The person who has written this article has his own vested interest for sure. He is a consultant!! But this is not a good way to overcome competition from indian firm. Rather you should write strong points about the services you and your team are offering.

    SD

    • Publo says:

      When you have no facts to argue the easiest approach is to attack the author. If you read most of the comments you will see that people in the ‘support’ camp support their opinions by personal experience, while those in the ‘against’ camp either attack the author or deny that the problem exists.

      The author of this article is not hiding behind an alias. This is his website and to his credit he is allowing all the comments even those that are not supporting his article.

      Before you simply dismiss this article spend few minutes to see who he is.

  44. anmol says:

    I am a Chemical engineer and here it does not matter whether you are a chemical engineer or from computer science background. I got placed in an IT company and my work is something which even a 8th grade person in India can do , and I hate it so much..It gives me the perception of what you people in the west do..We study in 1st grade what you study in 4th.. And guess what I wont do that too perfectly..simply because..I am not going to do this for long and you pay so less that its actually not even worth it…I’ll study more in my own field..Its like a part time job for me.,Pocket money to be precise…:)

    You buggers pay a fraction of the amount and expect us to work like anything..You dont know our potential nobody joins IT here for long,and those who do are much much better than western people and are maybe your bosses,those who are not are either stuck due to lack of money or either are doing what I am(POCKET MONEY)..lol

  45. anmol says:

    *I am an Indian for your information 🙂

  46. peter aristotle says:

    The salary of a fresher in Indian companies like TCS/wipro/infosys/hcl.
    RS 15,000/-
    considering the real working hours – 12 hours per day * 30 working days in a month including saturdays and sundays
    = 360 working hours per month
    – Rs 15,000/- / 360 working hours = 42 RS
    If we consider 1 US dollar = 50 RS
    per hour the salary is = less than 1$

    Indian IT industry is like more or less like slave trading which existed 100yrs ago in the
    world. 12- 17 hours of work per day including saturdays and sundays. No work life balance , just preaching of the
    HR. The employee hires software engineers from the market as “slaves”, even though they use the terms like resources,talents etc.
    Mordern software engineer slaves doesn’t contain chains like of the old. But they are drugged like woman who is going to be rapped !!!
    Employers/managers keep them in a fantasy world . As in every trade the pimps(employers/managers) get more money and prostitues( workers)
    get less money. And finally blames as bonus… scape goat/sacrificial lamp …..poor performance…?

    company profits ( IN CRORES ) millions & billions
    ——————————————————————-

    http://business.mapsofindia.com/india-company/multinational.html
    http://business.mapsofindia.com/software-companies-india/
    http://www.moneycontrol.com/stocks/top-companies-in-india/net-profit-bse/computers-software.html
    http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-04-01/news/38189325_1_tax-evasion-tax-haven-tax-base
    http://businesstoday.intoday.in/categorylist/17/1/info-tech.html

    sotware engineers salary
    ———————————
    http://profit.ndtv.com/news/industries/article-real-salaries-of-software-engineers-lowest-in-15-years-credit-suisse-373180

    ==> the above article is removed now, may be due to influences from company owners
    ==> but a servey on salaryies given to freshers/experience persons by companies will give the real picture.
    ==> it contained the fresher salary of MNC/TCS/WIPRO/ as RS 15,000/- ,which is 15year low( from 2000) considering the
    inflation of the country as said by the government.
    ==> but if the real inflation is calculated, then salary may be in “-” negative.ie, software engineers are working for the company
    by giving money to the company

    http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/salary-rise-in-2013-to-be-at-decadelow/article4439435.ece

    sotware engineers salary vs coconut tree climbers 🙂
    ——————————————————————–

    http://mayacapitalmarket.blogspot.in/2011/08/coconut-tree-climber-gets-more-salary.html

    http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/article1448656.ece
    http://en.bharat4india.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=320:now-climb-on-coconut-tree-with-ease&catid=39&Itemid=124
    http://www.outlookindia.com/printarticle.aspx?278542

    Inflation – A political figure rather than true one ???? — see how
    governments lie
    ———————————————————————————————————–

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglascarswellmp/100230386/lies-damn-lies-and-government-inflation-data/
    http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article33502.html
    http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21591882-official-figures-paint-rosy-picture-so-why-are-argentines-rioting-still-lying-after-all
    http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/john-mauldin/is-government-lying-to-us-about-inflation-yes
    http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-inflation-rate-is-a-lie-too
    http://www.commoditytrademantra.com/inflation/no-inflation-a-common-global-lie-while-prices-rise-simultaneously/
    http://www.wealthwire.com/news/editorial/4763
    http://business.time.com/2013/03/12/if-theres-no-inflation-why-are-prices-up-so-much/

    Inflation in india ???
    ————————–

    http://www.smetimes.in/smetimes/in-depth/2009/Jun/18/inflation-and-how-india-calculates-this-rate9064.html
    http://vijaysvision.blogspot.in/2012/01/inflation-rate-in-india.html

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Dear Peter,

      All your data and computations are wrong. We are in Industry and we know what is the salary if a fresher in TCS etc. You are openly misguiding people based in these internet links. That is a totally incorrect data.

      Secondly freshers in these companies are always trainees. A fresher is on training at least for 6 months and some times more. Even experiences resources are sent on training for induction, improvement and development of skills. You have no idea how much resources are spent by these top companies on training and human development.

      If you can afford come over and I will take you to all these places and show you. You will collapse in the very first place I take you, on seeing the kind of training infrastructure.

      Not only these tire 1, but tire 2 and 3 companies and some small companies also spend a good amount on training not only on technical skills but also on soft skills.

      However, if you are working with freelancers (without verification) or with small teams of coders with no management bandwidth, you are going to end up in problems.

      We know this article is written by a biased person who could not succeeded in India and we also know that there are lot of people out there afraid of the skill and HR resources of India. You are just using this forum to show your frustration.

      Sudhir

      • peter aristotle says:

        Hi sudhir,

        An internet connection is good enough to gain knowledge in any software domain.
        No special trainer softwares/kits are required to train the fresher engineers, but which is
        already being used in the live project.
        Initial guidance for familiarizing the tools form senior members , even good user guides
        documents will be sufficient for that.

        so giving a laptop with internet connection with some ppts/documents to read by themselves … is that what you call by training ?

        Again unlike other nations across the globe , there is no minimum wages requirements put forward by Indian government which leads to lower pays and more work to the software engineers , the lower end of the food chain.

        • Sudhir Singh says:

          Peter,

          I have said what I had to. And you have rightly pointed that for a freelancer internet connection is enough. Human being need society. You won’t understand it.

          India is about offshoring for organized not only for freelancer. Freelancer business is not even .0001%.

          Your hatred for India is justified as it gives you a hitting competition. Programmers in India earn a handsome income. There is a minimum wage act in India but for labour class. You can not even conceptualize India in you mind. This all is too difficult to understand for you.

          All said and done on knowledge economy front India is a true leader in Quality Manpower. That is our strength and we need to keep that edge to reap on demographic dividend.

          Come over to India, I will organize a tour for you to understand the country that gave Zero to the world. Try if you can come out of the bias. World trade can never move if it is one way.

          Regards

          Sudhir

    • Dheeraj says:

      Peter, The salary figures are completely off the rocker! I am an entrepreneur trying to start a new products business in Bangalore and we just can’t find the kind of salaries you’re mentioning in any of the major Indian tech hubs.

  47. Publo says:

    Sudhir, your comments here are getting old really fast. Either you are being paid by an India IT lobby and you suck at your job, or you you just not mature enough to understand that barking on everybody “you are wrong” is not a way to argue.

    India is a wonderful country full of history and with a very advanced education. Unfortunately India is a third world country being stuck hundreds years behind civilization. Shitting and urinating on the street is not an acceptable behavior in the civilized world, but it is in India. Not having clean water running out of your faucet is not something you’ll find in the civilized world, yet no Indian would drink running water at home. Having elementary building and safety standards is a norm in the civilized world, but not in India (http://cdn.viralnova.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/could_end_badly_18.jpg)

    Sudhir, this is a great discussion and maybe someone will learn something from it. Unfortunately for India, you are helping to push people away.

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Paulo,

      Why don’t you and peter come together to India. All your doubts will dissolve.

      • Publo says:

        Sudhir, I have been to India. Thus I don’t have doubts, I have facts. Can you say that what I wrote is not true. Would you like me to post pictures?

  48. Paul Bartlett says:

    Interesting, today I met a company who has tried both India and China.

    India they had a lot of problems. Usual issues. China has been totally awesome. With India they were dealing with a large outsourcer whereas China it is a small 15 man company. He said, they would throw anything to the Chinese and they would solve it and deliver exceptional stuff. He showed me some code they produced and it was a different league compared to India where there is always limited comments, crazy spelling mistakes in variable naming and poor structure.

    Many on here have said don’t use the smaller Indian organisations as the best go to the large MNCs. That has not been my experience. I have spoken to many who have worked with the tier 1’s who have been very disapointed.

    I think they’re just hiding from the realities that “Indian Outsourcing is Doomed” and Zhenya is right. The golden days are over and decline is on it’s way. People are no longer prepared to put up with all the hassles that come from India. There are many other choices now.

    BTW We are in the UK.

  49. VR says:

    Great perspective. Very good points.
    All top notch companies like google, microsoft and several others have opened their own offices, and hired talents there on their own. The education system is good and they know where to go to get the best talent.
    This is not outsourcing though.
    All big companies in the US have used outsourcing to their advantage. IT business has stabilized a lot. With latest and greatest tools and technologies, about 70-80% of the jobs are routine and do not require great skills. The cost advantage here would always be materialized.
    So bottom line is, not everything can be outsourced or relied upon. With grain of salt, companies have to make a judgmental call on how best they can utilize the resources and talent to save money.

  50. Josh says:

    I’m a developer lead at a large American company that has a close relationship with Infosys (note, not a small freelancing shop). I routinely have to reject code that’s replete with problems mentioned in other posts here, such as spelling mistakes, nonsensical variable names, utter untestability (and corresponding lack of tests), and 3000-line methods (my favorite).

    I recently reviewed some new code specifically intended to increase security in one of our critical systems. What I found were all of the aforementioned problems, plus several blatant SQL injection vulnerabilities. When I questioned the authors I was informed that said vulnerabilities were not forbidden by the requirements.

    Given the insane level of turnover at Infosys I see new names and faces come and go all the time, yet the problems I outlined above are repeated ad nauseam. I don’t see this as a management issue either. I should not have to teach rudimentary software design principles to an IT consulting firm, yet I am repeatedly forced to do so with each new round of fresh names just to keep some semblance of order in our systems.

    • peter aristotle says:

      Josh, can you pls tell me the minimum years of experience required in us companies to become a tech lead.

      • Paul says:

        Peter, not trying to be rude, but that’s an odd question and a mindset I see from India.

        The number of years = number of years they are competant to do the job.

      • Josh says:

        Peter, this year is my eighth as a professional developer. I’ve been a dev lead for roughly one year now.

        However, years of experience alone are a poor metric for ability. You might have heard the phrase ‘one year of experience ten times’? If one isn’t constantly growing, years of experience mean little.

        Regarding the code problems I mentioned in my previous post, I knew those to be poor design choices within a couple years of starting my career. It doesn’t take senior-level experience to recognize that a 3000-line method is a bad idea, or that I should spell things correctly.

        In my few years of experience with Infosys devs, I’ve noticed what appears to be a complete lack of reflection or introspection on their part. The same mistakes are repeated over and over. Copy/paste coding is absolutely rampant; they clearly are only interested in solving the immediate problem at hand, with no regard to the cost or difficulty of future maintenance.

        I don’t claim that this behavior is endemic to all Indian developers; I work with several here in the US who are clearly better at this craft than I am. I simply reject the notion that the aforementioned sloppy behavior is confined to freelancers, or that it is a result of poor management by the stateside clients.

        • peter aristotle says:

          I think , normally software engineers wont think / taste business if they are below project lead. Mostly
          business aspects are handled by managers or may be one who is in lead position , persons who overlook entire development cycle , who are bound to reduce the cost of development which includes maintanence cost …whose job profile demands them to think in “$” apart from “code”.
          I am not sure whether any one can produce code with 100% accuracy , in the first time itself. But repeating the same mistake again is another thing .Giving an awareness about development cycle, cost , coding standards ,peer reviews might help. … but most important give them the time to do it.
          The work culture in us and india are different. I think time spent for coding in india(above 12 ) as against america ( may be 8 hours ) is more for a single person. Its again $ per hour .Minimizing resources will increase profit margin. so problem solving will become the only criteria when a person is loaded with too much of work and others become trivial.
          Again most of the coders will be of 2- 4 years of experience guys,may not be in the senior level. There is a chance that indian companies will show a highly experienced person as doing the project in the paper for getting more money ; that their coders are in senior level/with a certain experience . But actually they wont be doing it. It would be done by guys with less experience –> “increase the profit($) margin “. At customer site, the things might be different, they will send the best in the group….. so i think management … also matters

  51. SKP says:

    But, we cannot be among the people from our own soil to blame the standards. We need to consider, not everyone has an exposure level as we do, not everyone is privileged to know where he must go. Mostly Indian middle class was struggling for job decades over decades,and IT meant some job at last.

    USA when started outsourcing din’t do favor, they rather got people to do their jobs at dirt rates, and when the Industry took heights, they found it not with quality. There is always a room for improvement for everyone. Our educational system is still not upto the mark. IIT has been created for producing people to do research, and we see them doing same job like private people with a want of good CASH.

    Lot of factors play role, and India had been working as service back ups to reduce cost till last 2-5 years, we getting into Product Development. We still need money to sustain and then think Innovation which is not the case with most of US and Europe people.

    Lets make our journey a healthy planet for our people which includes product, service and consulting to grow and try best to our capacity, rest will always fall short of what is defined “best”:)

    • peter aristotle says:

      I think the software engineers from my own soil does suffer from slavery from their fellow indian entrepreneurs and also from many ( not all ) american companies who start their business in India
      .I do agree the plight of indian middle class ; their condition is becoming worse since there is no government intervention

      The definition of “slavery” is

      – A condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation
      – Work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay
      – The state of being under the control of another person
      – The practice of owning slaves

      Many standards/practises followed by them are not good. By following these standards , the person who gains from the system is one on the top of the pyramid, or who places these standards on
      his fellow indians who literally do the the software jobs . I think in business , there is no need to bring “soil/nationalism” in between. I think it is better to think in terms of wokers , those who pays for the jobs and those who make profit.

      If US has started , giving jobs to indians at “dirt rates”, the same has been done by Indian entrepreneurs to the fellow workers. So there is no difference , whether it is indian or US.

      Why software boom came to india in the first place ?. I can give two reasons, one is difference in exchange rate between $ and indian rupee , and another thing is educated cheap labour otherwise known as ” knowledge workers” . Now due to inflation and also the linear decrease in
      salary of software engineers, that advantage is getting lost. Money is always a relative quatity, how much u r earning from ur fellows for the working hours & knowledge ur investing
      for.15 years ago this was not the condition, because the inflation was less . At that time the work done and salary offered was almost in equal nature. Now there is a big disparity. Land price,food
      price , children education fees are rising. No proper salary revision yet. Now the salary of software engineers is comparable to uneducated labour force in India , otherwise he has to reach to the
      position of project lead or mangerial position after 7/8 years.So literally those who does “code” , doesn’t have much advantage now. In the coming years i think this situation will have more issues. A
      better benchmark of growth would be asking an Indian middle class , how much u r satisfied in life compared to your father’s generation.??…

      In India one can do anything , if he rich and influenctial .So not only Indian but US companies are licensed to do anything.

      some practises followed by indian companies :-

      I heard a story told in India about one of the top indian IT company:- ( http://www.nasscom.in/industry-ranking) One of these guys went to a college in India , not in the main cities, they literally tried to do the “auction” of fresh engineers. Those who work with low wages will be given the job.So the starting salary went so cheap.In India there is no government control over the minimal wages given to software engineer.

      Another story is , some Indian companies ( not all ) will hire BTECH in electronics and computer science and also Diploma ,BSC and MSC in electonics and computer science. The head counts of BTECH graduates will be shown in the paper to american companies by these indian companies. Btech guys will be put in bench. Since they have more market value, if they gain experience they will switch to other companies for better salary.The Diploma, BSC and MSC guys will be do the job.After 2 years , the BTECH guys wont have much valuable projects to show in the resume since they are in the bench, so their jobability will decrease and they have to stick to these companies for employment. So again these companies can have the cheap labour force with them .Otherwise they have to resign the job and have to look for other jobs. So the careers of BTECH guys are destroyed. These are all old slave models which existed in different parts of the world , but in a lighter edition.The management gurus has made them into a business etiquette.

      The guilt of these practises should be shared by Indian government , Indian techinical education overseers and Indian companies.

      Another point is, there is not much curiculum difference between BTECH ,MCA, BSC and MSC. Why such different degrees are given to the almost same syllabus ; that only the all knowing , All india techinical education can only tell. But companies gain by giving different salaries for the same job. Again cheaper than cheaper salries for BSC and MSC.Again since they are not that widely accepted as BTECH degrees in IT industry, they will be virtually chained to the same companies with no other choices to make. If one says ” There is always a room for improvement for everyone “… what about these people ??

      “Our educational system is still not upto the mark. IIT has been created for producing people to do research, and we see them doing same job like private people with a want of good CASH.” …
      agreed, the people who joins in IIT are cream layer. But how much contribution is done by IIT’ians in the multibillion dollar software industry. How many IIT’s we have in India, in and around 15 .So around 90% of this multibillion dollar software industry are done by others for the last 20 years. The software work done in the industry can be done by even a private persons, ie, why companies hires from diverse streams of qualified hands to do the software job . But finally even if they do the job, and helps the company to earn money, they will get the blame — in terms of the education. If one coments for his job, then they have to pay more. This is one reason why , many indian companies wont tell the customer feedback to these persons during their salary appraisal.

      This issue more or less look like a labour law problem . There are many law suits regarding labour against Indians/Indian companies in america .

      http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/bias-charge-more-join-suit-against-infosys-in-us/article5248562.ece
      http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/devyani-khobragade-india-diplomat-row

      I think in India there should be laws by similar means “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_of_1963 ” to handle these problems

      http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/tools-equal-pay/checklists-equal-pay-in-practice/
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_pay_for_equal_work

      Another issue is software engineers in india/china/korean are having more slave like working hours,more than 12 working hours.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

      I see another irony here, even though we call US/european as capatalist country and India , china are more like socialist , communist the 8 day work hours are mostly followed by these capatalist nations.They protect the workers rights and value their work .

      If the entreprenurs can get access to global workforce with cheaper wages, protect their monopoly ( even if the invention is marginal or even if it the difference is only verbal ) with patent laws,
      across the globe ,sell their products in any country, can lobby ( sorry the term is still third world in India – “bribe”) politician/senators to form laws like GHATT ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Agreement_on_Tariffs_and_Trade ) and there by controlling NATO/CIA as their henchman to get access to market of different countries,

      and their resources ; why can’t the minimum wages of software / any work force salaries be regulated across the globe; since it is virtually a global world now, the same work done whether it is men
      or women ,white or blacks , US /Indian/Chinese citizens should get the same wages/hour basis.

      ” No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level–I mean
      the wages of decent living. ” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

      ” Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over ” – Henry George

      ” Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. ” – KARL MARX

      • Martin Vahi says:

        Why people in India/China are modern slaves?
        I guess that the reason is that they accept the situation, they do not stand up for their rights. Secondly, the Arab Spring has demonstrated that getting rid of oppressors is not enough. In addition to getting rid of oppressors there must be a build effort to actually GETTING THINGS DONE. Getting THINGS DONE means long-term, calm, planning. If the Indian culture does not allow long-term planning, then the Darwinian laws apply. Not just in terms of life or death, but also in economic terms. That, of course, also applies to Estonians and there’s a lot of things to be done in Estonia in that regard. (I’m an Estonian.)

