[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> The allegations “could severely damage the company’s pristine brand if true, especially in the IT services industry,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana wrote

Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.

[RyJones]

It has a pristine anti-brand for me. Seeing InfoSys involvement is a signal to "stay away".

[thrower123]

It's gotten really bad. There are whole swathes of companies that we deal with that are great if you can deal with their first-party people, but we're just part of a bundle of services provided to that company through a big Tata/Infosys/Cognizant/etc contract. And that part of it is incredibly toxic.

I think if I get another email with less than a sentence describing a problem, no screenshots, nothing, ending in "do the needful", or a high-priority meeting invitation sent at 7 am for 8:30 am, with no agenda or any indication of what is going to be discussed, I'm going to come unglued. The communication and organizational skills of the project managers I've dealt with leaves so much to be desired that I can't even express it, and there always seems to be such a swirl of people with ambiguous authority involved that just trying to mentally keep track of an org chart is a struggle.

I just groan when I see that we've gotten a new lead; it may pay the bills, but I'm not sure the grey hairs and indigestion are worth it.

[acdha]

Programmers do not hire Infosys. Senior management does and their reputation is different there: those complaining programmers are just trying to protect their turf, the cost savings are compelling, etc. and there are a million ways to spin the inevitable failed projects.

[divs1210]

It is very profitable as a company and brand, keeping other concerns aside.

[rsj_hn]

Brands aren't determined by how much wall street loves the firm, but by how much customers like the firm. In the actual industry it's in -- that of H1B visa mills -- it doesn't have a particularly good reputation for producing good code. It also has been plagued by scandals in India, and has a poor reputation in the eyes of immigration authorities as well.

[lev272]

Who are the most highly regarded of the firms in Infosys's field?

I realize that might sound sarcastic, but I mean it sincerely. I have little experience with that world, but I wasn't aware there was a hierarchy of brands in the offshore consulting firm space. Now I'm curious

[rsj_hn]

None of the big firms are well respected. The problem here is that if you are outsourcing software development, then you view it as a cost to be minimized rather than as something you care about. That means most of your projects are not interesting to work on, so these firms tend to have big turnover problems with talented staff. A lot of their work is keeping products alive in maintenance mode, for example, so that the vendor can claim that something is still supported in order to meet contractual commitments, but really they don't want to keep investing in the product. Consultancies are the hospices of dead product lines.

Real engineering innovation doesn't happen in this space, and there is so much innovation going on right now that if you are a talented developer you can do a lot better than work for one of these firms. If you are an overseas developer, you are much better off getting hired directly by a tech company to work on their products with an H1B than by going the Infosys route. There just isn't the surplus of talent claimed to staff these companies, and if you are unlucky enough to be a smart, driven developer working for one of them, you will end up bored out of your mind.

But at the same time, there are some excellent boutique consultancies, mostly small sized, with truly talented people, who decided to strike out on their own or in small teams. But again that's not a business model that scales to create massive consultancy behemoths. I know of a few, but they are colleagues who decided to work for themselves, it's not a brand you would have heard of.

This is true even for blue chip firms like IBM, whose consultancy business also has a terrible reputation for overcharging customers and not delivering what was expected.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Joel Spolsky has a great writeup on this phenomenon.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of IT consultants to build The System. The IT consultants he hired were incompetents who kept talking about “The Methodology” and who spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce a single thing.

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smart and talented. The youthful programmer built his whole system in one day for $20 and pizza. Mike was overjoyed. He recommended the youthful programmer to all his friends.

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he has more work than he can handle, so he hires a bunch of people to help him. The good people want too many stock options, so he decides to hire even younger programmers right out of college and “train them” with a 6 week course.

The trouble is that the “training” doesn’t really produce consistent results, so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules and procedures that are meant to make more consistent results. Over the years, the rule book grows and grows. Soon it’s a six-volume manual called The Methodology.

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a Huge Incompetent IT Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and a lot of people who blindly obey the Methodology, even when it doesn’t seem to be working, because they have no bloody idea whatsoever what else to do, and they’re not really talented programmers — they’re just well-meaning Poli Sci majors who attended the six-week course.

[hc91]

All of the firms in Infosys's field are the running joke of the software engineering world. There is literally not one of them viewed in a positive or even neutral light. And yes, there is a hierarchy of brands in the offshore consulting firm space and the Indian consultancies are the bottom of the barrel.

[rsj_hn]

I actually know of a Peruvian consultancy (HQ in San Francisco, but devs in Peru) that pays devs 20 bucks an hour to crank out business logic code for firms who have no tech competency and are willing to spend 4-5 figures to build an intranet or write some db logic. There are lots of shady players in this industry. The number of businesses who would benefit from some onsite scripting or automation is huge, as is the number of customers who get fleeced by these outfits and are stuck with unmaintainable code and need to keep sending regular checks to the consultancy to keep things going.

And don't get me started on the security of the code these outfits produce.

[hereiskkb]

Maybe. But profitability does not imply "pristine".

[vmurthy]

Infosys had a reputation as one of India's most transparent companies. Reputation is somewhat a nebulous concept so I am going to use a proxy: P/E ratio [1].

According to theory, investors pay up a premium PE for well managed companies and although it is an imperfect measure, lots of evidence suggests that it works (Look up HDFC Bank in India relative to its peers or government owned companies v/s their private counterparts) In India at least, Infosys had always had a premium PE compared to its peers [2]. So the "pristine brand" may have been with the investors.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra...

[2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...

[C1sc0cat]

I think its mainly in terms of the bean counters /boards of companies that out source.

Though of course it might make developers wary of joining a company with accounting discrepancies like this.