[ccozan]

it seems that in this case, two wrongs show as right:

1. The CIO/CTOs are too easily pushing the responsibility to such Indian IT companies. You know, easy to blame someone else and save money in the same time. And get some shares up too.

2. The Indian companies use very deceptive means to capture this market. Simply, they lie about their competencies.

It happened in multiple occasions when we got send from the indian 'partner' two 'best' person they had. They were suppose to be 10+ Linux experienced. Believe me, when I showed them the command line and I gave them a random, but real, task they just simply stared and didn't know where to start. After 10 minutes ( had to attend something else), I found them heavily browsing SO. Case closed!

[thiri]

I know what you are talking about but I have also seen the other side of this story.

I have seen the kinds of clients Indian IT handles and quality of the software they have produced. You can be more or less guaranteed your bank, insurance company, hospital, airline/transportation systems, phone/internet utility, entertainment/sports IT is all totally built and run by Indian IT.

The process is chaotic. The first iteration is a disaster almost always. But western management persist through that first and second and sometimes third iteration of garbage because the cost benefit is just impossible to ignore. And guess what by the 4th or 5th iteration things actually work.

What most people don't realize is there is no big difference between this story and the Facebook or Google story.

In one case its a bunch of kids who don't know what the command line is thrown into a bank or insurance or manufacturing companies IT system and its a trial by fire. Not knowing what the command line is has nothing to do with how smart/adaptable the kid is who gets thrown into the deep end.

Please note this is exactly what investors are betting on when they dump a bunch of cash on a bunch of kids at a future Facebook or Google. The kid might know what the command line is but that's not what investors are betting on. They are betting on the kid being smart and adaptable when thrown into the fire. They are willing to put up with the first couple iterations being disasters and sooner or later if you bet on the right kid things work.

Are there unintended consequences when things get built this way? Of course yes Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a solution to fake news, celeb worship, hate speech, cyber bullying on his platform. But (most)people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Same rules should apply to the indian kid running your bank servers that just got breached.

[ccozan]

The issue is not about kids being smart and easily trained - they do, and they are quite capable.

But just advertise it as such: "Look, we don't have any Linux specialists, but for this amount of money we charge, is worth to train this two guys, they are smart but no experience. Are you in?"

This honesty ( or lack of it ), is the problem, not the people. I mean, I also do browse SO, too :), and yes, sometimes I fail to give an immediate answer to a problem. But I tell this to the customer, and they feel comfortable, because in the other 99% of the cases I did solve their problem.

[dingaling]

Several times I've seen a talent-switcherchoo in play. The on-site transition team sent by ${OUTSOURCER} is usually top-notch, experienced folks who know the technology no matter how niche. ( CICS, Siebel and SAP for example ).

They'll spent three or six months on-site deep-diving the system and preparing to transition it back to their home office and meanwhile all the management-suits are nodding at the excellence of their outsourcing idea.

Once the project transitions, it's booted to a team of just-graduated staff who attempt to follow the documentation created by the transition team, and the rock-stars are presumably sent onto another on-site project. That's when the pain starts and by then it's too late; the local SMEs have all been let-go or reassigned.