        Here’s a commercial that, supposedly, got the CEO of the Danske Bank fired:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-pZj_cPBvw

        Well, the reason, why I read this blog post and the comments is that I try to get some sort of an overview of a global market situation to make smarter “career decisions”, to choose my clients in a more informed manner. My moto for years has been: “Because one is not able to walk all paths of life, learn everything, but still forgets a lot from the conscious mind, one has to choose very carefully the next stone in the stream to jump to.”

  52. Shashi says:

    Mr Rozinskiy …..I worked for Global logic which have outsourcing development offices in India, kazasthan and china ….don’t feel development is better in one country than other.Leave it aside
    The topic was india outsourcing is doomed….so my points will be against it.
    1) The head based growth i.e. every 3000-4000 additional employee add a revenue of $ 1 Billion is vaild till next 10 years.
    2) On 11 Apr infosys (3rd most revenue generating IT indian company) presented its result and their profit was
    higher 25% 🙂 .
    3) If US company will be unable to pay high salary of indian IT engineer then the salary will go down in india….its simple demand and supply.
    4) Quality of india IT engineer varies a lot…my batch mate shariq rizvi opened a company “dasient” in 2009 and tweeter buyed it in 2013.
    I think this much is sufficient

  53. Marco says:

    Dear Mr. Rozinskiy;

    As being a manager of an Indian team for a global telecom company based in Delhi, I am sharing most of your points. My last two years of India experience showed me that your article is well founded and several points are clearly understood by many investors.

    India is a very colorful country. Everything is changing second wise, which brings several oppurtunities. Maybe as an oriental / exotic destination , it may be even a nice place for a fantastic holiday. However, proven with my experience I am very confident to say that it is not the best place in earth to invest or outsource. There are several reasons which I will try to add below.

    First and most important cause is the quality of engineers. I am sure most of my Indian friends will say that half of NASA engineers are Indian or many American companies has an Indian CEO etc. A huge bullshit which I laugh loud about. Definetely, with a population of 1.2 billion there will be several wise people, but considering the environment, lack of quality education, lack of technological background, it does not make too much sense. Not suprisingly, only 1 university from India is in the top 500 university list (IISc) according to “thehindu” .

    A comparable outsourcing heaven, CIS countries succeeds to place several of their universities in top 500 list. I will not boost CIS countries for outsourcing or investment recommendation. But even this data may alone show how pathetic quality of engineering knowledge we are discussing about in India.

    New graduate engineers has almost no information regarding their area. But what is worse, they do not have a desire to self-learn and improve their knowledge. If you teach them on how to do a task, they may be able to accomplish it after training. But in my last 2 year of experience, I did not see any of junior engineers to accomplish any additional success else then what is taught to them (exceptional cases may exist). However, I have seen several junior engineers who could not accomplish the given tasks even after trainings provided. Training an Indian engineering team unfortunately requires patience of a saint.

    Even senior engineers continously requires supervision and guidance. Though this is not enough, also requires employee wise followup of given tasks to ensure everything is done on time. Else delays are inevitable and becomes a daily part of business life in India.

    New graduate salaries are starting from 1200$ and going upto 5000$ per annum. The costs may seem very desirable for investors being about 1/10th of developed countries. On contrast, experienced workforce costs are significant higher. Cost of a resource with 7-10 years of experience vary from 12000$ to 30000$ per annum which is not as attractive as new graduates. Salary levels are quadratically booming with the quality of resources and experience.

    Unfortunately even the work of senior engineers are not upto mark with their counterparts in developed countries.

    Also another major problem is the ability to acquire quality resources. They are expensive, but further rare. Any company does not want to lose a quality resource once they catch one and often candidates just use interviews to blackmail their companies for salary increase. On several occasions, after waiting a 3 month notice period, candidate did not even give a call to inform that he is not joining. You can imagine how diffucult it is to make planning in such a harsh environment.

    It is not possible to expect ethically right people in the chaotic environment of India. Employees behaviors are exactly the result of the boundaries that surrounds Indian people. In the recent 2 years, I have terminated more employee than my last 20 years of career. There are several reasons for termination. One of the most frequent reason is that coworkers not telling the truth, they are ill, their relatives die, they need to attend a very important meeting, they are hospitalized, their car is stolen… A lot of excuses , but most of them are just fake… I know in every country there are people who makes excuses time to time, but in my department I have seen engineers who brings such excuses on regular basis like twice a week which make me think they have no respect for the job they have.

    Interestingly most of the employees that got terminated, did not get any further engineering jobs again. This also proves the resource quality related concerns.

    I agree as a global investment, we are not paying high salaries and life in India is not as cheap as someone may think. This may be effecting motivation of our employees, however, I am 100% sure we are paying high enough for the quality of work we are getting and to be on benefit at our investment .

    Corruption is everywhere. Government is corrupt, organizations are corrupt and people are corrupt. You may hear lots of promises, but most of them will not be kept in daily business life. Even delivery of a simple server hardware turns into a challenge which is often available around the world with a blink of eye. Making agreements or any legal work in India is a nightmare. Tricks are hidden at any paper. Even paper work after being corrected, same tricks are getting tried to be added from backdoors. Bureaucracy is horrible till necessary bribes are provided.

    Cultural wise, India is very different than the western world. Not only by the work ethics, also by the relations between people is extremely different. Caste system still exists even among the educated people. The only rule that works in personal relations is the one that stronger side wins which is totally applied in their traffic as well. This is though called as the jungle rule. However as I said in the beginning, for a holiday destination being a part of their culture and lifestyle may be a nice experience, but trying to make business to serve expectations of global clients is very difficult from India.

    My reply may sound so grey about investment and outsourcing, but there are definetely occasions where India is a perfect place to invest. If you are in manufacturing business, like steel or textile, India may be a heaven for you with the strong labour force it is offering. There are other oppurtunities, like running call centers or network operation centers where engineer quality is not so significant, India also gives a charming welcome. However, if you are planning to outsource / invest high technology and higly value included projects to India, think more than twice… In such kind of high technology / high value included projects to be successful, I would suggest to hire 3 x more resources then the requirement of the project. Then your adventure will begin…

    Good luck to all outsources and investors in India.
    Marco

    • srini says:

      you were paranoid about some thing which is not realistic. IBM employees thousands of indian workers. Microsoft, Google has research centers located in Hyderabad. Computer Science corporation has development centers since ages in India.

      You were just talking some thing which is not at all true. You may find cases where your opinion might be true, but in a larger cases you were not true.

      If you are really true, then ideally no Multinational company should have involved with outsourcing in India. I will pose a simple question “If you get poor results with Indian outsourcing industry, why indian industry has grown from <10 billion to 100+billion in less than ten years".

      Honestly, i do not believe what you said is correct in a larger view.

      • Publo says:

        Your logic is flowed, so is your English, by the way. Decision to outsource and the locations choices are mostly made by people that never have to manage people directly. Outsourcing to India makes senses financially. It’s cheap. Actually, not as cheap any more, but definitely cheaper than hiring people in US and Europe.

        I dare you to find any one person who directly managed or worked with a team in India and is interested in doing it again.

      • Marco says:

        Hi Sirini,

        I agree that business investment in India is still profitable though dozens of flaws it has. This is why several global companies are continuing to invest / outsource at India.

        However, the markups of profit is highly questionable due to quality of workforce and stability issues rised by the environment. Considering there are several competitor countries which are seeking FDI, India may not be the right choice most of the time. I recommend you to read Unctad reports to understand foreign direct investment flows and stock. India is only able to attract a small percentage of global FDI which you are boosting as several multinational IBM, Microsoft, Google, Ericsson, Nokia, etc investments. By comparison of 2012 data, India’s net FDI flow is half of Australia.

        There is one reality you are forgetting. We are talking about a country of 1.2 billion. It has growth potential and no multinational company can underestimate value of this market/source. This is why we are here and unless the political stability of India is not in danger, increasingly it will attract more multinational companies. However, it is not because of the great benefits or high quality of workforce India offers.

        I should add one more characteristic of India: here everything is overestimated. Many of the adjectives I hear everyday are: “state of art, booming, tremendous, incredible, amazing” and most of the time when I see the work infront of me makes me feel that “come on guys that is the best you can do?”

        Please stop overestimations of your capabilities and wake up. Definetely there will be another Indian century again as your glorious history, but not sure if it will be the 21st century.

        Till that day, adapt yourself to strong work ethics, increase quality of your work power, build up roads between the skycrappers in your cities. No foreign investment wants to be stucked in mud between two skycrappers 2 km apart for several hours. Also maintain friendly relations with your neighbouring states, and keep an eye on the separatist movements in your country. Noone wants the Indian miracle to be destroyed sooner.

        I know nobody likes to hear the facts and truths, but if dreamy and racist minds do not change soon, I can bet India will have the greatest potential for having largest unemployed engineering force by their early 30 years old.
        Marco

  54. anumolu says:

    I may agree with some points. I worked in three Indian software companies among them two are qualified with CMMI Level5 one with CMMI Level3.

    For my initial project, the client is uk based company, Client used to pay very decent industry standard rates. In my team, i was not exposed to client, ideally client knows only two developers , honestly it’s me who coded most of the development requests, the indian company paid 50 pounds per month, that’s the reality.

    Indian companies use freshers as milking cows, although they say freshers are better off with the training they provide. Honestly, freshers were recruited just to save the cost in the project, and they will be imposed with bond with 2 years or more , so that they can not go else where in the two years, so that they wont make pay-hike, even if that fresher is highly qualified for that.

    Every one thinks, if i get a job atleast for some time after graduation, i can build my career further, here is the point ” If you do not know what you wanted to be, then you will end up like a scape goat in the industry”.

    I am working in a multi national company since last five years, i feel relieved, i get decent pay and there is a good recognition even if you make small contribution.

  55. Alex says:

    Hello …

    I believe that every civilization destined to collapse, the history and practice showed us that from the beginning of the world and humans.. the same.. if India started suddenly nice on the beginnings of the early 80/90 years related outsourcing, for sure, in now days, it is not anymore.

    Therefore, I don’t see anything stranger that India already failed in the outsourcing since long time. By the way .. we are living in 2014 now 🙂

    Coming or jumping instantly on the top level, any one can do – even stupids – can get instant on the top by some of luck, but .. keeping to continue on same level of quality, I doubt any one could do.. except strong qualified structures can succeed.

    If comparing/monitoring the market moves related outsourcing .. note that Indian companies always try to push their offer service to North America, Europe, include UK markets.. for Russia case is completely the opposite 🙂 Russian companies never push their service outside Russia .. considering the very big and sufficient Russian Market – Russia is the biggest country in the world -, what is happening is that Foreign companies seeing practical results of Russian works of extremely high quality, and growing coming up big corporations in this field.. they started to request outsourcing services .. from here comes the big difference.

    Cheerz!

    • Paul Bartlett says:

      There is obviously two slowly converging camps on here, but most has been negative detailing frustrations and failings. Please can some people post some success stories, where good software was delivered on time with some added savings.

  56. Yatin D says:

    The article is well written and is a perspective of an individual who has had a set of experiences. Those experiences translate into thoughts which are well worded within categories that matter the most to any client.

    Now, Do we all believe in a term called “Circle Of Life”? If Yes, then this is bound to happen. It is human nature to keep doing things they are good at. In a section of people you will notice that some lag while others excel. The Indian employee who excels has the right to get paid well and will strive for things better than others. But this is where the circle starts.

    Soon that employee will create many such employees ( assume fair competition) and the work force will soon out price itself. Eventually the sales team selling the employee skills will have to find innovative ways of mix-n-match. Remember everyone wants lower per hour rate right? Once account is sold – and if we less than experienced people the account will suffer. If this continues then the great Indian Outsourcing will suffer.

    But have we not seen this already? American wage out priced themselves against the skills offered so the jobs moved. The Europeans out priced themselves against the level of education. May be India will see the same too.

    As we all know “It is a Circle of Life”

  57. peter aristotle says:

    Hi Indian Managers,

    when you talk about poor performance of indian engineers and their poor educational background except from IITs ,IISC brands/tags , i would like to ask one question to “Indian managers “? .You might be a manager with say “X” years of experience and according to the phrase ‘one year of experience ten times’ , the equavalent experience should be 10 * X, if i rightly understands it. With this experience in software industry, when you go to hire a person ; why can’t you correctly “EVALUATE” the capability of an fresher/experienced engineer ?

    As I know for a fresher , the minimum cut off percentage for appearing entry level examination would be 75%, from reputed engineering colleges in India other than IITs , IISC brands. In that test
    he/she should pass.Then personal interview ; different levels would be there. Then he/she would be given the so called training. In the training period , he should pass every tests above minimum cutoff. So the training offered by Indian companies by highly experienced managers , should make the fresher engineer; a good engineer as per the customers( US/EUROPEAN) standards. Otherwise there would be no meaning to the training offered and the tests that the fresher should pass. In the case of experienced persons there would be minimum 3-5 levels of interviews to get into an indian company.

    So whats stops you from correctly “EVALUATING” the person before you, whether he is the right person for the right job even after all these recruting procedure.
    I am not sure who is smarter here ? the manager and the interview panel who couldn’t correctly evaluate the candidate or the candidate himself. So if a manager has ” years ” of experience and not able to correctly evaluate the person before him, whose problem it is ? . If you find later that the person ,whom you hired is not the right person and decides to fire ; the blame rests on mangers also.Next time onwards such managers shouldn’t be part of interview panel for the new hire.

    When a manager says “years of experience”, it should be more specific whether he/she has been coding & problem solving , architecting the software , people managing or quoting
    projects /bringing projects from the customers. I often see 3 types of managers – technical manager who is good in coding and problem solving. The second one is good in people manager.The third
    one is a political manager. The approches of these 3 managers differs , when an issue is faced by a developer. If the manager is technical he can guide him well but people manager and the political
    manager fails here. The best person to lead a team of software engineers would be a technical manager with good people skills. These guys can most accurately evaluate a new hire , in interviews ,
    most of the time.

    Expecting a fresher to do the job of a 7 year experienced person and at the same time expecting the same quality of the software is irrational in the first place. The political managers mode of
    working is in line with the response ADAM gives to GOD in EDEN garden when every thing went wrong :-

    ************
    Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

    12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

    13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

    The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

    ************

    … passing the blame down in the ladder….”poor software coolies”.

    Now i know why the salary of software engineer coolie is so less :- 🙂
    ———————————————————————————————
    (www.dilbert.com)

    Dilbert’s “Salary Theorem” states, “Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives and sales people.“
    This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two postulates:

    Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
    Postulate 2: Time is Money.

    And, as every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time

    Therefore: Knowledge = Work / Money

    Solving for Money, you get Money = Work / Knowledge

    Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done.

    Conclusion: The less you know, the more you make. (This brings some people to “the dark side”. Finance/Sales)

    ——

    QUALITY: TIP OF THE ICEBERG 🙂
    ————————————————–

    EUROPEAN/US MNC manager :-

    We have a requirement . we want to build a “ROCKET” , with in 1 year to go to MARS.So next year we will be in MARS. As part of our development planthis is our company’s goal at end of first 4 quarters. Out of many prospective offshore INDIAN vendors, you came on the top since you are the most cost effective( not in quality and english spelling, otherwise he has to hire americans which reduces the profit margin ). Are you willing to share in our growth.

    INDIAN manager :-

    Yes sir,I ONLY shares. How much you are paying me in $ ?.we have highly experienced resources ( low cost fresher engineers ) and hardworkers( works more than 12 hours a day ), we can build the “ROCKET” with in the time frame from scratch with added value.
    (have a habbit of not saying “IT CAN’T” since it is negative attitude and it will be a bad impression before the customer)

    INDIAN manager :- You have to built a “ROCKET” with in 1 year.
    INDIAN engineer coolie :- YES,YES,YES sir

    ( have a habbit of not saying “NO” because it is not part of Indian work culture even if he knows ROCKET can’t be built with in 1 year from scratch with the current expertise ; else it may cost his job )

    After 1 year …customer meeting

    EUROPEAN/US MNC manager :- Have you built it ?
    INDIAN engineer coolie :- Yes sir ( shows a “ROCK”. )
    EUROPEAN/US MNC manager :- what about “E” and “T” ?
    INDIAN engineer coolie :- sir they are SALLY !!! , sorry SILENT !!! .
    EUROPEAN/US MNC manager :-

    INDIANs are poor in spelling.They can’t deliver on time.Indian offshore development doomed!!!!
    ( calculates the cost in india vs cost in america ; STILL PROFITABLE !!! GOD’S WAYS ARE MYSTERIOUS !!! )
    we will give you one more chance to finish the project. We are willing to pay , half of the amount as extra . Tell me your crisis mitigation plan

    INDIAN manager :-
    I will fire those responsible engineer coolies .Poor Indian eduction , work ethos ,bloody Indian &#$%!!!! . I will hire new experienced workforce .
    (he plans to hire freshers from ARTS colleges rather than engineering colleges, because it is more cheaper .He can have more appraisel amount in his next salary review)

    EUROPEAN/US MNC manager :-
    I am impressed.But make sure that they know the spelling of QUALITY also.
    (HOPEFULLY NOT THE END …:)

    • Paul says:

      Peter,

      I wish it was like this, but you just need to be involved in the recruitment process to appreciate it. It is nothing like the UK (and probably US).

      In India, the key issues we struggled with were:

      1- About 30% of candidates simply do not turn up for the interview.
      2- For senior roles (>4 years), about 50% of candidates these days refuse to take a technical test! They think they are above this.
      3- About 95% of candidates are really awful (at one time I had about 3 months Java experience, but wrote a very simple test – display and edit a record from a DB!, and I would say 1 in 10 could even do this and only a couple we acceptable).
      4- Candidates are generally just fishing, trying to get a better offer then use to go back to barter with their boss or other offer.
      5- About 20% of applications are completely fraudulent (We interviewed and tested one guy and then when he joined it was a different person!!).
      6- About 75% CVs are massively exaggerated.
      7- When you make a job offer, the candidate often goes incognito and gives you the run around.
      8- About 25% of those who are offered a job just do not turn up.
      9- About 25% of those who are offered have a whole list of issues (mum sick, wife stuck up a tree!) and change the start date.
      10- The number of applicants you get are huge and the filtering process is massive. If you ask for a 4+ year exp C# developer you will get 90% who do not have 4 years experience.

      In my 10 years of offshoring, having recruited hundreds of people, I only ever seen a couple of people who stack up to the quality of UK and US. You have to work with what you can get. With a lot of management and coaxing you can get acceptable results, but bottom line you just have to not look at the code, otherwise you would not sleep at night.

      Paul

      • Marco says:

        Hi Paul,

        Your message has been a nice summary of hiring process in India. Let me put a few small additions to it. In some messages, I have seen that engineer work 12 hours per day, 6 days a week. As working in India as a team manager for the last 2 years, I have to say this is not possible at all. On paper 6 days a week makes sense, but in net hours Indian engineers does not even work half of their assigned work hours. Most of them does not have a work owning feeling or does not feel responsible for the work at all. They continuously need to be monitored on the work they are assigned. This is why most of the time schedules are not met by Indian teams.

