[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.