[primax]

I would agree if Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and HCL were in the business of offering up skilled people that they have promised to clients. But every single one of my clients who engages these companies has a story where they were sold X cloud or devops or security people and the people put on their engagements had 0 experience.

I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the same thing. And the managers overseas want to charge me expert rates while I have to train up their staff on the basics of how to do their job. And I mean the ABSOLUTE basics.

I really don't see how it's not fraud.

[r_singh]

There's probably barely any big consulting firm or bank that does not have offshore mega offices (in India) where a lot of important work happens in equities, commodities, etc. Citibank, BOA, PWC, you name it. All employ tens of thousands of people in India.

Even tech cos. like Amazon are hiring their next wave of knowledge workers offshore.

It's not like the offshore heads can force anyone to do so, or the Indian government is providing huge incentives (like for manufacturing in china). It's because the decision makers believe doing so is the right thing. If it's anyones fault, it's the heads of these organisations that are to blame, for prioritising perceived cost savings over what their own workforce thinks or does.

Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud. It's something that companies trying to bite more than they can chew often result in.

Also, I agree that having to teach your offshore counterpart how to do their job is absolutely ridiculous. It makes me wonder, how selfish can these corporates be, that they prioritise their profit or share price or bonus, over their own workforce.

[dsfyu404ed]

>Having a great sales pitch and not being able to deliver is not a fraud.

When you do it over and over and over again it sure starts to quack like the fraud duck.

[r_singh]

In that case their customers should be aware of this by now and they should be out of business (maybe soon).

[purplex]

I have worked for two of the Big 4 consulting firms, in security domain. They have the same story - they promise client to provide resources on subject A and B, ask the ones who have less project to learn subject A and B (these resources are expert in subject X and Y, but since the client wants A and B - they are asked to learn that in a day or two. I have seen many colleagues going to the client location, searching on Google "how to do A" in the morning and then provide some PPT with basic information.

Currently working for an American software dev company.

What I mean to say is, the issue you mentioned is not limited to these 5-6 companies, but for the whole IT industry.

[primax]

No direct experience in a given tech is ok sometimes, if they have transferrable experience (i.e. ansible to chef, cloudformation to terraform et al).

Having no experience on any cloud platform and being sold as an expert however is a different story.

[tonyedgecombe]

That's a common problem across all big consulting companies, it's not specific to India.

I think the real problem is that many of these corporates haven't realised how important IT is to their business. The idea that a bank should outsource development is ridiculous, most of their interaction with customers is going to be through these systems. If they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors then they need strong IT.

[r_singh]

> The idea that a bank should outsource development is ridiculous, most of their interaction with customers is going to be through these systems. If they want to differentiate themselves from their competitors then they need strong IT.

I agree with this too. However, this arises 2 doubts in my head:

1. Is Apple outsourcing manufacturing to Foxconn any different from banks outsourcing their IT?[1]

2. Is hiring offshore talent the same as outsourcing? Can the talent still not be in-house and the company be a multinational?

[1] Yes, it is because a lot of times firms outsource their entire IT/System design to these outsourcing firms too. And this is because of lack of knowledge from the manager's part, laziness or just greed. But it is still comparable because they both have certain shared downsides in the long run.

[viraptor]

Foxconn has a very direct impact on Apple's product, so any issues with quality would come back to them pretty quickly. Foxconn also has an ongoing partnership which I would expect to be worth a lot of money to them.

On the other hand, everything I've seen so far outsourced in IT in a standard way could come back in any condition. Worst case, it's unusable, but contractors get paid anyway and move to the next client.

[nkrisc]

Regarding Apple, they seem to have a very close and special relationship with Foxconn in order to ensure the quality of production. So while it is a similar arrangement, it seems very different to me.

[grilledyam]

Basically all of the offshore devs I've had the pleasure of working with are at the very beginner end of the spectrum, bar one or two. Even had to teach a "senior" developer how to write a unit test the other day... it's ridiculous.