        Usual employee motivating methods are not often working here. All of the junior engineers want to be a manager within 5 years, but they do not understand that being manager is not a born right given. It depends on the success of the employee. I have seen many companies are inventing titles to keep their workforce happy. For example, a deputy manager in India can be mapped to a senior engineer in US, or an Indian technical lead can be counted for engineer or max to senior engineer. Regarding the hiring:

        – Around % 50 of the job applicants does not show up in the interview or does not revert back to phone calls.
        – Senior candidates do not want to take technical tests. The ones that accepted to take technical tests are falling % 90 into basic level on online accepted tests. In over 100 candidates who were given an online test for evaluations, the best candidates fall to good level. Even this value is very dramatically shows the education and engineering quality level.
        – I totally agree that % 95 candidates have very less knowledge, but they are unaware of their knowledge level and status. However as not having enough knowledge, their braveness level is opposite which makes disasters often.
        – Candidates are fishing. If they already have a work, then if you select them, first thing they will do is to bargain with their employer and keep you on hold. I have seen several times candidates if they agree with their employer, they will not even answer your call again.
        – If you offer a candidate, bigger title, the likeliness of getting him on board gets bigger.
        – CVs are hugely exaggerated. Most of the time, whatever they heard in their lifetime is written into the CVs.
        – CVs and diplomas are fake. Sounds funny, but this is also the case and very often.
        – CVs and diplomas are not from engineering faculties. Lots of arts, science graduate CVs are coming for engineering job applications.
        – CVs are numerous. You need to screen about 200 CVs to succeed hiring candidate.

        Well these are from my personal experience by directly managing a team of Indian engineers. However as a friend suggested recently, we would really want to know if there are anyone who can tell us a success story in India.
        Thanks,
        Marco

        • Adi says:

          I am curious to know, where did you get all those % values from ?

          • Dr Sekhar Kidambi says:

            Good question Adi. This Macro is having Micro level experience. I can supply the best engineers who can chase their challenges.

            thank you verity much Adi.

            thanks
            sekhar kidambi

  58. peter aristotle says:

    If the following definition is acceptable for MBA guys , Manager guys :-

    Benchmark for “success story of an outsourcing company ” due to Indians = wealth & profit margin generated because of INDIAN software engineers exclusively.

    Please see the balance sheet , exclusivily due to Indian software engineers, for the past 25 years in your company.

    If the following definition is acceptable for Engineers :-

    Benchmark for “success story of an Indian engineer” = Number of lines of code which Indians have written and is still successfully running in worldwide gadgets + How many Intellectual property rights, Indian engineers helped to file for outsourcing companies, which still they are able to make money with.

    ( sorry for the spelling mistakes and coding styles.)

    Please take an account of the world wide gadgets and how much % of code and its replicas , wrote by Indians is still running successfully in it.Also please see the
    number of patents filed by american , uk , korean companies because an indian engineer is behind it.

    For the above two benchmarks i dont have the statistics, but i am pretty sure that a quantitative analysis will favour “INDIAN SUCCESS STORY”

    sincerely , about the future , i don’t know.

    another perspective of outsourcing , please read till the end
    http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/India/Kar-Rabindra-P/The-flip-side-of-outsourcing-to-India

  59. marian says:

    Hello

    I am interested in the comment regarding markups comparable to the US markups such as 25-35%. With fixed costs such as Pension Fund; PTO; additional benefits such as HRA; transportation; education; gratuity act; additional insurances; the cost of doing business etc equates to more than 25 to 35%.

    My question is are you identifying the 25-35% as the Margin and not the markup?

    The Markup is usually the fully loaded cost which includes the employee costs; overhead and profit (margin).

    Please confirm that the markup you reference is the margin.

    thanks

    • peteraristotle says:

      Hi marian,
      if the question is to me, what i meant is in simple terms only . profit margin = revenue – expenditure like CTC ( contributory Pension Fund; PTO; additional benefits such as HRA; transportation; education; gratuity act; additional insurances + also variable component of the salary – which most companies doesn’t pay and kept only to look the salary more bulkier + tax ) + the cost of doing business + overhead etc.
      This could be applicable to indian companies.

      For us/european/korean companies the immediate profit margin( when considering only outsourcing) is the difference between wages/hour for an employee in these countries , (followed by companies themselves or as stipulated by labour laws in these countries ) versus that of indian labourers ( no labour laws for indian IT sector )

  60. AT says:

    Having working in an outsourcing company for close to 15 years at various roles in delivery and sales, I will say there is merit to what Zhenya has documented. In the early days, it used to be a lot different. The outsourcing companies had great talent (when Google, Facebooks of the world hadn’t graced India) and certainly was a big help to companies in US but over the years, the talent pool (in the outsourcing companies – the talent has just drained to other companies) has become very poor. The cost has become high and the blended rate has hardly moved but at the same time there is intense pressure on margins. I quit the company since I didn’t feel we were doing justice to the customers. The employees are the real gems of a software company, but when they turn into a commodity in the eyes of management then there isnt much hope. 15 years ago, the stocks were growing but now with hardly any stocks or options and average at best salaries, I dont think we can expect much. The only “real” value this model provides is cost arbitrage (rest all are smoke and mirrors) and that value too is now too diluted to be of any use.

  61. hari says:

    Software engineer/lead working in India (worked for 2 years in Zurich ), Not every Indian thinks life is better at West, especially in the long run. Good and better are relative. So who ever says all the tallent comes to west and lack of it stays in India is wrong.
    There is some truth in what the writer says. But there are many underlying reasons.

    – Many Indian programmers are not really intrested in support projects, They need Development projects where they can learn a new technology or upgrade (I would be very happy to work in a VS 2012 Dot net project )
    – Many Business functions use Products and Automation (Products are cheaper as copies are sold to multiple Customers) which were not available 5 years ago. So they are not paying for Custom Development (sad for me but good for the customer)
    Ex; Computers replaced accontants and Products (along with Automation) replaced Engineers
    – Becuse of the above reason many Indians are now in Application support
    – Many Support jobs does not require exceptional tallent (with level 1, 2 kind of model)
    Ex; It is common man’s idea that every software Engineer needs to be exceptionally brainy to do his job right. In many cases it depends of the type of job to be done
    – Competion, excess supply of Computer graduates, tendacy to go low cost etc is higher than ever and exceeds demand (demand decreased as Customer IT needs are more efficient due to above reasons not that demand is less)
    Ex; I have worked in a revamp of working website project which was worth half a million USD in 2005. Even I was surprised why they would revamp a working website for such a high cost. The sales guys could easyly rip off customers 10 years ago, But now customer is very smart with cost and ‘to do or not to do’
    – After 2008 companies have reduced their IT budget and increased monitoring, cost saving etc, earlier they dont track Indian developer’s time or estimates and activities like they do now.
    – THis leaves Indian software engineers to work for pittance and sometimes in night shift (there has been less promotion and salary raise ) on avrage during 2008-2014 compared to 2003-2008
    – India is a service provider and not a real product maker, this is cultural thing call it lack of innovation,

    So it not doomed, the industry now serves for low cost as customer became aware efficient and wants to spend less on IT.
    Last, I like your way of describing India with a crowded jeep and snake charmer. Dont hate us, blame ur bosses and politicians who decide to make money by outsourcing at the expense of ur Employment rate

  62. peter aristotle says:

    There is a lot of exploitation in Indian IT/ITES sectors since there are no strict labour laws. The Indian IT sector companies (http://www.nasscom.in/industry-ranking )
    have been lobbying/bribing not to establish Labour laws in IT sector for the past 15 years and it is still exempted from labour laws till 2019. I am not sure whether
    US, UK , French companies will work under the same labour laws. When anybody considers about quality of work done by Indian engineers they have to consider other factors like
    the working conditions ( wages , working hours etc ) in India. I think workers can be motivated but not sure about slaves.

    some articles from last 10 years:-
    ———————————————–

    http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/it-industry-has-to-adhere-to-labour-laws-now/article2978689.ece
    http://www.itecentre.co.in/node/225ou

    ….Working hours … it says 14 hours in IT/ITeS-BPO sector

    http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/nov/26bpo-it-bpo-union-to-file-pil-against-working-hours.htm

    …. BPO sector :- 19th century prisons or Roman slave ships.

    http://www.ritimo.org/article4857.html#intertitre0
    http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/occupational-safety-and-health/cyber-coolies.html
    http://indianeconomy.org/2005/11/08/not-slavery-but-empowerment/

    … a simple narration

    http://socialism.in/index.php/life-in-the-indian-it-industry-high-life-for-the-bosses-low-life-for-the-workers/

    … NASSCOM lobbying and its fear of labour laws in INDIA ( minimum wages, working hours , …etc ) and it has directly or indirectly
    aided EUROPEAN/US/outsourcing companies:-

    http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-11-07/news/43776157_1_manufacturing-sector-labour-law-outsourcing-sector
    http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/5002-it-firms-have-to-follow-standing-orders-are-they-ready

    … NASSCOM success against labour laws for the next 5 years ; till 2019 :-

    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/IT-companies-in-Karnataka-to-remain-exempt-from-labour-laws/articleshow/29719053.cms
    http://www.bangaloremirror.com/bangalore/cover-story/The-honeymoon-is-over-for-IT-sector/articleshow/32680159.cms

    …. in INDIA , unless some miracle happens , NASSCOM will still be able to lobby/bribe Indian politicians
    against establishing labour laws in IT/ITES even after 2019. By the time they establish labour laws, God only knows whether
    IT sector will be there in India.

  63. Marco says:

    Hi all,

    This article is amazing and it makes me revisit it several times as I keep facing most of the points mentioned in it almost daily.

    I would like to rephrase a few parts of the article which is describing how difficult to keep Indian engineers motivated and also put some comments on the quality of Indian engineering education with the help of my personal experience from directly working in India.

    Though always exceptions would exist, most of Indian engineers have a fixed growth path in their minds. As a result of this, their titles are too exaggerated just to keep them motivated. In case they don’t have the growth path vision, simply they are looking for their next opportunity. This is a cultural problem and these growth paths are completely artificial. It is not possible to imagine an engineer reaching a technical lead or architect status with 4-5 years of experience, but that is the case often in India. I have heard some Indian executives joking about this as Indians are best at inventing titles. Even in a small team, you can come across manager, assistant manager, deputy manager, technical lead, architect, senior engineer. Only missing titles are the junior and the engineer. Most of western people are falsified by these titles and assuming they are working with really senior resources.

    Titles are often does not have any real meaning either in experience or with salary relation. Also does not reflect the responsibility set of the engineer. Therefore hiring becomes a real difficulty as the titles are not earned, but given to the candidates where in the job interview they will be bargaining for higher titles.
    While hiring a new resource, the best way is to make candidate go into detailed testing for personality analysis, intelligence testing, language testing and technical testing. With help of these methods, it is only possible to make a successful outcome of an interview. However, still a strong background check is recommended as there are lots of fake documents or stories made up by candidates.

    I would like to add some comments regarding Indian engineering education. There are almost 400k graduates passing out each year from engineering colleges in India. Though the amount of the engineer graduates is massive, the amount of candidates that are lucky to be employed in real engineer jobs is only a fraction of that. My personal experience shows that between 0-5 year range of experience, only %3 of applicants are suitable for a position that requires international standards. I have verified this by merging experience of several other foreign managers that work in India.

    It is possible to conclude that bachelor of engineer degree in India often gives a quality to a 1 year course in West. Time to time, I am having the honor of entertain some trainees in my team from different Indian colleges. I am providing them small projects (like web page design or small scripting tasks), however till now I did not get any successful output from trainee level engineers, but heard millions of excuses. When you are assigning them a task without 100% supervision, they become like rabbit in the dark with light hold to the eye.

    My predictions with the low level of quality, Indian engineering unemployment rates will sky rocket from its current 20% level in the next years and several of the engineering colleges will be closed. Maybe only after explosion of this engineering balloon, a healthy education system may appear in India.

    Marco

  64. RK sharma says:

    I am an Indian who studied at IIT in India and then top US university, have worked in India as well as now I am in USA for a decade, What author is written is 100% true if I look at it neutrally, I see some people like Sudhir Singh trying to sell his services to customers but like one person said it is not 2005 where Indian sales people can say anything and customers will believe, now things have changed.

    But let me give you a very different perspective, think of it in terms of Culture and person go hand in hand and few people are going to shout at me but that doesn’t make me wrong since I am telling is what I have seen, observed and experienced. This also explains a different context as related to work ethics in outsourcing.

    Go to any major corporation in America, in IT field there are only South Indians, that means people from only two state of India, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are controlling IT sector, these people only hire people from their village and community and that is why Americans are being discriminated in America, Europeans in Europe and even other communities in India, please understand the words nepotism and caste system. People from these two states control entire IT industry and they never allow anybody else to get the job, they go out of way to make life of other person difficult. Why H1Bs have taken away all jobs in USA, you hardly see an America in any corporation, reason is an Italian like mafia is being operated where others are not allowed, now people who understand the system knows that Andhra Pradesh (call them Telugu) people started inventing fake resumes in IT, CV is 100% ex-aggregated, there is one trick or another and they talk slowly because brain needs to think one lie after another, Tamil Nadu people (which are referred as Tamils) are usually hyper egoistic people and there style of management is just using threat. In a way US corporations have devalued what ever progress was made in social sciences or HR field in last 200 yrs, CEOs don’t understand the ground reality, they outsource and in reality there is no cost saving either but by that the time results are quantified CEO has taken golden parachute and retired, whether system is working or not is not the problem. This trend continues. Indian companies like TCS (read Tamil consulting services), Wipro (can’t finish the project, I saw 5 of them in major fortune corporations getting shelved and Wipro staff getting fired), Cognizant (opening office in New Jersey doesn’t make company American when entire work force is Indian) promote boot licking and regional favoritism as explained by me. Indians simply can’t innovate because culture doesn’t support it and how long this cheap labor phenomenon based on lies can continue I don’t know.

    Then Indians can’t work with others expect only Indians, after all other people are aware about rights, I was a Program Manager in a largest Insurance company in USA, only 1 white person was in whole group (as one can count Americans on fingers these days, they all have been virtually displaced by Indians due to this culture I explained), when a new Indian joined he fired the white guy on next day, I had argument with this Indian manager that why you are removing only 1 last person in group because he has guts and thinking brain to argue, (Indian like “yes sir and yes madam people”); to hell with you and your slave promotion atmosphere and I resigned and joined another company in USA next day, I hear stories from Indians in India and usually when delivery comes, they start coughing, the girls get periods, my mother is sick is another excuse, I am ill and lot of time I had to fix code, a new excuse is I can’t hear on phone since line is bad, I am getting divorce due to martial problems, there is heavy rain, internet or system not working, VPN was not working etc etc. Testers claim they tested but when we go to admin section of tool , we understand nothing was tested, it is all lie and lie, and those who are going to shout at me, please I am talking about all your favorite Indian outsourcing companies and I have seen both sides of coin including IT sales as well.

    I don’t know for how long this will continue, thanks to greed of US CEOs who just know one thing in name of cost saving and improving efficiency (blah, blah….), outsource everything and lay off people locally.

    There is rampant L1 abuse (intra-company transfer visa abuse done by Indians), H1B abuse and now US government is proposing rule to provide Employment authorization document (EAD) to wives of H1B using which they can work anywhere, so Americans who are working even at McDonald also need to run, such is the unruliness and lobby of Indians now, sometimes I feel bad since no management technique works with Indians, it is all lie after another life. Management was invented by Americans but they don’t know how to counter this trend, neither in America, nor in UK or Europe.

    Below is the proposed rule link which is open for public comments and again my fellow Indians are bullying their way to get this rule passed, there are lot of sobbing stories asking Obama administration to pass this rule, only few Americans are commenting against it, afterall who can match 1 billion and two hundred twenty million people.

    http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=USCIS-2010-0017-0001

    I really don’t get it, Americans and Europeans don’t understand or what is the problem ? First thing is American CEOs need to put few Americans or even people from other part of India or Russia etc in teams, this culture monopoly needs to be broken

    • Marco says:

      Sharma hi,

      Nice response back for the articles. Most of the Indians I know in Delhi region are far away from accepting the truth about India and engineering skills. They are living in their dream world like current glorious Indians are building spaceships, nuclear bombs, skyscrapers , being the largest democracy etc. where most of their people are living total poorness in streets or villages with inhuman conditions.

      As you mentioned, all problems are rooting toward the cultural background of tribal life and caste system. Though the costs cuttings are looking very nice on paper to global CEOs, in reality no one is able to achieve this. (there are exceptions surely) Also the annoying of customers is a free bonus for all the investments and outsourcing done to India.

      There is no work ethics in India. Every ethical point is corrupted. Indian people are usually naming this as freedom. People and workers are not respecting each other. How could a community be so rude to each other, I cannot imagine. The only way to unite Indian people is against foreigners. This is the point where racism comes into picture.

      Even two Indian colleagues do not understand each other. Same task could be misunderstood on different ways than actual task by two different employees regardless of however you explain them, written or verbal or both ways.

      There is a lot way for India to catch up with modern world both at corporate and at democracy quality. Hopefully, your country will find a way out in both succeeding at engineering discipline and also being a friendly nation to the world.

      Development starts when you accept the reality. Nice reading:
      http://www.sabhlokcity.com/2011/01/lets-get-this-very-clear-india-is-definitely-a-third-world-country/

      Marco

      • RK sharma says:

        Hi Marco,

        I totally agree to things you are saying and I have explained things in perspective from my end, we Indians can’t take criticism and bring patriotism or ego whenever someone is saying truth, but I wonder one thing, will this outsourcing trend continue for ever, I see banks, insurance companies, retail companies giving away everything to Indians,( a lie that Americans lack STEM education is so popular that lie has become a truth now even in minds of administration, and Americans, Europeans invented everything, if we leave thousand years back inventions like zero etc by Indians out of discussion, that was ancient India which no doubt was prosperous but was not able to save itself from invasions and subjugation of Mughals first and Britishers later, one of the indirect reason for slavery culture) projects don’t get delivered, quality is shoddy, every one has memorized few lines like , quality will be delivered, we will improve bottom-line, system performance will be optimized and some buzz words here and there, just 15 days back I was interviewing H1B candidates for open positions and resumes were forwarded by TCS and Cognizant, people literally don’t know anything more then spelling of java, whatever they hear to in life, or from friends or anywhere else, they put everything on resume and staffing agencies got so corrupted in USA that these HR people are promoting this nonsense by just searching keywords. HR people have also read few books on psychology and are more interested in checking if face is tilted or not during interview, people are just lying and surviving.

        I wonder in atmosphere where liars make big claims, work can be done cheaper at-least in theory in India, or China, what will happen to future generations of Americans, Europeans, UK, Canada etc, they will just leave on welfare or what ? may be time will tell but no economist talks on these lines, every one is happy in propagating a propaganda and when one country has 17.4% population of planet, one CEO of Microsoft doesn’t mean much, neither one Vinod Khosla means much or some other names, every country can throw few names.

  65. peter aristotle says:

    Innovations are not at all happening in India ???

    If we equate Innovations done by indians to number of patents filed because of Indians ; the trend is on the rise.
    The following links will give an idea of number of patents filed by MNC and also indian companies, because of indians.
    Ofcourse Indians are not the first in filling patents, but also they are not the last.

    Links for past 3-4 years:-

    patents filed because of Indians :-
    ——————————-
    ……. the total number of patent applications from India was estimated to be 37,000 and In 2012, it had hovered around 34,000.
    http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/weekend-life/the-rise-of-thce-patent-brigade/article4006171.ece

    ….. in 2012 India ranked 7th in the world , for filing patents.More than that of Russia , canada and australia.
    http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/newdelhi/china-patent-office-world-s-biggest-india-at-7th-rank/article1-983361.aspx

    ….. patents filed by indian companies in 2013.
    http://www.livemint.com/Companies/1ZIgnGcKBiiMlOJIAKNhUI/Indian-technology-companies-sharpen-focus-on-patents.html

    Indian government is not allocating much fund on research programs as other developed countries.Thats one of the reasons why india is lagging behind other countries and ofcourse beuracracy and high attitude of professors in IIT and IISC ( Phd research students often face difficulty under them ).When Indians are getting an oppurtunity in MNC and Indian companies, where they can have financial support and the right work atmosphere, they can deliver. Despite little financial support , the trend of filing patents in India is on the rise. Indians are behind many patents ,filed in germany and also in US.

