[nell]

This thread is full of generalized insults at a million people based on where they work. If someone did the same based on a different attribute of a population, they'd be banned.

I've worked at one of these companies but left over a decade ago. I know how we're looked at when we do client work (part of why I left). Some of my colleagues were less competent, true. But, some will wipe the floor with the client employees we did the work for.

To WITCH employees: If you are an employee at one of these companies, remember you are not the worst. Many of you come from humble backgrounds and are just learning the ropes. The world is cruel. It is a tough place, and you will be discriminated against. This is your fuel. You've already made great strides; keep going. You have to.

[mrweasel]

I'm not quite reading it that way, but if that's the case I completely agree: You should never insult people based on where they work, or for any reason really. What I see is a general criticism of the companies, their culture and business practices.

InfoSys is not a company I worked with, so I can't and won't comment on them. TCS is a company I have had the misfortune to encounter. The problems with TCS is numerous, a few examples: they oversell, you're denied access to consultants that can actually help and they will always prefer to prolong an issue, rather than escalating to senior consultants. There's no incentive for one of their consultants to be pro-active or take responsibility. There are so many departments/team and layers in their organisation that there's always some one else to point the finger at.

The consultants are TCS aren't stupid or incompetent, but they also aren't being helped, pushed or motivated by seniors or their management. I do got the feeling that they would be reprimanded if they where to escalate an issue. In a meeting with TCS I suggested added 8GB of memory to a VM, as either a temporary fix, or a sort of "let's see what that does for the client". That suggestion was rejected because: It wouldn't fix the underlying issue (which was true, but they also didn't want to upgrade Java or the operating system, which was part of the problem. The OS being an old unsupported version of CentOS), and also wasn't something you could "just do". That would require involvement from 5 or 6 other departments. A month later, someone finally caved in an escalated to a higher up TCS consultant, which just added the memory as a fix until the service could be migrated to a new OS and JRE.

Anyway my point is: No, it's not the staff, not as such. They skills are for the most part perfectly fine. The company did have true experts available, if required. It's just that the culture is a really bad fit for western style companies, if you're in Northern Europe it's an even worse, because we don't share many of their values and fears. This could be solved if the Indian companies better understood the market they're selling into, because they do have the technical skills. As it stands, people like me get annoyed that we have to tell the clients that we can't fix their issues, because someone in Mumbai is afraid of looking bad to their boss or ask a colleague for help. If it has to be like that, then at least have the balls to tell the client yourself why you don't care that their systems haven't been running right for a month.

[cocoland2]

That is a very compassionate comment.Thank you!. It is such a sad thing to make sweeping generalizations, I know of many ex employees of these organizations in FAANG, startups. Agreed that the ratio of great technical talent may be small, these companies have 300k employees, a vast majority is maintaining a legacy application that is keeping a business alive somewhere or processing someone's health insurance claim or something important thereof. You will find some really smart people doing products like Finacle, a well adopted core-banking software. What was done was bad and than talking of bad practices (so many exposed buckets in AWS, miners using compromised EC2 instances from github repos) a vast majority of the discussion seems to be sweeping generalizations of how every single person employed in these companies are!

[stevewatson301]

There is something to be said about the repeated displays of incompetence though. My own experiences working with WITCH employees have mirrored those of the other comments and that of the article. It is not wrong to criticize the methods that they pursue, nor the fact that they do not wish to learn from their mistakes.

Most companies the size of WITCH do not utilize access keys nor add them to source control. While a developer may make a mistake, you would expect there would be guardrails around the development process, either by way of an automated scanner or a more experienced software engineer catching it as part of a code review. The fact that none of this happened is quite concerning, IMO.

You could also perhaps say this is a management problem than an employee problem; and while that is true, such distinctions are rarely made. As an example, I'm sure you've had bad experiences with customer support which you simply summarized as "The support rep at Corp X sucks" when talking to other people; whereas the truth might be somewhere closer to "The support rep was out of luck because they didn't have a process to do A, B and C because management didn't think of it."

[Aeolun]

> Most companies the size of WITCH do not utilize access keys nor add them to source control.

Most companies the size of WITCH do not use barely out of college engineers for rock bottom prices, driving them to deliver, features, features, features at all costs.

Literally all costs. It's a lot simpler to work with AWS if you can just plonk your full access key down everywhere, and even someone just out college can understand it.

Conversely, dealing with AWS Roles/Profiles and permission is a whole separate profession by this point.

[qwertyuiop_]

It is a tough place, and you will be discriminated against.

Calling out incompetency which exposed privileged patient data is not discrimination.

Rough analogy: you don’t want a pilot who flunked basic aviation class to fly your plane and it’s not discrimination to keep him or her out of the cockpit.

