[campfireveteran]

Infosys and TCS remind me of Uber and Lyft: business models based on magical thinking-rooted exploitation. Engineers need to form their own worker-owned consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large corporations.

[jryle70]

Infosys and TCS have been around for decades. If their business model was based on "magical thinking-rooted exploitation" then their customers must be real fools. Or maybe they thrive because there were huge demand for IT projects, which continue to the present time, and businesses have traditionally not considered software engineering their core competency, despite the fact that outsourcing is inherently inefficient.

> Engineers need to form their own worker-owned consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large corporations

"Infosys was established by seven engineers in Pune, Maharashtra, India with an initial capital of $250 in 1981" [0]

$250 in 1981 is $706 in 2019 dollar. So yes, looks like they started out exactly like how you advocate.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys

[pnako]

Easier said than done, though. The problem is that potential clients aren't able to assess quality easily.

That system works for lawyers and doctors because there are bars and boards to not only vet theit credentials, but also restrict supply through quotas.

One solution might be for that coop to sell service around a valuable piece of software they own (or at least have demonstrable expertise with). Thats how the SQLite developers work, for example.

[r_singh]

Uber and Lyft are loss making experiments. Whereas Infosys and TCS are profitable corporations, responsibly hiring hundreds of thousands of people (which they do not plan to fire impulsively like Uber), bringing in huge volumes of trade revenue to India for over a decade.

Uber and Lyft use contract workers, rather than getting people on their payroll. Infosys and TCS hire freshers on bonds at salaries that are not very high, but hire thousands every year on their payroll in a country where IT engineering programs have near 100% placements. If those engineers want to work for themselves or other non-corporates, no one is stopping them.

[anonymous_i]

quality != quantity

[r_singh]

Fair enough, I never said that they were quality. Just that they're nothing similar to Uber or Lyft.

[dsfyu404ed]

Quantity has a quality all its own.

That said, that's probably a bad motto to have in IT.

[anm89]

Do you need to control how every engineer works?

If you don't want to work for a corporation, don't work for a corporation. Why do you need to tell the entirety of engineers how to do it?

[matheusmoreira]

Unionized workers have far more leverage in business negotiations.

[thunderbong]

That's actually a very good analogy.