    Other than zero, two remarkable inventions by Indians in past 200 years. During that time India was not a third world but a slave country.

    One is Rocket/Missile technology :-
    ———————————————–

    Not every discovery was done by UK and US. This one uk copied from India, 200 years ago from a south Indian king Tipu Sultan’s army of Mysore .
    From uk , us and russia copied and ofcourse they moved that invention to new sky level.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysorean_rockets
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congreve_rockets
    http://twocircles.net/2012dec30/tipu_sultan%E2%80%99s_world%E2%80%99s_first_missile_rocket_gets_due_recognition.html
    … even NASA acknowledges it.
    http://archive.asianage.com/india/history-s-rocket-man-tipu-sultan-gets-his-due-228

    Mysore rockets were the pioneers in modern world wide missile and space launching vehicles.The idea originated from one of the dravidian states of southIndia , just 3 hour journey from IT hub bangalore.

    second one is in the field of Radio waves :-
    ————————————————————

    IEEE recognised J.C Bose as one of the Founding Fathers of radiowaves,but he was the pioneer.

    J.C Bose (jagadesh chandra bose) :- pioneer in wireless communication (not marconi)
    ———————————-
    http://www.minhas.net/culture/indianpeople/jcbose.htm
    http://www.facebook.com/notes/ravi-shankar-chavali/who-invented-radio-marconi-or-jagadish-chandra-bose-/471023366263784
    http://web.mit.edu/varun_ag/www/bose.html
    https://www.cv.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html
    http://www.facebook.com/notes/ravi-shankar-chavali/who-invented-radio-marconi-or-jagadish-chandra-bose-/471023366263784
    http://web.mit.edu/varun_ag/www/bose.html
    http://bic.boseinst.ernet.in/founder.html
    http://www.humantouchofchemistry.com/jagdish-chandra-bose.htm

    Today’s technological development based on radio waves -: radio , TV ,wireless satellite communications, internet , mobile phone, GSM,GPS has its roots to
    the experiment done by an J.C Bose in west bengal, West India . Putting satellites to orbits using launching vehicles , its roots is in the rockets of Tipu sultan from south India . The only mistake J.C Bose did was that he didn’t filed patent and Tipu sultan’s engineers don’t even know about patents and they were busy in war with britian in 1800.

    In short … for the very internet in which some says that , India is a third world country ( Indians doesn’t care about it – whether they are 3rd or from 4th ) , lack innovation, they should first THANK INDIANS because they contributed in putting a foundation to it when they were slaves. If one want
    to appreciate these inventions ,take rockets and wireless technology out of development of internet s/m.

    • Marco says:

      I just passed over the links you shared:

      1st link is having a virus, therefore I skipped it.
      2nd link shows indian patents has fallen from 3.5% to 2.5% on global level from 1990 to 2011. (going backwards ?)
      3rd link shows how many patent applications TCS, Wipro or Tata has done in 2013. Do you know that General Electric alone files more than 2000 applications every year? Also General Electric has opened to public 30.000 patents that it owns.

      Other links, I will not comment, but thanks for the fire crackers and mighty festivals of Diwali and Holy that Indians bring to world.
      Cheers,

      • peter aristotle says:

        a short summary of the first link ;-

        In 2011, the total number of patent applications for in India was estimated to be 37,000, .
        In 2012, it had hovered around 34,000.

        In 2011, 400 patent applications were filed by GE globally that have contributions from GE India.
        The world’s largest technology company, IBM set a record in 2011 as its inventors recorded 6,180 patents in areas like commerce, shopping, medicine, transportation amongst others. While IBM does not give out patents generated out of geographies, it said that IBM inventors who reside outside the US contributed to more than 26 per cent of the company’s 2011 patents.

        Another technology major, Philips, filed 210 patents out of India primarily in healthcare. “Inventions have been made in the areas of clinical decision support, image processing, signal processing,

        thermoregulation methods for incubators, pregnancy monitoring are being worked from the Bangalore centre,” said Viswanathan Seshan, Head, Intellectual Property & Standards, Philips India.

        Networking giant Cisco’s engineers managed to get about 68 patents from India. similarly, Chinese competitor Huawei’s Indian R&D centre was involved in development and delivery of high-end telecom

        software platforms, components, applications in the areas of next generation networks, data communication, unified communications, network management, optical network, mobile handset software

        amongst other areas.

        Kulbhushan Misri, Head, Analog, IP, Sensors, Freescale Semiconductor India said that the company has filed over 200 patents in sectors like automotive, networking, industrial and general consumer.

        Apart from driving global projects the India centre was instrumental in developing solutions specifically for the Indian market such as developing new chips that incorporate vehicle safety, infotainment,

        and telematics. Telematics is a technology that uses IT and communications in an integrated manner in cars and other vehicles.

        Indian companies in 2011-2013
        ——————————

        Infosys, for example increased its patent filings by 50 per cent in FY12 fiscal over previous fiscal. During the 2012 fiscal, the company in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said

        that it filed 143 unique patent applications in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Indian Patent Office. Competitors, TCS filed 43 patents in 2011, Wipro filed 8 patents.

        Others like HCL Tech and Cognizant still have some catching up when it comes to patents, according to a recent Barclays Research

        Privately held Ittiam Solutions in the FY12 fiscal crossed $20 million in revenues with royalty income contributed to more than 35 per cent of its revenues. “So far we have been granted 30 patents

        and another 30 patent filings are under review,” said Srini Rajam, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Ittiam Systems. The company comes up with new IP in areas like automotive infotainment,

        communication and broadcast technologies

        —> Ittiam solutions is now acquired by US MNC Broadcom in 2014.

        Raja Krishnamurthy R&D Head, 3M India and Sri Lanka said that the India centre received 14 patents in 2011 in areas like adhesives, polymer processing, acoustics, surface modification, specialty

        materials, nanotechnology. 3M sells products in healthcare, industrial and transportation, display and graphics (like hoardings) in India.

        About GE , well GE has been the leader and has been in the industry for years and they have the leading edge – common sense.
        They can have well funded R&D, but behind that many indian employees will be there.The link clearly explains it.
        The importance of Patent filing in India, has been on the rise. Of course there will be fluctuations. I think in the next ten years , there will be a clear direction ,in which way indian companies
        will go.

      • peter aristotle says:

        the full GE story:-

        India a focus area for patents, says GE in 2011
        http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/india-a-focus-area-for-patents-says-ge-111071600011_1.html

        GE india filed 1850 patents from india in the last decade ; 30 GE products made in India and looking forward to similar number in 2015

        http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-11-22/news/35300603_1_ge-s-india-ge-india-technology-ge-plans
        http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/jobs/GE-to-hire-engineers-for-RD-jobs-in-India/articleshow/17324497.cms

        The share of foreign companies in US patenting by Indian inventors has gone up from a modest 16% between 1995 and 1999 to 67% between 2006 and 2010.

        Utility patents filed out of India R&D centres of MNCs have risen from 481 in 2006 to a whopping 1098 in 2010.
        http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-01-07/news/36192629_1_mnc-r-d-patent-filings-patent-applications

    • Marco says:

      Also one more minor addition regarding the 3rd world country comments that is previously done. I hope it does not hurt feelings of my indian friends, but we are talking about a country where in center of their capital Delhi there are about 10 power cuts in average daily. At suburban or villages, probably there is only 10 times electric in a month.

      Water from the tap is flowing with color of brown in Delhi (is it from river Ganj?) But thank God, at least water flows from tap at Delhi, that is considered a luxury at most parts of country.

      Sewer system is open (I think many people have hard time to imagine this because I have never seen it anywhere same) This time of the year, you can not imagine the smell in the city due open sewer system. However, still thank God, at least Delhi has this open sewer system. According to Telegraph article, half of india does not have sewer system at all.

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8859987/Half-of-Indias-cities-have-no-piped-water-or-sewer-systems.html

      India has the largest middle class of 250 Million in the world, but with a small exception, here the middle class counts for people who can purchase a cell phone or tv set.

      My two years of experience is enough for me to have a permanent idea regarding India, and investment conditions in India. Maybe 20-30 years later things may change, but there is not any favorable investment conditions for now.

      good luck for any adventurers.

      Marco

  66. RK Sharma says:

    Check the paper “The rise of South Indians: Invisible dimension in decline of jobs for Americans in US economy [Kindle Edition]” on Amazon.com

    It will clear doubts of everybody who is working or wants to work in IT industry and provides practical tips to others as how to survive in this onslaught, the author has shared ground reality as what goes on in market and how Indians or specifically South Indians starting ruling IT industry.

    http://www.amazon.com/The-rise-South-Indians-Invisible-ebook/dp/B00KQ4GMJ8/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1401823007&sr=8-5&keywords=the+rise+of+south+indians

    • peter aristotle says:

      ….. let me guess 🙂 a north indian aryan brahmin RAMA endorsing US big brother , to kill south indian brainy (ten headed ) dravidian rakshasan RAVANAN.( which includes tamils who are against brahmins and telugu ).

      http://thelondonreturnjournal.blogspot.in/2013/11/why-are-south-indians-so-smart.html#!/2013/11/why-are-south-indians-so-smart.html

      … some discussions about migration to america.
      http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/2009/02/11/let_the_brainy/

      one thing is true , it is difficult for a south indian to work with a north indian for the following reasons :- they are more dominative and markets better and south doesn’t like it . They are more “talkative” , “noisy” and it helps them in doing less work.They usually try to speak in HINDI rather than ENGLISH in work places which provocats south indians.

      Literacy of north india versus south.
      —————————————————

      http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/north-india-vs-south-india-who-is-doing-better-report-says-south-india/1/269761.html
      http://www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/literacy-rate-in-india.html

      http://www.gnu.org/education/edu-system-india.html
      http://www.path2usa.com/forum/showthread.php?1925-North-India-vs-South-India/page3

      …… just googling will give more links about the difference in education between south indian and north indian.

      some history :-
      ——————–

      India is divided by North indian aryan brahmin and even had ideological contribution to 2nd world war:-
      ————————————————————————————————-

      HITLER took the aryan brahmin ideology in his heart and the world had its 2nd world war:-

      During world war 2nd we saw how civilised first worlds – britians (uk) , us , russians , and germans ( aryan Hitler ) , japan loved each other.Even India was dragged into it. The 2nd world war , graveyards will speak the stories. Many love stories were exchanged between germans and jews.
      We all know it and no need to speek further. May be Human resource management evolved better in 2nd world war.

      It can be summed up in Mark Twain’s words :-

      Mark Twain. “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”

      … INDIA is in divided state because of north indian aryan “BRAHMINS” and their “MANUSMRITI” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Indian_caste_system)
      and not only because of moughals and british .Moughals put an end to many evils of brahmin spread religion but of course its not hinduism and its brahminism.
      The Hinduism followed in india before 4th and 5th century AD is different and caste system was checked by buddism till its extinction from india.Brahmins invented caste system like patent system to get land, cow and women( of any caste but men are untouchables ) without doing any useful work.The “BRAHMINS” are more in north india, one of the reasons for backwardness in north india.-Caste system is more prevalent there.

      British played a big role in dividing india in the name of Hindus and Muslims;; India and PAK had 3 wars after that :-
      —————————————————————————————————————–

      British put seeds to divide india in the name of Hindus and Muslims ( simon commission).
      http://secularafrican.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/hindu-muslim-divide-british-invention-or-british-complicity/
      http://historyofislam.com/contents/the-modern-age/the-partition-of-india/
      Britsh looted India and have grown rich. (http://www.kohinoordiamond.org/ ) ; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor) and
      (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27529905 )

      Britians divided india and ruled like brahmins but were better than north indian bramins, because North indian Brahmins divided india thoroughly.

      Positive side of British invasion :-
      ——————————

      But for the good things that british brought to india, they should be thanked for .They united India. What ever development seen in India is directly or indirectly is due to british and americans.
      Even Indian parliament is built by British.The IITs and IIMs were made in model in top US universities with the help of US government .British brought some human justice in India.
      The good things that british did especially in terms of human rights and human development, weighted more than their bad things. Slavery in india as spread by brahminism was
      abolished, even though these acts were due to british & german christian missionaries .

      ….. the irony is , kerala state a dravidian south Indian state is having highest literacy rate in India and the living standards , often compared to
      that of europeans and the credit goes to UK/British & german christian missionaries.

      • RK Sharma says:

        This power point with voice narration sums it nicely that how South Indians (Telugu and Tamils), hopefully now they will face competition from Telangana ( a new state bifurcated out of Andhra Pradesh) basically gained such an edge in IT and skills or knowledge is very small component of the equation, the real story is different. Global citizens needs to learn it fast before it is too late

      • Sudhir Singh says:

        So, this where this blog is finally leading to. The recipe of Peters latest post is 100% close to the explanations that communists who hate Indian culture gives. The famous Aryan dravidian divide a history that has ever since been proven wrong, but satisfies the ego of those who work against India,who feae Indian power.

        Time are never same any where. Some facts for writer.

        1. South Indian was no where in comparison to states about 30 years ago. The Northenr states of UP, Punjab etc. and west Indian states of Maharastra and Gujarat were on top.
        2. Southern states increased their technical manpower by establishing number of engineering colleges both in Govt. and Pvt. sector. In north untill last 10 years or so the only option was IIT and what aere now known as NITs. So when IT industry startedd to grow they gained the most.
        3.Although we do not want to discuss cast at least in such forums, yet brainy manpower with hisest IQ in south is mostly what is known as Ayran Brahmins not draividians.
        4. Ravna was a Brahamin. His mother belonged to North and his Guru too. He was a great Shiva Bhakta.

        I have said time and again here. This Blog is a meeting point of Indian Bashers and the points they raise are totally flawed or biases or their mind. It serves only an Anti-India Interest group.

        If some one is interested in details of Indian culture and history can contact me.

        Sudhir Singh

      • Archie Leach says:

        Why are you using the western “Peter Aristotle” when your atrocious english makes it clear you are indian?

  67. Marco says:

    To be honest and frank, I am still waiting from investors and outsourcers to revert back on recently asked question of telling good business experiences they ever had in India. Could anyone give any examples of projects that are successfully done on time without delay, with high quality of coding and documentation? Also please share your experience on how easy it was to manage the project with Indian engineers from human resources perspective. Finally, how much of your targeted cost savings turn to achievable?

    Senior resources (6-7 years of experience) who seek around 20.000 USD per annum is unaware of internationally accepted software standards, usually solo performer and only performs acceptable according to weak norms. Junior resources who seek around 3.000 USD per annum are even unable to code down hello world and request their employer to teach them 🙂

    I don’t think anybody who has done business in India once, wants to take the same way again. Even giant MNCs are considering or already in process of leaving the country as they face significant quality issues with resources, continuous delays, corruptness, unpaid balances and discrimination they have seen over local companies. Foreign direct investment levels to India are deep down in the list of FDI list, comparable to Australia or so only.

    Though if you have the time and the nerves, there could still be a minor higher profit margin than competitor countries. However I recommend try your chance in China, go for Russia, go for Estonia, go for Belarus, go for Turkey, go for Brazil or Mexico… But keep away from India. Your achievements and success will be much higher and you will preserve lots of nerves. At least your clients will not turn their noses up at you when you explain your product is developed at India. I will not explain all the reasons once again; anyone can read from my previous comments.

    Good luck,
    Marco

  68. VJ says:

    I did graduate school in the US and worked in the us and Canada before returning to India. Only when working for a major Indian SI, did I realize that all my professionalism and passion was created by my time in the US. Apart from the issues mentioned in this blog, one major problem in Indian companies is nepotism. Friends and family hired as senior managers using fake doctorates, fake degrees, experience, etc. There is so much cheating that one almost thanks the US for saving one’s soul!

    I am writing this from a small phone. Still trying to not make spelling or grammatical errors. The Indian-trained managers will never spend effort for this diligence. before posting, I am checking visually for any punctuation errors. An Indian-trained professional will never do that. Every RFP response, every presentation, had to be rewritten by me.

    Even when they are told by an American client about communication problems, they will not ask the American-educated staff for tips. Childish.

    • Adi says:

      “The Indian-trained managers will never spend effort for this diligence.”

      Meaningless generalisation. (Where did you say you got your education from ?)

      ” before posting, I am checking visually for any punctuation errors.”

      Look at the small “b”, you Mr Perfect English.

      On a side note, there is high chance that your obsession with punctuation errors and spelling mistake is due to your lack of incompetence.

  69. Aseem Gauam says:

    About me –
    I am an entrepreneur, self taught programmer. I run a small software start-up (www.practicalfish.com) from Delhi.

    I feel for all the bad experiences. In my opinion both Indian companies and people outsourcing to India are to blame. There are many who expect 75% cost savings and same quality of work. Doomed for sure. Then there are some non technical managers, CEO’s who have no idea how to validate engineers/firms on skills, experience, expertise, capability etc. Doomed for sure.

    CEO’S just care about $$$. No one gives a shit about quality of delivery. There are only deadlines. That’s the only quality check.

    Our culture is to blame as well. From an early age of 6-7 kids start tuition. There is a spoon feeding culture. There is no self learning or motivation towards to get better at what you do. 95% of the engineers are there by CHANCE and not by CHOICE. Due to this most of the workforce is not passionate about their work. As time passes by efficiency decreases, everyone wants to become a manager. Just sit on your a$$ and do nothing.

    Another perspective –

    I would insist every one to read – The Mythical 5% by Bruce Eckel – http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=221622

    India has around 2.5 million developers. Its very hard to find the top 5%. Outsourcing does save costs but it takes an hell of an effort to find the right bunch of people who will get the job done. With cultural issues the lower 50-75% developers are below average. The good ones usually don’t want to work for startup or small companies due to cultural reasons (parents force their kids to work for a MNC etc).

    Cheers,
    Aseem

  70. sushrut says:

    Well people do talk a lot here …no offence…… The thing is (my opinion) …. software …is bound to have bugs or whatever….even Facebook app of android has been through upgrading and improvement and stuff….. (there is no perfect software…to be frank) .People in India work with the best of their ability on any given project…in payscale of pennies…. (observe closely on salaries.)…And if you think you need more quality…go ahead …hire resources from UK or whatever.Plus I also saw something related to people from India wanting to go to US ultimately.Well common guys seriously? …… Educated people talking such stuff?

  71. Marco says:

    Sudhir,

    You are the living embodiment of typical Indian. I enjoy to read your comments very much. They do not annoy me at all, I learnt to smile and pass after living 2 plus years in India.

    However, continue with your good work, I am sure you can find several western companies who can believe India is the right destination to outsource or invest.

    Marco

    • Sudhir Singh says:

      Marco,

      Your understanding is very wrongly placed. I have worked more in International and cross-cultural settings.

      Even do India Advocacy, I do not paint stereotypes for any culture. All destinations have their own specific advantages.

      Enjoy

      Cheers.

      Sudhir

  72. TheWellWisher says:

    I agree completely to this. The reason behind off-shoring projects , be it to India , Hungary ,Czech Republic or Phililppines is the result of corporate greed and the primary victims are existing employees.
    I am an Indian software programmer who have worked for many top US banks and health care companies.When you say that Indian programmers don’t understand the whole picture you should ask yourself what caused it.Most of the time we are given vague or unclear requirements by our onshore Business Analysts .When I used to question them or ask for more documentation they would either say that this is all we have .They were also very reluctant to share documentation because they were under the constant threat of replacement. They always used to think that if some one in offshore learns about the entire system they would loose their job.

  73. Adi says:

    || Resource Availability ||
    “Even if you find someone you’d like to bring into your project from outside it will take you 2-3 months”

    Think about it from the other side. How would you like it if a competent employee leaves your project with 15 day notice period ? Will you be happy ? You may want to reconsider this argument.

    || Resource Quality ||

    Most of the companies outsource their repetitive mundane work to India. You can’t expect quality resources to be happy with such kind of work. The quality of the people you get depends on the quality of the work you outsource.

    || Employee turnover ||

    Very good point. I encourage everyone to ask these questions before making a decision.
    {Well, 50% is very unlikely}

    || Time zones ||

    I agree that communication can be an issue to some extent different time zones. But it is not a serious problem by any means.

    || Mindset and work ethics ||

    “Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate.”

    Only when you push the regular mundane work to India.

    “Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little.”

    Perhaps you should find out what is blocking them instead of simply complaining about it.

    “They will not say no”

    True with many Indian managers. But there are people who say “No” clearly. However, many clients seem to like the idea of hearing “yes”.

    || Cost ||

    I have noticed similar practices in some cases. I don’t think such practices are very common.

  74. Prakash says:

    Some of your comments are partially true(refering to management, freshers etc), but not all of them
    dont consider all the Indian software developers/programmers are just the same.
    I worked for one of the Top Oil/Gas company based out of Houston(cannot provide the name because of NDA). Since we absorbed
    quickly the client process, product and ability to deliver the product they gave direct contract to my employer,
    (ofcourse we had right management -technical, managerial team that directed us in the right direction).
    Being a lead handling the team who worked from India initially it was a rough road(for most of us) since the client earlier knows
    the technical team who is about 35-45 years old now replaced by 1/2 of the earlier team size of resources from India who are 24-27 years of age.

    It took approximately 2-4 months for them to approve that “these guys can infact deliver the same quality product”. Though we deliver
    quality product we too had our weekness, I was not having very good English communication skills (though i am a good developer),
    because My client manager gave me chance to improve myself i am still in US and now working for one of the major sports and entertainment company.
    “Also to mention the contract would have been turned over back to the earlier vendor if we would not have performed well”.
    (Every big fortune 500 company has this clause or something similar)
    We resolved the timezone issues by making offshore team worked on UK Timezone, while I am at US CST timezone,
    I would take care of dealing with requirements from East Asia/Australia client users in the evening US time,
    this model still works even today without flaw for that client.
    Not to mention i(we) have laughed at and fixed at some of the worst product code written by previous developers(from previous vendors)
    all of them are from USA.
    Any interview you attend for the technical interview team will definitely include 2-3 people from Indian Origin, why because they
    know how to select the best candidate for the job.
    India is not far behind, the next product like google or facebook will definitely come out of India in another 5-10 years.
    Useless developers will be everywhere, we or the team responsible have to find the right candidate for the right
    job by properly validating their knowledge interviewing them.
    Cheers…

    • RK Sharma says:

      Please don’t lie, there are 2-3 Indians in selection committee because it is all Indians everywhere, have you read the book

      amzn.to/1oTuFNJ

      Also don’t tell me Indians can make good hiring decision, they are nowhere in management shoes and wherever they are, they fail to deliver, Indian culture is culture of only take and take and management is an art where you need to groom resources and to some extent stay happy watching their success, Indians can’t do any of this no matter how hard they try. Cut throat competition, regionalism and rivalry, caste-ism and so many issues along with years of slavery first from Islamic invasion and later on from Britishers is root cause of this. All Indians are very egoistic whenever someone speaks truth. Look at US market, South Indians hire only South Indians, and this has nothing to do with merit. I have worked for Wipro and I have seen 5 projects getting scrapped during my tenure with them, so you can speak all you want from your high horse, main thing is Indians are very good at making fool of US CEOs and hence outsourcing business is booming and yes some Americans are culprits in aiding this boom because of their nonsense attitude of not working, speaking work- life balance and bookish terms from psychology books, concepts which are mostly laughed away by Indians. US recruiters don’t even return phone calls because they are busy and bottom-line is if Americans were so hard working, Indians won’t have been imported to US to do the work (cheap labor or what ever you want to call it) neither would have all work moved to Indian shores. But I think now people are realizing what Indians are doing, especially nepotism and lies, fake degrees, fake resumes, fake experience is one of the most common problems in USA practiced by Andhra people and hyper sensitive shouting of project managers from Tamil Nadu people, well that is why they will never recruit American. Only another Indian will lick shoes of these people to stay in job, Americans can’t do it. So USA is writing its own demise as far as technology industry is concerned. US is taking wealth of its middle class and giving it all to Indians.

      • peterparker says:

        Even those Indians who have studied from IIT and work in big technology houses also are no where near the management. So it is clear, Indians are used as work horses and indian engineers are nothing more than labours in the software factory of work. On that work part, innovation etc, it depends, engineers are there just to solve a problem, what sort of problems are thrown at them is the decision of management. Indian corporates don’t throw challenging assignments at indian engieners, hence, we see that most of us end up doing run of the mill low level enterprise software.

  75. IndianmovedtoUS says:

    I have worked in both Indian outsourced environment and US in house development. One thing I can tell you from my personal experience is on average, Indian developers are graduates and have IT background while American developers, BAs and PMs are wannabes. They work in different industries and switched to IT to make money. In Wipro, while we were working on CMM level 5 processess, in US, there is no concept of quality control. Most of the US in house projects never get completed. Stats can be taken from PMI.

    Because of the pressure to deliver to the client, Indian IT companies strive best to deliver. I have worked on Wipro fixed price projects where we have worked 12 hours a day for months to deliver to the client. Can you expect that from US employees and in US projects? US employees are pampered and do not have commitment to the project.
    Again, this is my personal experience and do not draw any conclusions based on that.

    • Paul says:

      This is not my experience, but I can relate to what you’re saying.

      In general, I have found US guys very dedicated and very hard working. But they work smart and don’t waste time. They drop something if it is no good. And they do not waste their time on unnecessary process and paperwork.

      On the other hand, I have found with Indian offshoring, because they have a contract they have to complete to get the money, they will work the 12hrs a day you mentioned, regardless. If it means delivering rubbish they will do so, whereas in the US they do not need to.

      At the moment I am working with a team of US guys and several of them are working 12+ hrs. It’s midnight and they’re still working to hit the deadline (and so am I). I am working on something written in India many years ago and it is a copy/paste dog that we are trying to patch up (it was written by a BIG Indian company).

  76. ex TCS and Infosys Tech Lead says:

    Outsourcing is not saving US Coprs any money (or time since time is money).
    Maybe 10-15 years ago Indian IT consulting companies cost less, but now these companies charge their clients $40 to $60 an hour for base developers and $100 to $180 an hour for tech leads and architects. The Indian consulting companies provide only a few of these higly paid workers Tech Leads and Architects and a few BAs who cannot even write down their names and the savings comes with having the base developers back in India. But here is the catch, the Indian consulting company still charges high dollars for the developers in India. That range is $40 – $60, but pays way less to these employees in India. The Indian employees that come to the USA with workaround visas are paid between $20 to $35 an hour while in the USA which is a huge bonus for them. But to be able to get to the USA they have to build up the right env back home and kiss managers A$$.
    I do not want to get too much in details, but I do not see how USA corps save money with outsourcing through big indian consulting companies. At the end 40$ – $60 is not cheap for base developers, $100 to $180 for Tech Leads. Also, the rework, low quality of work and the time that takes to deliver the product as expected …. Outsourcing only benefits indian IT consulting companies full of low quality workes. I would say only 5% to 10% are really skilled. The rest are in the business to make money, survive and get by. Oh In response to Indians working 12 hours a day. That is pure BS. They look like they are working 12 Hours a day, but in reality their productive hours are 5 to 6 hours max. They just want to look like they work hard. Funny thing isn’t it. And all that CMMI certifications are just to show off their clients to get the contracts lined up. Lying is also a big issue with Indian contractors. They literally killed te joy if being an IT employee in the US. I wish luck to whomever would like to venture with these junk IT outsourcing firms and patience to the once that are already working with them.

  77. Raj says:

    Lots of educational experiences on this page.

    Too bad its also sinks into racism. Also not surprised about rootless Indians pouring out their inferiority complex. Somewhat disappointed with Russian racism towards Indians but that too is a response to their own sense of inferiority towards Americans – a post 90s phenomenon! Sure many Russians are excellent coders, but they need to work on their mindsets! Snakecharmers and overfull jeeps just made me laugh. Brought the author down to the Pakistani level!

    Those who have had bad experience with Indian IT companies is a result of their own bad communication skills, inability to put the deliverables into a contract and to space those out appropriately. One should always first test the outsourcing company with a smaller project, and use that to build up the system of collaboration and trust. Also if possible embed one of your own developers into the team who has done some initial work on the project to give guidance to the rest.

    Those who want better results, work on your communication skills, management skills and leadership!

    India isn’t going towards doom. India has just reached the next level where it is about to kick some serious technological and economic ass! Those who are over-enthusiastic to write our obituaries, they will be seriously shocked!

    Sudhir Singh and Michael Young,
    good sensible posts!

    • rajsingh says:

      Ever heard of the LCA project? It was a grand project conceived by the government of India, on which billions of dollars were spent on salaries to individuals like you (yes, exactly like you) , salaries, benefits, cars, secretaries 🙂 pensions and big houses, all with tax money from an impoverished country. The LCA project was to build a Light Combat Aircraft so that India would not need to continue spending huge chunks of GDP on foreign arms suppliers. The project went on and on and on and on for THIRTY YEARS, and yes the indian genius engineers (yes all of geniuses who won 1st, 2nd and 3rd top ranks in your national exams where you are asked questions like ‘how many teeth does a cockroach have, who was shah jehan’s last w*ore etc)… Yes they built an aircraft. IT NEVER FLEW. Not even 10 inches… not even the 3 inches you are familiar with.. Finally, 35 years into the project (1/3 f*cking century or research and development LOL) the american government developed tummyache from laughing too much at the power of Indian engineering, and gifted an engine to the Indians, and then the airplane flew. The LCA they are showing off at the republic day parade is 75% indian… BUT THE ENGINE THAT MAKES IT FLY, MY FRIENDS IS PROUDLY MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BY MEN AND WOMEN WHO KNOW HOW TO THINK, AND HOW TO MAKE THINGS WITH THEIR HANDS AND THEIR HEARTS…

  78. John Frier says:

    I have to say of the staff I have hired in India, they have all failed to deliver. They do this head jostle that isn’t really and up/down yes, or a left/right no. As I learned more about their willingness to say ‘yes’ to EVERYTHING I started ask them “Do you understand what needs to be done for this deadline?” They would say yes, then fail to execute. So After I would ask them if they understand, I started asking them to tell me what they will do. And they couldn’t answer.

    MAJOR business culture problems in India and my experience has been so bad that I just close any applications from Indian based teams. Sad part is there isn’t really any other country for low costs. You can go to China, but EVERY software I have had developed there has back doors and security flaws. So I’m left with Serbia and european countries.

    • RK Sharma says:

      My friend, outsourcing to India doesn’t work. Indians have learned to make fools of CEOs and CFOs of big corporations in USA.

      Last week I was taking an interview of an Indian in New-york city through Skype video, and I came to realize he was doing lip synching and someone from back was speaking for the questions I was asking. Now you tell me what can anybody do in such cases.

      Yesterday I was speaking to a VC and told him don’t get high with cheap labor and outsource the product development to India, company will get struck and product will never see light of day, forget about acquiring customers.

      These South Indians are bringing bad name to everybody in US and global IT industry, hearing an Indian name nobody will trust us. It is pathetic. But no-doubt Indians have become best in gaming system and transporting middle class wealth from USA to India.

      Read
      amzn.to/1oTuFNJ

      Thanks

      RK Sharma

  79. Prasad says:

    Hi Zhenya, I am partially agreed with you. As you have posted this article in 2013, so in last a year you can notice now, there are so many extreme changes in mentality of Indians. It was so sad to read that unfortunately you did not get satisfactory result from Indians, but I would like to tell you that, most of the international IT, Automobile and mechanical organizations are now interested in hiring employees from India. Most of the organizations also have opened their branches here. Indians are now getting more hardworking and they are competing strongly with other countries. I would like to request to please have a latest survey in Indian employment market and definitely you will notice a best satisfactory improvement.

  80. Chris says:

    Interesting comments! – Our company is considering the option of some form of outsourcing, and I am really interested to hear any positive experiences from medium enterprises in recent times. At this point I must say I am very put off and my gut says we should keep expanding the team we have in the US! As a side note, I have traveled to India many times and worked with Indians many times in overseas projects. We all know there is a mix of talents, cultural issues with respect to wanting promotions etc and it appears locking down quality resources for a project may be too difficult to justify the risk. Thanks.

    • Paul says:

      Chris,

      Don’t do it unless you are doing it for other reasons. You will not save money, you will not find better resources, you will not find flexibility and you will not have less hassle.

      If you are prepared to invest a lot of management time both locally and in India (full time) then there is a chance of it working – not saving money or better resources – but you would not be totally fleeced. Chances are you may get fleeced unless you do a lot of research and prep and management.

      Paul

    • Sudhir says:

      Chris,

      Any outsourcing or offshoring needs management. If one tries to self-manage a show in another country without any past experience, the cultural difference it self can make it a failure. There very less examples of when a company wants to go global or use global locations for adding value to business, when they can succeed with a a repatriate manager. You need a local manager who knows how to handle local people, local issues.

      Most importantly you should be in right hands.

      Then over all if you are greedy to look at $10 average rate in India who can guarantee the success. One has to aim at saving 40 to 50% without losing quality on fully loaded onshore cost. The ratio of Direct cost to indirect cost may range between 50: to 40:60. Large players charge about $35 to $45 average rate now. However Small and Mid segment can easily base the hourly rate between $ 20 to $30 and offering both a expert management and a quality team.

      If a right process is followed, you can end up recruiting about 2-3 outstanding, 5 excellent and 3 average resources in a team of 10. All are never equal anywhere in world.

      The success of offshoring lies not in technology, it is all about managing people, managing project/deliveries through a process and finally managing relationships. Every thing has managing added there.

      Better to look at success stories and not failures.

      All the best and regards

      Sudhir

    • Marco says:

      Hi Chris,

      I have a negative experience. I am not an Indian and I was tasked to transfer a global operations team of a midsized company to India.

      I would recommend that as long as you are not outsourcing 1000+ man, do not even try. In India, small and medium are not respected. Also, it is very important what you are planning to outsource. Anything complex, requires accuracy and precision, do not even try.

      Costs will not be as less as advertised. Yes there are engineers with cost of 3k USD per annum, who has the ability of saying if the led is green or red. Any knowledable resource will cost 20-25k USD per annum. You can obviously find resources of that range in much easier locations.

      This blog is a great place where you can read several real experiences of outsourcing/investing to India. It is not a tailor made article or only showing India as a garden of roses. You can evaluate according to your requirements with help of these comments. Also you could read comments from Sudhir or others who are actively advertising their outsourcing companies. They also help you to get the idea of future results.

      I agree with Paul that in case you decide to go forward with outsourcing, you will be spending huge amount of management time just to organize and keep things going (I am not saying smooth)

      In case you would like to have a call with me for further information, please drop your contact details to my email: vasayboy@gmail.com , I would be glad to help.

      Marco

    • venu varma says:

      Hi Chris, With a team of European architects i am trying to define a process and help major US and European companies in outsourcing to India.There are so many problems associated with outsourcing to India and we are trying to solve them one by one gradually by selecting few Indian vendors and qualifying them so that they those companies can be recommended to interested clients like you.We also want to make sure that we monitor the project closely and try to increase the quality levels.

      You can reach me in case you are interested to discuss.I got to say it takes lot of time to educate Indian vendors and dont expect miracles straight away.

    • Oleh M. says:

      Suggest you start looking at Eastern Europe 😉

  81. Marco says:

    Dear all,

    It has been a while that I did not write here. I have been busy with packing up from India. My company has given up the idea of transfering global operations to India office after 2 years of time and money investment.

    Why we failed?

    – lack of high quality resources. Exactly there are good resources in India, but you have to review 200 CVs, interviews lots of candidates, just to catch one. Still, in java exam that our company applied to candidates, we did not get any candidate with intermediate result. All scored below and way below. There is no assurance of catching a good candidate. In hundreds of interviews I have done, no candidate was able to answer following question: what is the last book you have read, what is the last technical book you bought?

    – lots of lies. lets not call it lie, lets say finding the truth is impossible.

    – resources unable to work alone. Well teamwork is appreciated surely, but it does not mean you have to do everything as a team. Most the engineers I have hired can not score individual tasks.

    – unable to say no or yes. Well you know, another cultural thing. I need the work to be done, have no time to solve your cultural puzzles.

    – higher costs than planned. Sr resource costs around 20.000 usd per annum and variable quality.

    – high employee turnover.

    – very high variance in reaching success. Everyday is a suprise.

    – difficulties in obtaining hardware and repair.

    -31 work days of annual vacation days.

    -chaotic environment

    – several others…

    Today on BBC World news there was a program about business life in India. If you could have watched it, then you can get the precise idea very easily.

    My personal idea? Shall try again after 20 years later but for now, it is a money swamp.

    Indian workforce is truly spoiled. We are not talking about Germans who score under any condition. If you leave the office in India unattended for a day, you are garantied to get a Jungle at the end of day. Noone would even remember what business they were in.There has been engineers who has been watching movies at office all day, unable to do any work and when they got terminated they could ask what they did wrong.

    Cheaper and many does not mean it is better. It just means you will have more and more trouble.

    One final thing, did we close down all the office? No! We just closed down global operations, but India is 1.2 billion, a population noone can ignore. However, thats another swamp which I will not get into details. (When doing business to an Indian company, two feelings you get immediately is that they think you are betraying them, you can guess why after reading above, second one is that they are your masters as they give money)

    Goodbye
    Marco

    • venu varma says:

      Hi Marco i wish you all the best for your future.I feel really bad that you had all this bad experiences in India.I need your inputs as we are planning to build training programs by European trainers to serve European and US MNC’s in India..I think you got lots of knowledge about flaws in Indian IT engineers and i would love to have a detailed discussion with you in case you are interested ….

  82. Bill says:

    I have been in business with Capgemini, Infosys and TATA. I do agree with all of your statements. Out of the resources provided you usually find one guy out of twenty being fairly talented.

  83. peterparker says:

    The problem with indian IT industry is that the workforce comprises of those families who belong to working classes of India. These people actually are from small town and suburbs, especially south indian ones, and they don’t have any exposure and know nothing about the outside world. They always fear, live with conformity, their only solace and comfort zone at the work place is their own community and brethren. If you say that there is a mistake in the testing, they would take as if people have hit at them personally. Corporation must train these people and teach them about work ethics, how to work in team etc. That’s absent in their cases. This is the reason that why we see majority of projects delivered with bad quality.

  84. peterparker says:

    The real problem is that everyone in India joins the IT bandwagon. And once they enter, they quickly realize that they have chosen a wrong field. They never had/have aptitude to write fantastic code. On top of that, they never will have open mind to ask from an expert or work like a team player, because, the person who is a manager himself belongs to this league who never had interest in IT but joined it. Yes, welcome to Indian IT industry. The workforce have no clue that what’s happening. Managers don’t know how to utilize talent. The founder of the firms know everything, but they take an opportunity to exploit the people, because in India, the opportunity are less and population is more. Though, smart people do get their share, but it is a long waiting game with lot of frustration.

  85. raghwendra says:

    I am a freelance web developer from New Delhi, India. The facts write in article doesn’t true in each cases. In some cases that I faced employer wants to fit their all features in a fixed cost after deciding the budgets.

    There is lot of the employer outsource the work to be India and running their own companies very well and generating their large turnover. Even offshore companies run their branches across India in different cities.

    By the way i agree with @peterparker comments also.

  86. anup says:

    A Insightful article, one must say.
    And equally good feedback from most readers.
    I take this article with a pinch of salt.(” doomed? No way”)

    For Small start-ups like mine, I know the importance of true and honest feedback,which is second to none for course correction.

    Regards
    Anup Gehani.

  87. America says:

    I agree with you. Also they create more work for others because of agreeing on unrealistic deadlines. Since they take too long to do the work, management has to reshuffle the work around. Most of them are hard to understand and in top of that they ask unnecessary questions. Also, they alll love to manage and delegate the work they can’t do to others. Another thing that is very noticeable is that the majority don’t have common sense. They want everything to be speelled out to them because they are incapable of thinking gor themselves and make intelligent decitions. What is happening to America why don’t we hire our own Anerican people and make our own economy here at home better

  88. Yulia says:

    I have worked in India as a software developer and omg the experience was horrible. It’s like they are too scared to conclude and complete a project.

  89. titu says:

    worked with brilliant Indian engineers and managers both in India and in US. This write-up is an attempt to describe an outsourcing industry in India and problems we face as customers, not people working there.

  90. Deepak says:

    Globalization / out sourcing /off shoring is a reality in the changing business environments. Multiple factors like costs, availability of skills, requirement of multiple skills only on as required basis are some of the many factors which drive IT outsourcing.
    India has emerged as the largest IT outsourcing service provider.The costs of delivery are significantly less and there is ample availability of technical skills. There are a few high end tech experts, many mid-level and large number are with low level of skills

    However, Clients have faced many issues in getting quality delivery within committed time and cost..

    Project Management is an obvious challenge. Clients are keeping the project management under their control and these managers have faced ample issues in communication, culture , virtual team management etc. There are large number of vendors who resort to dubious practices. The Project Managers sitting in different continent are not able to appreciate these practices. All these issues impact the productivity, client sat and business.

    I, with my almost 2 decades of project management experience and having worked for long periods in the US , Sweden and Czech Republic and in companies like IBM , Cap Gemini and L & T infotech have made an effort to address this issue through our initiative “Project Management Center of excellence.

    We are working towards improving quality of Project management in Indian IT environment and also aim to establish Transparency and Trust. We are at present carrying out IT vendors’ evaluation and can also make recommendations. As a Project management specialist company, we aim to significantly increase the client sat , productivity and business benefit realization without increase in the cost of service

  91. Rahul says:

    I won’t repeat what’s already mentioned in so many comments, both in favor and against, both which I agree when put in right context.

    My personal take on this based on over 12 yrs of experience to anybody looking for successful and effective outsourcing – FIND A GOOD MANAGER (excuse the bold).

    Instead of issuing blanket statements like “outsourcing is doomed”, find an OPD vendor who has good managers. All the problems mentioned on this post then become HIS problems. That’s what a PM/SM/PM Proxy or whatever you want to call, is there for.
    Finally, lend him all the requisite help he needs to make your vendor engagement a stunning success. I have seen this over and over and the one common thing in all of these relationships was a smart and a hard working PM. Help him help you win. It really isn’t that simple, but it is.

  92. Deepak says:

    There are thousands of business houses who have substantially gained from outsourcing to India . There are many who were pained .
    It is just having the right people to manage the work from India, which makes all the difference .
    After 20 decades of managing large programs and projects like Ericson , Unilever, Kraft Foods & many more and having worked in US , Sweden and Prague with IBM , Sogeti _ A cap gemini company , I started Project Management Center of excellence in India , only to address the issue here in discussion .

  93. Janny Ratner says:

    Spot on, Zhenya! Managed a huge test automation outsourcing project with 2 major vendors in India and 15 QA teams in the US. Every point you made, I, as a project manager, experienced. It took us a year to put enough metrics in place to prove the model doesn’t work and cancel the project.

  94. Dr Sekhar Kidambi says:

    Hi All

    I am proud of to say as an Indian. ‘Every work has good and bad’ Vivekananda, who inspired East and West, North and South.

    Indian History and culture is enough to prove all IT professionals or bottom level employees sweat motivate the world. One person’s experience is not countable. I give him a question to them who gives
    / certifies against indians motivation.

    1. Sanskrit is base language for computers.
    2. ‘0’ is invented by ‘ Indian Scientist’ Aryabhatta.
    3. Still is the world is working with Ramanujan’s theories.
    4. The land of peace and affection.
    5. Working without relation is not indian style.
    6. Before leaving the British Deligate, Mountbaten says ‘ The world depends on Indians in future’
    7. The land of great leaders, philosopers, philonthropists, industrialists like ‘TATA’ authors, scientists, stars and what not.
    8. The world is now being motivated by all indians 360 degree level.

    I Can challenge any one that I can prove Indians are example for motivation and execution.

    Creating wealth is not prosperity. Creating peace, safety, security with high social relation is called real IT

    Great Indians
    sekhar kidambi

  95. Dharmesh Acharya says:

    Hi,

    This is really long chain on questioning India’s capability for Outsourcing and Application Development. I understand pie is bigger and everyone wants to claim share of it.

    I run Software Outsourcing & Development Company and would like to share what our team could do for Australian Software Company.

    This company has more than 500 clients using their Recruitment Software which was windows based and wanted to rewrite for converting it Web Based SaaS Application.

    We had more than 10 people for 8 months on project from our side, 1 Dedicated Project Manager and 2-3 more resource from their end. I;m not claiming 100% success was ours, I have to admit they were also fully prepared from documentation, understanding culture, weeks visit every 4-5 weeks, agreeing to work on project as Time & Material where not only outsourcing company has to take a tool & still keep us accountable to delivery beyond buffer.
    We contributed by upgrading our development framework ( based on dotnet entity framework) and also received top class feedback for Quality of Code, Architecture & Security verified by 3rd part Consultant.
    Though our team had people for Q.C. Company had decided to give testing to independent vendor and their report was mandatory for project closure.
    We had very successful engagement, in second year we have much extended contract and we will be working together for another 3 years for them.

    Yes it didn’t pull of together like dream project, we were delayed by 1.5 months, team in India had extended for very very long hours for couple of months. But end result is we have successful relationship where we are now producing new version of Software at competitive price for this company. People of project were rewarded paid vacation & increments.

    People are excellent worldwide, its upto leaders to get best out of them.

  96. shiv says:

    Well said Zhenya,

    All your points are valid, as you have mostly worked with companies and paid $5-10 per hour.
    But you can not expect great things done at that rate. Do you?

    • Indian Software Engineer says:

      Hello Zhenya ,

      So with all this negatives with the Indian Outsourcing industry …. Have you stopped outsourcing to India ??

      • Yes, I have. I find that India, today, doesn’t provide the value I need. I am not looking for the cheapest price (which India doesn’t provide any more, by the way), but rather for a combination of price and quality. I haven’t been able to find it in India on a scale I need to build teams. With all the comments here I am disappointed that people don’t see the difference between Indian engineers and Indian outsourcing industry.

        • K says:

          Hi Zhenya,

          With due respect let me ask you few questions first – If your intentions were to comment on the drawbacks of Indian Outsourcing industry what idea made you attach the pictures from old India? I am sure you didn’t see the office spaces based here for the IT industry.
          If you were to only comment about the industry then why did you explain the experiences you faced with individuals working out of India?
          To the rest of the readers I want to clarify one thing not all the best brains have left India by choice, several have returned or stayed back for various reasons. Money or fame make many Asian population run towards Western countries but there is an other side too.

          Now coming to your comments Zhenya, to get the need of the hour with cheapest price you need to consider the fact that ‘what comes cheap is not good and good things are never cheap’. By cheap I am pointing at 10-15$/hr rate. Several multi-national companies are now doing business with Indian outsourcing companies for several years because they need both 15$ staff for repeatable tasks (QA, helpdesk, back office etc.) as well as top-notch techies with 70-200$ rate for the qualitative productive services. I am sure you had bad experiences dealing with staffs based out of India like I had with staffs based out of Philippines, Brazil, Eastern Europe but that doesn’t necessarily conclude to the fact that the entire industry in those locations are doomed.

          Cultural differences, productive communication and many other skills are expected from the outsourcing company to get businesses done from offshore staff who are available at a lower rate to do the same work their counterpart would charge times. Corporations want to save money and hence they offshore/outsource knowing that there would be other non-monetary costs. Imagine the way you order your burger with so many questions asked by the staff and how you order food in a fine dinning restaurant. The food and services are not the same, yet we eat at both the outlets.

          Finally, the India outsourcing companies these days have so much certification, registrations, affiliations with international regulatory bodies like ISO, PCMM, BS7799 etc that even the outsourcing companies don’t have. The industry here is moving from Service based to Solution based, hiring employees from all time zones and races to fulfill the need of the customer. You still want to generalize again about Indian companies? You could but again you will see lot of comments pouring from this part of the world as well as other satisfied consumers of India’s IT outsourcing industry.

          Good luck for your future ventures with off-shoring and outsourcing 🙂

          Cheers,
          K

        • Shirley says:

          Hi

          I must admit my experience of off-shore is pretty awful. Supposedly experienced BI testers with no real understanding of a database, never mind BI. Unable to adhere to deadlines they had provided themselves or produce simple SQL scripts or test cases.
          It is all well and good being culturally aware, but if you are selling your work force as experienced with the ability to produce time critical work they should also understand that cultural awareness is a two-way thing, and a Europeans expectation is that if you say you understand then you do understand, and if you say you’ll deliver to a certain date then you communicate issues, rather than hide them away, otherwise how can you manage delivery of a product to the customer! I can count on one hand the number of remote workers I would recommend, and I’ve worked with a lot. It is just a case of people thinking if you throw bodies at a project it will all work out, well, it doesn’t, it usely makes a much deeper pile of cr@p, which off-shore workers don’t care about because they’re not the ones having to face the customer.

  97. Ivan Dilber says:

    The problem is not in India per se, but in the very specific segment of the Indian IT industry that for some reason many choose to work with. You said yourself that there are indeed great engineers there, so why not work with them directly? One could be investing in those really good developers to build a dedicated team of seniors for you, but instead people choose to go with the big, corporative outsourcing sweatshops because they are cheaper and easier to find. And of course they suck, that’s why they are so cheap. You can’t have both the quality and the insanely low prices, not in India, nor anywhere else. Quality has to cost more, but the “more” is still relative because the costs of life are very different, so it is still significantly cheaper to have a great team in India (or even better East/South-East Europe) than to have a great team in US. So I’m quite sure that India’s outsourcing is here to stay, only clients will have to learn to hire smarter.

    • Deepak says:

      Ivan, you are right .
      I recently spend more than 3 years in Central and Eastern Europe for establishing and working with IT services centers. The resources in CEE are good , dedicated and hardworking . Costs still remain 1.5 to 2 times as compared to India depending on where you are getting the work done . Romania , Poland are cheaper as compared to Slovenia. The knowledge of English language is a big challenge , especially in ex Russian countries . Getting Niche skills and even common skills in large number is very difficult . PMI ( Krakow – Poland ) , Vodafone ( Czech ) and many other large clients have and continue outsourcing to India .
      India has emerged a large IT outsourcing hub. Recently even Daimler , Unilever and many more large companies established their Captives in Bangalore hiring thousands of resources .

      • Mr. Truth says:

        Let me just say without ANY hesitation that 99.9% of all the Indians my firm (a fortune 100 firm) has leveraged have sucked horribly at the job they were hired to do. The ethics are terrible, work is sloppy, and basically has been a terrible experience!

        • Dee says:

          Just one question
          Shell, Ericson , Unilever, Daimler, Nestle , Citibank, Philips out of 100s of the clients of IBM , Accenture , Cognizant, Cap Gemini, Microsoft , Intel and many more global service providers have a very different experience. Out sourced work keeps growing both in terms of quality and number.

          A few small and medium service providers do resort to unscrupulous practices of fake resumes, someone else interviewed and some one else asked to work , get low-end cheap resources and make a just acceptable resource work for multiple projects .
          Such practices are limited to a few cheap and small service providers. These people also establish network thru a similar scrupulous sales folks .

        • Sandeep says:

          Just that? Nothing else? Just terming 99.9% of Indians you’ve worked with as unethical and sloppy without any specific reason/point? That’s just weird!

  98. Ainux says:

    This was a good post by Zhenya and some of the comments are genuinely humorous. The IT industry in India has earned approximately 600 billion $ over the last 15 years. If what Zhenya says is true, then the decision skills of management in Western companies must be as bad as the IT skills of the Indians. Rational thinking suggests that only two equal fools can live with each other!!!!

  99. Shekhar says:

    Hi….all points of ZHENYA ROZINSKIY are well taken. I am non-IT individual. Was just going thru the comments, few concerns I do agree like festivals, holidays excuses etc. This happen in all countries, they have their own holidays and festivals. Lets not talk about it. Just wanted to know that if someone wants luxury and facilities of 5 star, how can they get it by paying for 2 star in any other country. If you can pay for 5 star star services, why go n look for same luxury in other countries for the cost of 2 star. Make it in your own country, if you’ll pay for 2 star, nt in any case u r going to get 5 star services. Yes India and few other countries are cheaper when it comes to outsourcing, but then u r not going to get exactly what u r expecting. plz do not compare it with US or UK. U run to smaller countries to save money but forget that Talent/Knowledge does not have different price in different geographical regions. It will cost u somewhat same everywhr. So either u save ur pocket n compromise with the quality, or if you want quality then dont look at ur pocket.

    I have been taking care of one of my client’s back end work for last 5 years, we have provided Mechanical Engineers to our client. now see what happens….for cost cutting he outsourced us his back end, wanted 2-3 yrs experienced Mechanical Engineers……for 10-15K INR. Can anyone tell how is this possible in any country whether it be China/Russia/Pak/East Europe???? And above that he wants them to be fluent in English. Anyone who commented in this blog can provide me such engineers, I will transfer my whole work to them. Later after 3 yrs when he, himself did some R&D and realized that he needs to raise his budget, we provided them with good engineers, still pretty cheap what wud cost them in US.

    And Paul in September 2013 comments said in a reply that ZHENYA ROZINSKIY is not russian, kindly check his FB profile, he is working in California, but is from Odessa, Ukraine.

  100. Nics says:

    I wonder an old post still getting comments, but there are a few things to be noted. The quality of code generated in India is well below standard in some cases, but not everytime.

    i previously worked for a US telecom giant and we produced excellent quality code even though most of the developers were from India. The developers were hand picked and we made sure they met the required standards.

    I also have worked in a UK bank’s IT section and the system which i worked was totally messed up by a leading Indian IT firms “talented” resources. But I’ll put the blame on the people who took them to the project, they were not evaluated and the bank just bought them the way they were showcased. Now it has become a common practice to evaluate the candidates which service companies present and clients never buy what is presented to them.

    also do understand that there is a balance between Cost, Quality and time and if you need one, you have to make a compromise on the other two. i.e. a low cost means low quality and less time for development.

    So if you had a bad experience, its your fault that the proper evaluation was not done.

  101. Sandeep says:

    A little late to the party. I can’t imagine anyone who has commented above to be wrong, some of them might be a little exaggerated – but still with a hint of truth in them. What I’d like to point out is that the Indian IT workforce is a much larger ‘sample’ than you’d see in any other country. That would account for the greater standard deviation too. If your country had 10K IT workers in total, then, you’d probably have the best in there. When you have them in millions, you invariably end up with a few smart ones and as the bell curve goes – a lot of ‘not-so-smart’ ones. That applies pretty much everywhere – doesn’t it? Anything to do with people is never black or white, only our computers function in binary. We have enough positives in the Indian IT industry to sign up new customers and have enough negatives to make existing customers go back to their internal IT teams or look for different geographies. However, an article with such vague statements without a ‘specific possible outcome’ wouldn’t be popular enough or controversial. This is Zhenya’s opinion and that’s something we have to accept. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zhenya publishes another article a few months/years later modifying some of the statements made above.

    • Paul says:

      One point I would like to make is that the majority of the Indian developers I met (and I know hundreds) are really smart people and have huge potential, but there is something missing. Usually it’s a combination of a) too busy with family life / distractions to really commit at work or b) awful work environment / culture where they are not allowed to think or innovate and just pressured to churn out rubbish or c) can’t be bothered to learn more, usually due to a and b. This is not a uniquely Indian problem of course, but it does seem more prevalent there due to many factors.

  102. mAnkyman says:

    It’s very hard to find good guys for low pay. The good guys in China/Bangladesh/India are not stupid. They know they can get a lot more money and don’t sell their work for peanuts. In fact, the really good guys in those countries make tons of money with their own dev shops/outsourcing shops/etc.

  103. rajsingh says:

    To understand the true inferiority of the Indian engineer, you have to have had worked with western trained engineers for a couple of years, the contrast is like heaven and hell, like icecream and poop.. Once you have worked in a software company in Seattle with intelligent , logical minded individuals who are capable of human levels of thinking.. and also understand the concept of mutual wellbeing and common good, and then you work in Hyderabad or some other dump in India with caste-divided corrupt backstabbing , genetically defective individuals with their grotesque features (thanks to centuries of caste based inbreeding) you understand the difference. Until then, you can talk all you want about the wonders of Indian engineering. All you need to do is step out of your little computer center and look at the pothole ridden roads in front of your computer company, with human and animal excrement and garbage and communist party flags lying around in the roads, with leg-less beggars crawling around… 60 years of ‘development’…. wow…

  104. Dee says:

    Hi Friends ,

    I suggest , we ignore the above Pent Up’ by Raj Singh ( to me appears to be fake ID created by some one on an Indian name ) .
    Many of us , the number is in tens of thousands have spent many years in many countries including US .
    By the way Seattle Based Microsoft continuously and aggressively working on moving high end work to India .
    If some one needs to understand the issue, let us look at latest Gartner , Mackenzie , BCG , Forrester etc.

  105. ariff says:

    I guess , Zhenya, got some money for wrtiting this , It is all about money boss , anyway india is far better than many countries

  106. Leszek says:

    Do we have to pay attention to cultural differences? Let me tell you a short tale: my good old friend moved to Asia and one time he decided to spend the night in a “luxury” hotel…

    “In the evening I call the front desk:
    – I would like to order a black coffee in the room.
    – Of course, sir, now we bring black coffee, sir!
    After half an hour hotel boy comes with a cup. I’m tasting… It is the tea!
    I call the front desk:
    – I ordered a cup of coffee, but I got a cup of tea. Black coffee, please.
    – Of course, sir, now we bring black coffee, sir!
    I’m waiting. Hotel boy brings a cup of sweet as hell and ice-cold… latte.
    I call the front desk once again.
    – Please, bring me black coffee, nothing else. Just hot water and coffee. No milk. No sugar!
    And then I heard in a receiver:
    – I’m sorry sir, but unfortunately, we have no more black coffe now. Would you like to order something else, sir?

    xsolve-culture-matter

    Next morning I moved out of the hotel to find a Cafe. Of course, as a stranger, after I walked by few blocks, I got lost. And the worst thing I did was to ask the local people to show me the way back to the hotel. Each of them showed me a different direction! Damn! Why cannot I order regular black coffee and cannot get the right answer for such an easy question – how do I get to the biggest hotel in the city?”

    Good question, isn’t it?

    It took my friend some time to realise that people of this culture are ashamed to confess they do not know something. This is the reason why they prefer to give you a wrong answer than to admit they have no idea what you’re asking for. The same way they aren’t able to state they cannot satisfy your expectations or wishes. They want to “keep face” at all cost (even if you pay this cost).

    Why? Is there something wrong with them, are they impolite or do they want make fun of us? No, this is just a cultural discrepancy. Behaviours normal for them make us surprised and confused. Sometimes it’s hard to get used to this. And if you cannot change it – accept it. There’s no other way.

    No doubt you have similar observations and it’s evident that we have to pay attention to cultural differences. Sometimes it is of great importance whether the supplier is represented by a similar culture as well as if the company you are dealing with is mature enough to overcome the cultural barriers in case if these obstacles exist and disturb.

    It’s easier to understand each other in software development business if our communication is based on similar values and reference point. So, if we have the same background, founded by our cultural roots, we should talk and work together succesfully. The languages that we speak uncover our perception of reality – reality conceived as a set of goals to fulfil, targets to reach and tasks to solve.

    Thus, if something is screwed up – it’s not because of Karma. We take an astute and critical look through our activity to check all steps to find out what we did wrong. And then we can fix all problems. You can call it responsibility if you want. This is how we understand our job, and this is the culture we live in and the values we respect.

    Culture, habits and manners in software development matter a lot. And correct me if I’m wrong about IT culture!

    • Paul says:

      I have experienced the exact same issue when trying to find the courtesy coach between the domestic and international airports in Delhi. Took 4 wrong answers, 1 mile of walking and 1 hour wasted until I got the right answer.

      Now this perception matters a lot in software development and is one of the fundamental failings of many projects, because in India they are always wanting to please, so tell you the work is finished, when it isn’t, because they can’t tell you that. That leads to incomplete, non-refactored, untidy, buggy code.

      So you have to manage around this and don’t accept their answer, but draw your own conclusion through your own testing, code reviews and acceptance criteria. Which limits what you can send over it India and means you need a lot of process and management, beyond what you can get away with a coherent and competent local team. You have to have a very good and trusting relationship to be able to send more than coding problems.

      • Leszek says:

        Absolutely right! Paul, let me know what kind of communication tools (maybe JIRA?) you prefer and why.

        • Paul says:

          Jira, Git, Stash, Skype, Email,Google Docs etc, GotoMeeting, Jenkins.

          I love Jira because it is very easy to use and track how much time and effort is being put in, plus you create the branches linked to the issues and they follow all the way through Jira, Stash and Jenkins so you can see a full log of the work, commits and builds together.

          GotoMeeting seems really reliable and simple to use. Skype is good too.

          Google docs is awesome for realtime collaboration.

          CI (with Jenkins) is really important to make sure they are not breaking the build.

          I’d love to add Confluence too.

  107. Guess says:

    I am absolutely agreed with Zhenya about every single point that he said.

    The real issue is they never understand the big picture and be careful about juridical issue. You find yourself wrong although you are right. Document everything on time!

    *There are definitely good projects which are completed by Indian. My opinions only for projects which are failed. It about reasons why they failed.

  108. Rob says:

    I just wanted to follow up on my previous post, and share more information about our experience working with Indian programmers. Our company has interviewed hundreds of Indian programmers, and we’ve hired quite a few, too. This is what works for us.

    1. Very Strong Interview Process

    To work for our company you have to pass a serious of programming tasks. These are real-world scenarios that they can complete in an hour or so. By comparing the result with previous candidates, we get to see how well they understood the problem, what solution they came up with, and then how well the code is constructed. This is absolutely critical.

    2. Hire Them Part-Time For a Month or Two

    Even with a rigorous on-boarding process, we still have to monitor them very closely in a low risk setting for a month or two. We find that quite a few people do not like this level of supervision, and we lose a lot of new hires this way. We also find that many people do well on the test, and fail in real-world situations. The part-time trial is good, but you also cannot let it go for too long. They usually have another job, and working that many hours for too long is not going to work.

    3. Manage Them Daily

    Our experience is that you need daily scrum meetings. These meetings are designed to check what they did yesterday, and confirm what they are going to do today. It’s an agile approach that works, but it is time-consuming. And if someone is not going to work out, you have the benefit if seeing it early.

    4. Continuous Code Reviews

    Our experience is that you are much more likely to get bad code than good in India. But there are very good developers, too. The key is to look at the code regularly, and catch little things before they become big problems. We use code scanning tools as well, to spot serious issues. FxCop and Sonar are used with regularity in our build process.

    5. Build Accountability

    This is the name of the game. If your team lacks accountability, the project will suffer. Period. We do this by constantly pushing for the next client review, which happens every 2 weeks. They cannot have weeks of low stress development, or you will be disappointed. They know they have to deliver, and we make sure they participate in client meetings.

    6. Pay Well

    We pay better than most companies in the industry, but we only do that for excellent employees. We also promote within, and our leads are strong. But this is a slow process, to figure out who has the right skills, personality, etc.

    With all of this said, some things are really clear.

    a. Non-technical people have no business engaging Indian companies directly. They lack the ability to figure out who is good, and then manage them effectively. We struggle, and MyProgrammer has been around for 20 years. Non-technical people will most likely end up with a big mess. I would put the odds of success at 1 in 100. Probably less than that.

    b. Forget low rates. You need to pay well to get the really good people. I am talking about $40,000 and up per year. If you hire a company charging $15 per hour, that developer is making $4 to $6 per hour. Trust me, you can’t afford them. But just because you pay more, there are no guarantees. You need to have someone on your team who knows good code, and can manage them.

    c. You are going to have to deal with turnover. It is reality in India. We have been able to mitigate this to a point by paying well, but you are still going to have a key member suddenly leave, in many cases with little notice. And that is why coding standards matter. You need to have an approach that allows someone else to step in, when needed. If the code is a mess, or written to the style of an individual, things grind to a halt very quickly.

    All in all, working with Indians is a challenge. But it is possible to create good software, and save money doing it. But be prepared to put the time in, as there are no shortcuts. Everything you get you earn.

    • Martin Vahi says:

      Strange. If You are paying 40k$/year equiv 3333$/month equiv 2.7k€/month equiv ~1k€/month after Estonian ~60% taxes, then that’s a kind of money that can buy You average secretaries and state bureaucrats in 2014 Estonia. For 2k€/month after taxes, id est ~4.5k€/month id est 54k$/year it is possible to get pretty decent software developers in Estonia, provided that You hire freelancers, who work directly from home and provided that You act differently than You described in Your comment. Given Your comment here, I guess that probably the main showstopper would be that no decent software developer is willing to put up with the crappy way that You treat software developers, regardless of the pay. I suggest that You read the previously mentioned

      http://www.rozinskiy.com/collison-path-eastern-european-outsourcing/

    • John says:

      Rob,

      Can you please let us also know two things

      Attrition is so high in India that seems they don’t care to keep jobs, they just take salaries, give one excuse or another and never deliver anything which can make money for med size company, Indians can always change company with ease, I have seen them doing same in USA as well India. So how do you manage to take tests from them, interesting point is Indians don’t want to work for small companies since they look for brand which helps them in getting dowry in their respective country. A girl father will give lot of dowry depending on social status if the boy is working for big company. What I see is, they never are interested in taking tests. Also ironical nobody in world seems to have brain to evaluate what Indians actually deliver?, in the end nothing works in conjunction with each other and end purpose never gets solved. I think Indians learned these dubious techniques from that fact that they got easy money by fooling senior management people in USA and now Indians have tasted blood, where they think they can get away with everything. Truth is somehow it is working as well.

      You talk about using standardized coding standards, now since technologies are different from Java to .net to Ruby on rails so what specific standards you are using and how do you evaluate them?. Can you throw some more light on it. Some links may also help us.

      Thanks,
      John

  109. Mayank Sharma says:

    Hello Michael and Zhenya,

    Hope you are doing good !

    I am very impressed with Michael’s thoughts and will like to thank him for showing his trust over all developers working in India.

    Zhenya, I agree with you on few points as there are people working only for money matters but these type of people you will find around the world. In my views, as an Indian developer we always try to put our all efforts to make the any project successful. Our clients are most precious to us and we do respect them and never let them down in any how. So, as of my personal opinion I suggest you to keep on outsourcing your work to Indians to get the best of results and build a strong, long-term and faithful relationship. Here we have very talented personalities never get chance to show-case their expertise and I am sure you will get the best of resources with high talent in very reasonable price. 🙂

  110. Venkat says:

    Zhenya Rozinskiy you have no idea about India and how many times have you visited India and have tried to work with Indian developer. India is not all crippled like your country to deliver that bad quality of work. People from your location have been trying to malign India by such nonsense blogs since you cannot directly compete . Please refrain from doing so and concentrate on competing with Indian developers in a healthy way. Very place has a good, average and bad developers.

    • Venkat, thank you. When one doesn’t have anything to respond to the subject being discussed he reserves to personal attacks and insults. Oh, and I have been to India and have worked with Indian outsourcing developers and companies extensively.

    • RK Sharma says:

      Venkat,

      You are a South Indian, naturally you will negate facts because it is mainly south Indians who have become rich by making fool of American MBA’s. Indians never deliver and have only lies, excuses and stories to tell and yes I am an Indian who has extensively worked in India, Europe and North America.

      Have you read,

      “The rise of South Indians: Invisible dimension in decline of jobs for Americans in US economy ”

      amzn.to/1oTuFNJ

      In step by step manner it clearly highlights what south Indians- Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka (ascending order is based on forgery statistics of people from each state) have done to global IT industry and especially US.

  111. abhinav says:

    Dear Zhenya, I somehow landed up in the current page and can’t help myself without commenting. I am a part of the same Indian IT Industry and have experienced pretty much everything mentioned by you, probably more. I can only request, not to carry this impression as some kind of a blanket statement. There is other side of Indians as well and you will also find Indians which hold honesty, ethics, values, and integrity over everything else.

  112. John says:

    Wow, this is a hot topic. I agree Zhenya. I’ve been living this dream/nightmare for 15 years. End result, very little gets done. We just keep pouring in more and more money with little results.

    Yes, there are some very qualified people in India, some of them smart, warm and wonderful. But there are not enough of them. The timezone problem, poor English, and cultural issues. “Is it Done?” response is ALWAYS “Yes John”. The code quality is horrible. It takes us several days to do a build on code that was supposed to have been tested, it will not even compile. To them checking in the code means it’s complete.

    The conference calls in the early morning when they are on their way in home in the evening in traffic on their cell phone, you cannot hear anything because of all the horn blowing.

    Interestingly enough, I find the women much easier to work with. They tend to be much more humble and willing to listen.

    These are my own 15 years of experience with this, not just outsourced companies, but actual hired employees. Although at times it hard to tell since there is much “contract-to-hire” going on.

    I blame the entire situation on greedy North American companies that believe they are getting something for free or cheap. Offshore costs only 1/4 of what on onshore resource would, but takes 10 times as long, if at all, is not saving money. We have had onshore people planted offshore for 5 years or more and it made no difference, still a disaster.

    Whatever… I’m looking for a new job that does not heavily rely on unproductive resources.

    • Deepak says:

      Hi John ,

      Seems , for some reasons you are dealing with people /companies , where productivity management is an issue . This may be Skills employed , Project Management etc. Generalizing the same for all Indian 125 billion USD market may not be the correct approach .

      Looking at the discussions above , I guess Zhenya has started this blog with business interests to look for customers to take work to Estonia or any other country in Central Europe.

      There is no doubt , lots need to be done to improve processes , quality of delivery , project management practices for small and a few mid size service providers . Large / global service providers , who are mainly supporting the large businesses and Captives are concerned , there is a long list of success stories and this is ever growing.
      Generalizing that India IT Outsourcing is doomed sounds ridiculous to me . Actually the ground reality is otherwise . India IT outsourcing continue growing at 10 to 15 % and has also moved up the value chain. However, a large number of service providers especially in SMB sector do cut corners and provide poor service

    • RK Sharma says:

      John,
      In your opinion, this loot by Indians or specifically South Indians in America in IT field will continue for ever or will there ever be end to this practice. Can’t Americans think straight or there brain is gullible enough to be made fool by Indians every now and then. It looks like, Indians are just stealing wealth of America and US CEOs are allowing it without any concern, nothing works, all lies and excuses and still this Indian outsourcing industry is just blooming. Seems concept of public finance is harming America since nobody is accountable for this large scale stealing of US dollars and that too without work. Starting from Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and others no Indian outsourcing company ever delivers anything, put 20 people onsite when 2 Americans can do the same job. Is it because Americans can’t think in multi dimensional way or what is the problem? Are Indians too smart?

      Will this continue for ever?

      • Deepak says:

        RK,

        I believe that this discussion has been started by Mr Zhenya Rozinskiy to find potential customers for his business in Estonia or some other CEE country

        This blog has got nothing with facts, figures and any sense otherwise and is only meant to drive a personal business interest. The amount of outsourced IT work being done in India is more than annual GDP of many of these countries, where Mr Zhenya Rozinskiy is trying to promote his business .

        Indian IT Industry this year is expected to grow at 18 % and this is 15 th year of double digit growth . However, a few people find it difficult to manage a team of 10 people sitting offshore

        • Paul says:

          Deepak – I think you have lost the plot. Where did you get this idea from? I have been following this discussion for 2 years and not once has he even hinted this.

          Like Zhenya I have seen the deterioration of trust of Indian outsourcing. I was involved for over 10 years. In the early days when rates were crazy low and staff were really hungry to get work, it was better. It was way below western quality, but you got 6 for the price of 1. Now rates are much higher and the quality has not improved significantly. You get 2 for the price of 1, and with all the troubles it is barely worth it.

          I moved to USA myself last year and the company I work for would not touch India with a barge pole again. Once bitten twice shy. They outsource to both Argentina and Mexico with great success.

          • Deepak says:

            Hi Paul,

            The way the discussion is positioned and the portal is structured, is not in synch with the realities on ground.
            1. The name – India Outsourcing is Doomed. – India Outsourcing added another 25 Billion USD in last 2 years only in IT sector and Gartner believes double digit growth for India in 2015 , where is global spend is increased only 3.5 % for 2015. It is only yesterday, Oracle CEO shared his plan for 3000 hiring for cloud. Daimler and Robert Bosch plan to pick up 1,500 for their Captives among many thousands to be added by many more.
            2. Picture displays an over loaded jeep. Not sure how is that defining India’s status where Merc, Porsche and BMW are doing a roaring business. Not to state that such scenes are nt rare in India, but will you like any one to put a few pictures of prostitutes and define beautiful Estonia, or other CEE countries, we know the such scenes are very common there, or define NY by showing a few shelters for homeless.
            3. I also managed teams from Mexico and appreciate the skill levels and attitude. Softtek , one of the largest Mexico based software companies is executing their ambitious plans for India .
            4. Your costing of 1 to 6 and increase in the rates to 1 to 2, does not seem to be in synch with statistics. As far as I know India rates are very stable for many years despite increase in the cost of delivery in India. The $ appreciated to fill in the gap. India even today is the most cost effective IT delivery country
            I am in no way saying that developer skill levels in CEE or South American countries is bad. I found excellent resources in all these countries. However, a blanket statement that ‘’Indian Outsourcing is doomed ‘seems to me an expression of someone, who failed to get the work done, whereas others are much smarter and continue being benefited.
            I agree, there are issues of delivery by Small and Medium Service Providers, where not only quality of delivery is an issue, even some practices may not be even worth trusting. To bridge this Gap, my company started a service called Client PM. The service is designed to provide professional project management service to those, who find it difficult to get work done out of India.
            I reiterate India has the largest pool of highly skilled and good resources, working at a very reasonable and competitive costs. India out sourcing continue growing at a very rapid pace.
            However, around 10 % of Indian resources may not be up to the mark and Small and a few medium service providers to resort to unscrupulous activities and poor delivery in India.
            You also get good resources in CEE and South American countries

  113. sonu says:

    the Problems in delivery which were mentioned in the comments seem to arise from bad management/hiring process rather than being based on geographical locations.
    I.e. you would have probably encountered the same in any other country . Generalizing a country’s IT workforce because of some bad examples is outright wrong!

    just that India is ahead of the curve in IT services business then many other countries. As a result the Top IT companies based out of India have built a skilled workforce with varied domain knowledge.
    Although if you engage scrupulous low level companies or free lancers then of course there are risks associated with them.
    If you pay 1 dollar then you get commodity worth 1 dollar as well.

  114. William says:

    I absolutely could not agree more with absolutely everything you’ve said. Sometimes people ask me why I pay my developer in Serbia $35ph when I could have many more people or much cheaper in India in my experience going to India always gives me a much lower quality job, extremely difficult staff and eventually always costs more. This isn’t to say that everyone in eastern Europe is great they aren’t but in my experience you tend to find great developers much easier there. As I’ve not found one in India (or any Asian country for that matter)
    that I was happy with.

    In one example I wanted to build a ocr an Indian company told me 6 months I then hired a Russian guy who did it in 10hrs for around the same hourly fee. Insane.

  115. Michael Sandler says:

    Problem is: Previously the projects kept rolling in, but now you have to go out, search, and find them out. So people who are frustrated and fretted about “no work” need to find some scapegoat like the Nazis found the Jews. In my opinion, we never see any Indian complaining about “no work”, but you’ll find loads of Russians blaming Indians. Now, Indians being extremely-good at management, interaction-skills, and marketing are maybe still able to get enough work in their Garage, but Russians typically being introvert and shy are not that successful at getting work for themselves, hence the frustration. Psychology and Philosophy all scream the same patterns…

    • Jeff McLintock says:

      Michael, why bring up nazis and Jews?

      are you talking about the same Indians that will not ask a question ever? Or Indians that will not voice their opinion if it contradicts their boss?

      Or maybe you just have some kind of problem with competitions. Maybe Russians and Ukrainians and other Easter Europeans an just do a better job?

    • Martin Vahi says:

      As a native Estonian I can tell from the ~25% of Estonian Russian-speaking population that Russians are NOT, as a “culture”, introvert AT ALL! At least, not from Estonians’ perspective. However, if You claim that Russian culture is a culture of introverts, then clearly You are not properly aware of the Finnish and Swedish culture. Estonians, in general, are very warm and “Southern” compared to the Finns and Swedes, despite the fact that the Brits find Estonians to be cold, not “warm enough”. What regards to sales, then as of 2015 I do not have enough experience to summarize. It seems to me that what people do, depends on their culture and their activity and customs determines their needs and the ways how they try to fulfill those needs. Buying/Selling/Swapping services/products is often a preferred way to fulfill one’s needs and how that is done, is determined by local customs. Therefore, different regions of the world probably need very different style of services, sales activities, conflict resolutions. That is to say, I expect to fail in sales in an environment that I do not know “well enough”, but that’s not an excuse for not making an effort to learn the customs, ABC, behavior norms.

  116. Expat says:

    Hi,
    of course she is right; have been working 10+ yrs in offshoring companies. They (whoever they are – from Asia, i mean) – have less efficient working styles and methods; maybe as they are not used to the super strict concentration levels of Northern Eu and the US. However; so, you have (correctly, that’s it) 1 EU/US person doing the same amount of work (same quality) like 5 + 2 there (5 developers and, they need a lot of control, QA or QC). Plus me, from Northern Europe, doing the final control and sending everything back ..
    Offshoring only looks good in whatever strange calcuations; of whomever who had never been there.
    Maybe it is the ‘cultural’ difference – I would not call it like this. Rather, in Asia, people a/ use a lot of their brain power for their family – any family/kin issue .. and b/ a lot of ‘brain power’ if say so to ‘survive’ the daily life, of terrible traffic, great heat, super-crowded cities/flats/houses, not-too-clean food .. etc. Not much brain left over for work, and, ICT work is one of most-concentration-time consuming ever .. so .. no wonder the outcome.

    Offshoring is maybe working for now. Until the salary, there, raises – it is already, didn’ t it? Then it will not be worth any more. Costs-effort (re-do, re-call .. blablabla ..) – and outcome just don’t match.

    Sure, absolutely; some people, there, will be good. However, most of them I have met – they have made their way to the US, to Singapore, or to Europe. 🙂

  117. Expat says:

    @Paul
    you said something interesting, i have observed it as well.
    Yes, there are Sw engineers in Asia who are good, and who are interested in their work. However; and I believe that is indeed a ‘cultural’ thing (and not a development thing like e.g. over-crowded cities or close-to-not existing infrastr.)
    – they have learnt something. say, they title themselves: ‘I am a Java-spring-hibernate-mysql-expert’ – and they will be that sort of expert _for their entire working life_. They will not learn something else. That is not in their way of thinking (and, maybe, that was not necessary until recently). They will continue that super-narrow string of knowledge, and, ‘be an expert’ in it. – Maybe that is also part of the fact, that after, say, 45 yrs approx.; all their ‘brain’ goes into their family’s well-being (which is a nice fact, actually). – That is maybe a reason, also, why there is close to zero creativity, resistance to wrong instructions/reqs, innovation. – Just a guess based on observation .. say; that is _not_ to judge. Rather – to accept 🙂 .. and if in doubt, take an European ..

  118. Fernando says:

    I work in IT and have seen it many times working for different companies. Every time outsourcing is “sold” as the paradise of low cost and expertise, most of the times it ends in a disaster, first of all because US companies are too cheap to finance a thoughtful transition, They hire the outsourcing company and it’s like “bam” expect them to do the stuff people working 10-15 years in the company are doing.

    Second, indians don’t care at all about the company or anything, they’re too far, and there are too many jobs for them, they don’t care one bit, they know they will get hired by another agency right away.

    Third Indian management is horrible, the Indian guy that keeps posting reminds me of them. They’re stubborn, do not see reality and sometimes feel like a broken record or some robot throwing out gibberish. They write huge long emails and when they talk talk for 2 -3 hours straight with nothing of real content being said.

  119. Rick says:

    Zhenya has nailed some very true experiences which me and my colleague went through. I worked in several industries which involved in outsourcing transactions and project to some very top names in India.What Zhenya mentioned are part of the experiences which I went through. On top of that I would like to add in a few personal opinion:

    1. Screening the right candidate – many resume were well decorated with colorful logo or fortune 500 firm names but the job experiences and role in it are few times higher than what they actually were. job applicant like to memorize things which they read from somewhere and “pretending” they have achieved that.A junior engineer we interviewed was telling that he was an operation head in his previous firm and provided a contact of his “ex-boss” for reference check, but one of my colleague knew someone in that company and realized the so-called “ex-boss” is only a junior engineer in that company instead of “VP” as he claimed.Background check can be also disrupted by fake referee. There were many other cases which we encounter with “over exaggerated” resume.It is a challenge to find someone actually as good as his resume.

    2. Productivity – Despite clear SLA defined and contract were signed, the people working on it seldom bother about that and think it is company’s reliability to pay compensation so they don’t feel committed to deliver as what was agreed. Just like Chenya said, I saw people work very “hard” but in the end produce very little.

    3. Low loyalty – People only tend to join a reputable firm to work for awhile and then jump to another firm with “exaggerated” experiences on their resume. They treat each job is a stepping stone for their overseas prospect and barely put in strong effort to achieve solid accomplishment

    It is not uncommon your outsourced project in India missing the deadline and keep on extension and blowing your initial budget. In my previous firm, they finally decided to take back the outsourced transaction services from one of the reputable service provider in India because the actual cost are actually surpassing the processing cost in US.

    • Paul says:

      Hi Rick,

      Very interesting that you are experiencing this with tier 1 providers. The general sentiment in this discussion has been that the lower tiered providers are just picking up the scraps and that the programmers who give a damn are already taken. Plus the lower tiered companies themselves are somewhat less honest. It seems it doesn’t make a difference actually.

      My experience shows you have to find the right provider and stick with them. And that is very very difficult to find. My guess is a 1 in 50 providers are any good in India.

      Paul

    • SS says:

      Hi RICK,

      If India was doomed why would it still be no. 1 offshoring destination. a top Foreign Direct Investment destination. And more clinching evidence, I know some cases where offshore presence in India was targeted to actually gain in share holders value. If it fails, it mostly fails for SME segment as they fall in to trap of bad offshoring managers of greedy providers. However, that % is very less.

      For small size, one has to understand India or work with a India managing partner to get to right value equation. Selection of right people, productivity etc. are issues faced in any Geography.

      There is no one single formula any where that works. Offshore outsourcing is a specialized area of how you get to both the numbers and satisfaction levels. We also do provide a consulting support in that direction.

      If you want a value conversion from offshore in Asian countries, you need a local partner, who knows the terrain.

      Best,

      SS

  120. Doesit Matter says:

    Do you understand the Indian culture? Do you understand their struggles and insecurities? Why do you think you are in a position to comment on their behavior? The pics you have put is sign enough of your ignorance and biased view. What you’ve written only corroborates it.

    I have been in the Indian offshore for 2 decades now and let me tell you what you have written is not the entire truth. Sure, the industry started as a cost-saving measure and it reflected in the kind of work that got offshored. Over the years, it has changed and there are some very innovative work being done. I myself have been part of some stupendous work that you probably only fantasize about.

    Being at offshore all my career, I have come to notice one thing, no matter how good you do, you will be just that – an offshore worker who is there only as a cost-saving measure…a headcount. I rarely see genuine respect for an individual. Why is there an expectation that the Indian guy will adapt to your way of working, why can’t you understand and adapt to his? Maybe the guy is not ‘standing up’ not because of his incompetence but due to his cultural influence. Let me tell you another side to this story, disagreement or questioning from offshore is not taken lightly by the ‘other’ side. I have personally experienced two such occasions where retribution was quick and lopsided…and I did not have social security to cushion my fall.

    Your post seems more like a rant and smacks of extreme prejudice. I would sincerely advise you to be a bit more open and a bit more friendly to your offshore team. You will notice a big change, I guarantee you that.

  121. YY says:

    I see article is written long back (2013) and writers predictions (or shall we say insights?) have no where been found rightfully indicating even to the near of the current trends. Read below report. Of top 10 top destinations , 6 are still occupied by Indian locations.

    http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/Tholons_Whitepaper_December_2014.pdf

    My point is,if scenario was so bad in totality of considerations, as portrayed in article and in some comments , i am sure India would have paid the price by now by loosing a few slots to East European/South American countries in current report. However its other way round (with some other Indian cities picking up the momentum) , indicating the writer has erred greatly in his understanding.

    While giving in to the point of some degree of the incompetence creeping in the industry due to chaotic and sudden tech bloom in the country, i would never agree to the overall painting of the tech talent with same brush. Because there are companies in India running businesses dealing with 1 billion people, across verticals, without much of hiccups or downtime, all built inhouse in India.

    There is a much argued point about quality of code being delivered. I would agree that India, primarily being groomed as an operation center/back office during early days of outsourcing, does not have that level of standards ingrained in each and every engineer while doing coding but things are changing fast, as India is leading the startup culture now , along with sillicon valley, and it has come to realize this drawback and filling up the gap faster than anticipated.

    As writer has pointed in article that it is his personal opinion, let me give the disclaimer as well. That this post is my personal opinion.Pardon me if i sound harsh in that. 🙂

    And I am of the opinion that article does not take into account the socio-cultural factors in consideration and turns out to be a biased account of someone frustrated at his inability to choose right set of people for the job to be done. You can not simply point at the resumes and say that someone cheated in his resume and is incompetent. You need to have right set of filters to reach to right resource. If you don’t have them then you need to blame yourself as much as you do for others.

  122. Someone says:

    The original author is spot on. I’ve interviewed more than 20 candidates in the past year for an entry level architect position. The candidates in Bangalore would not be hired as freshers in the USA. I’ve managed associates in India for three years and been training Indians since 2007. I’ve made five visits to the country. My productivity has decreased 20x fold as result of my company’s India expansion. Argh… this has to be costing my company more than it is saving.

    • Anil Kumar says:

      Well said YY, since the article was posted Indian outsourcing industry has grown in double figures every year.

      I worked with more than 20 clients from different countries on various technologies. I started from entry level and no handling a Program. Although none of projects failed to deliver but some of the projects was mess and difficult to work on, due to inefficient management from customer side which results in confusion in the entire team. Hence the developers or consultants prefer to leave the project. You end up with consultants who don’t bother about the performance and project.

      You need proper management skills to manage resources not only in India but in any country. Few of the lines from the article itself proves that Zhenya was not able to mange the projects and resources properly.

      1) “””””Employees in India are extremely difficult to motivate. You’ll notice that weeks and months go by with very little progress being made. Indian outsourcing employees seem to have a natural talent for working hard while producing little””””””
      This is why Mangers are hired. If manager is saying you cannot motivate a team, its time to say Adieu to your job. If employees can have high productivity themselves than we don’t need project managers. I think mangers are to be blamed in this scenario.

      2) “””””””Now ask them what is their turnover rate on projects, which would include people moving from project to project within the same company.””””””

      This example from my experience will help you understand the problem. I work in Mid Level IT Company In India. I have observed that if customer dosenot treat offshore resource well than this information spreads like wildfire in the organization and finding a good resource gets difficult. Now a days you cannot force good/talented resource to work on project. If he knows customer/Customer manger is not good enough to work for than you cannot force him. You end up with low quality resource.

      There are so many points i can highlight.

  123. mahendhran says:

    One approach which worked…

    It was an offshore ERP implementation with one of top 5 Indian IT consulting.
    50+ Team size… The client had very good history of offshoring experience.

    Two highly motivating personalities who had very good business and good technical experience, was sent here to offshore once after the initial team was formed at offshore.. All the delivery managers,project managers,reporting leads,PMOs where chunked out from offshore ,except just one … The two plp from onsite very highly vibrant in moving the work and down to earth at people management … They created a very clear atmosphere to each and every team member ,so they where their own PM or lead ,with their home grown PM systems… it was a huge execution hit..

  124. Tushar Sharma says:

    I am from India, working with a “Big 4” firm and have almost 5 years of experience in SAP consulting-Technical.
    I will try to be precise and on the point and here it is:

    India is serving as the top most Outsourcing partner for most of the Global companies, not because it is cheap but because it provides quality in lesser price which it’s competitors are obviously failing to do.

    Now, simple logic, we serve thousands of customers and 100% customer satisfaction is unrealistic.The IT outsourcing business is increasing gradually in India.
    Some customers, most of them are posting comments above, are clearly not satisfied. Hence the frustration, fair enough. But, sooner or later you will be back to India with your projects 🙂 🙂 because we are the best.

    This blog was written in 2013, and we are in 2016 and India has increased it’s share in IT exports here is the wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology_in_India
    Peace!!

  125. Clement says:

    Hello,

    I believe that the Author has a fair point. And to be true, I am quite happy! If this was easy to get your outsourcing team to perform well and that all Indian engineers would have the same quality, I would not have the success I have with my new line of business.
    I am a senior database architect in Europe and I was fortunate to have worked with Indians. Some are good, some are not. Same in France, same in the US. A few years ago, working for 3-billion dollars company, I worked closely with many Indians and notably a database architect then a few years later he helped me on a project on a db engine i was not experienced on and did a great job. Then I started giving away clients to him in exchange of sales commission in order to work less and it did work great. Then I told him about partnering to get ressources in India and work for our clients and because the guy only recruits smart people, it did work great too!
    I am not saying that your comments are not legitimate. I just feel that you need to put as much effort in recruiting in India than in France or in the US!

    It is true that the trick is to convince companies that you can achieve excellence with offshore outsourcing team. I think the main issue that companies have is managing such teams. I , myself manage the client and his expectations while my partner manages the Indian ressources. I feel you need to be local and know the local culture to achieve.

    Finally we do not undercompensate our engineers. We achieve the same rate as all the US/Indian outsourcing companies but we take way less margin. I think that is why it works! Indian engineers get a fair share of the revenues and are therefore happy!

  126. Astana says:

    Hi Rozinskiy

    I have been doing SAP since 1994 and still going …

    Personally I am very skeptical for the resources coming from Indian Continent

    Too many bad apples..

    • RK Sharma says:

      Nobody understands why Indian programmers and IT professionals are so arrogant, reason is simple, market is bearing them, they don’t care as they get free money for doing nothing. This all is because of perhaps 20 big companies in US, chance are with new administration in US and change in policies, along with technological shifts like automation and cloud, perhaps arrogance and grabbing mentality of Indian software professionals can be controlled little bit. Once US puts brakes on looting, it will improve.

      Right now it is too easy to get job in India and people move from one company to another without working on anything, they just collect salaries because Americans don’t mind paying them. I have seen people getting $5000 in India with no value addition to clients business, the only thing they are good at is, flattery of their higher ups and regional affiliation. Remember south Indians control IT industry and they hire one of their own kind.

  127. I. Hunter says:

    Argentines are much more talented than Indians. Besides that, Argentina offers cultural proximity and a reasonable timezone.

  128. Big Charlie says:

    I have been in IT for nearly 30 years, and to this day I have yet to see passable code coming from an Indian outsourcing firm. The level of quality is so poor, it’s now legendary within IT circles. All you need to do is mention “Indian Outsourcing” to get experienced technical people to smirk.

    These firms had their heyday. They fed straight into the non-technical manager/bean-counter fantasy that there was this mythical land where highly skilled, compliant technical people are eager to start work at 2 dollars an hour. Much like a man who ditches his Ford for a Tata, thrilled with the savings until his first wheel comes spinning off the axle as he speeds at the maximum 54 miles an hour down the highway. You can only imagine the horror when the responsible corporate scapegoat faces the marass of infantile code that he’s now tasked with putting into production.

    Now, I’m happy to see that companies are getting wiser by realizing that this is a path to illusory short-term savings only and an inevitable disaster in the end.

    • Martin Vahi says:

      I replied to Your comment, but I accidentally placed my answer to the general stream of comments. If You want to read my reply, then please look for my comment that has the same date as the current comment has. Than You.

  129. CodePower says:

    Article is spot on stay our of India at all cost!!!!

  130. Martin Vahi says:

    Except that this illusory short-term savings path has been going on since the Moon landing era.

    Apes in the jungle are not getting any smarter, because evolution is a slow process, except with wars, meteors and other types of serious environment changes. The dumb managers will not be replaced until robots replace all of those people that are dumb enough to work as subordinates of those dumb managers. As robots do not need dumb managers, one a smart, remotely working operator per factory or warehouse is cheaper than a team of managers, the managers will get laid off as robots take over. As a matter of fact, may be many of those managers intentionally choose the Indian crap-writers, because otherwise there’s not enough people for them to manage and there is a risk that they get laid off due to “lack of work”. If the software just works and a secretary of the CEO can reconfigure it like she/he does with spreadsheets, then there will be no need for custom business software development and the middle-management that arranges that custom business software development. A few business software companies will reap a fortune by selling licenses or some LibreOffice Base development team works at a nonprofit that is being jointly financed by multiple corporations that want to keep some competition on the market and that’s the end of those dumb middle-managers.

    The middle-managers NEED THE INCOMPETENT INDIANS for their job security. 😀

    I also want to point out that not all Indian software developers are sloppy and/or stupid. I’ve seen some stellar, truly nice, code from Indians, but as the saying is: “exception proves the rule”. I also mention that the online courses of Indian Universities tend to be of higher quality than the Western counter-parts, provided that one can bare the terrible accent. A positive example:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2QgdDk4Xjw
    So, the very fact that the Indian software developers have EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITIES for learning their trade, makes them look EXTRA BAD at what they do. I’ve heard a rumor that at least some of the Indian languages do not even have the future tense, there is only the NOW, the MOMENT. Software development, on the other hand, requires people to THINK AHEAD, THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE, THINK LONG TERM. If that’s the case, then the Indians have certainly a heavy cultural handicap, when it comes to software development.

    By the way, once upon a time I even found one Egyptian “software house”, a small family business, that that caught my eye with truly high quality, but of course, who a hell will expect to get fine software development services from the kind of a nasty mess that the Egypt currently is. The background of the Egyptian software developers is that due to the lack of computers, cost of computers, in the past the Egyptian computer science faculty concentrated on the mathematics and now, when the computers have become affordable to everybody, the former tough training in mathematics really pays off for the Egyptian software developers. At least for those, who care to be meticulous and avoid being sloppy. Of course, don’t expect to find the fine guys easily from Egypt. The Egypt’s capital, Cairo, is as big as the New York is, yet its influence on the World IT affairs is pretty much non-existent. So, those few, who work on software development in Egypt, must be real software development fanatics and care about the quality of their work. If You’re smart, then You might want to look those people up before the crap-writers flood the Egyptian software development market.

    Thank You for reading my comment 🙂

  131. Chris MacKay says:

    I totally agree with this article, I am the lead consultant at a software firm that sells its products to big US and EU corporations.

    They have all outsourced their IT Support to India and this has created massive headaches. They all seem to use Tata IT Services. The staff are very inflexible and as soon as a problem arises with our product they come to use and blame it on us, where in reality they need to unblock it in their firewall or change the proxy settings etc.

    They all seem to read from a script and don’t think for themselves, it is infuriating,

  132. john joshua says:

    You had a bitter experience ,sorry about that,but dont make that india into snake charmer. you stay away
    and give jobs locally and try to profit and stop cribbing about cutting cost. Please dont come back also to india for more work, WE have tons of companies giving us work and investing heavily here, You are cheapskate yourself and you want to bracket a whole countries industy in that ,you can go to hell or iraq

  133. Ryan Bayne says:

    I was taught ethics at University here in the UK, do all other nations take pride in teaching ethics? I don’t think so and I often wonder if nations driven by religion use their religious culture to fill the space where ethics should be.

    Every nation has it’s big unethical players and companies with unethical cultures so I don’t like talking about a single nation. I’m lucky to find a couple of very good Indian developers who are very smart and work quickly. One of whom is a woman. Very talented and can be relied on.

    Providing we do not take them from granted and treat them like they are there to be hired and fired on demand. A mistake too many people make!

  134. Stein Thore says:

    Nice, I like your site in owing to share a useful information share with us. I appreciate you for giving such valuable data about software development. We also provide outsourcing and outstaffing services in Ukraine.

  135. Paul Bartlett says:

    This “blog” was really fascinating. Since I last posted a few years back I stopped working in the Indian outsourcing business. I moved from UK to California, USA. I work in a large company with a huge number of Indians as it’s silicon valley based. The experience is totally different. The quality of folk from India is amazing. A 100% difference compared to the outsourcing world. I think the outsourcing world gave India a bad name in the software world – but at least it got some important $$$ into the economy. In my posts I never meant to offend any Indian – in fact most of my friends are Indian and I love India. I meant to offend the terrible outsourcing practices and poor quality.

    So my question is, is the Indian outsourcing world still happening and is there still huge quality issue, or has it matured in the past 5 years.

  136. Joe HiTech says:

    I have worked in hi tech for 25 years in multiple industries and multiple technologies. Here is my conclusion. There is ONLY one reason companies are outsourcing to India. COST. That is it. Not talent. Not shortage of qualified workers in North America. Not time difference to have a second shift of workers and make the project completion date faster. Just COST. The proof is simple. If a QA Test engineer or a software developer with the same amount of experience and knowledge makes 100k in both U.S. and India, not one US company will hire even one engineer in India. Just cost. That is is it. Until, the salaries in India go up and are comparable to US, hi tech companies will keep hiring in India. Same applies to manufacturing and China. Just cost. Another thing to think about. Have you noticed India does not have one innovative and decent company that sell its products to other global markets? Not one. There are IT outsourcing companies and a bunch of low-cost low-quality companies, but no innovation ever comes from India. Not one truly global car, or manufacturing, or telecom, or chip maker, or database, or hardware, or software company? Why is that? Because, stupid American companies are on a race to hire cheap labor. so why bother innovating? Sorry to be brutally honest here.

  137. indrani dhar says:

    An insightful blog

  138. Rahul says:

    Great Work!

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