[crossroadsguy]

I am from India and live here. I usually find it offensive the way HN becomes racist, subtly and directly, when topics around this subcontinent, especially India, come up. This is anything but that.

I think people are unnecessarily being much more considerate and respectful than this company and its people (including the British PM’s father-in-law) deserve.

Infosys and anything or anybody related to it are worst of the worst.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I’ll take a shot at being brutally honest. I feel this in a different way. I grew up in a conservative family with some racism in its more distant ranks, thankfully with a more liberal mom to balance it out. I grew up fairly well off in a white area, where there were only ever two families of color. Both families moved away in a much shorter time than the average.

I’ve noticed that for awhile I had carried an innate aversion to offshore outsourcing, but only when it’s predominately non-white. It’s difficult to rid yourself of these intentional or unintentional exposure based thought patterns.

I had the privilege and good luck of ending up in a position where I ran an educational, science focused nonprofit. Then I started a business that had needed skills far more expensive in the US, before we could quite reach that level of expenditure. You learn quickly in those kinds of situations that if you carry those innate perspectives you can end up locking yourself away from some excellent talent; capable people who can work magic if you set them up for success.

This comment is only in reply to the topic of race. I’m not making any judgements or assertions about Infosys or any company in particular. Some companies and some people are bad at what they do, and that’s a global truth that is blind to race, culture, creed, politics, and anything else. I’m in full agreement that this type of security failing can, will, and has affected any company no matter what their employees look like or where they are based/operate.

[willcipriano]

I don't see this as a India problem, it's really an incentive problem.

In my experience the further you get from the money, the less of a shit people give. At a 5 person start up the result of any effort you put in is considerably more noticable, you don't have to share the credit of a innovation with a thicket of business analysts, scrum masters, executive vice presidents, etc. In that type of environment people tend to put more effort in as generally a sizeable portion of the rewards for that effort will find it's way to them. (Side note: this has changed with the innovation of Hollywood accounting[0] for start ups, and the number of truly innovative start ups has also seemingly declined)

Now think of a large company. The rewards tend to be nearly entirely rank based. You are a Software Engineer III, that pays between $x and $y, if you want a promotion you'll need to change fields into management. Perhaps a really bright idea or large effort will result in a small bonus, so you still have some reason to put effort in but probably won't go crazy.

Now go one step further, you are a employee of a 3rd party firm working for a large corporation. A big part of the firm's value prop is that they are cheap, as in they demand less of the reward for effort, they share a small portion of that with you but also have their own thicket of business analysts, scrum masters... you get the point. At that point honestly why bother? You have so many middle men between you and the results of your efforts that it's very unlikely that you'll ever see any meaningful reward. Just do what it takes to not get fired.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

[basha94]

Thank you for this! I've said the same thing and had to deal with salty downvoters earlier today. Companies pay WITCH companies billions of dollars for their services yet a lot of pretentious hackers just don't see the value.

[stevewatson301]

That's just based on the ability to convince the management types though, and I'm sure you've heard of the phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM."

For an executive, it's easier to justify outsourcing to a large consulting firm simply because of the security afforded by the choice and the ease of justification; rather than any technical abilities they may or may not possess, and certainly it does not imply its correctness.

The anecdotes you hear are from a engineering perspective, which is where the consulting firm has to walk the walk, exposing their true abilities. It is incorrect to dismiss that as being "salty" or "pretentious", and tint them with an angle of "discrimination". The lack of processes and guardrails in these consulting companies is an objective fact.

[basha94]

Steve, how dumb do you think management is? Why would a company spend >=$1B+ in OpEx and CapEx just because somebody convinced them instead of seeing any technical value whatsoever?

[stevewatson301]

Did you ever have an interaction with your manager where they could not understand the technical details of a project and insisted on only a high-level overview?

People understand the world through dimensionality reduction and lossy compression of information in domains that they are not involved on a daily basis. This causes an inherent issue when you stack these phenomena across multiple organizational levels; this is how you end up with Intel's or Ballmer-era Microsoft's management failures, to use some non-WITCH examples, or the issues that we're talking about in this article.

[hn_go_brrrrr]

Management is human, just like everyone else. They absolutely make their share of truly stupid decisions. It's just they have more power, so their stupid decisions cost way more and affect more people.

[crocwrestler]

That's fine, but people use these companies to presumably receive competent contractors, not to subsidise the country of India

[jojobas]

There is nobody responsibly for hiring of new people into any of the bannable groups, or firing from them. There is management at Infosys that is 100% responsible for the apathetic, rot that engulfs it.

[mindentropy]

The funny part is WITCH is propped up by these very companies complaining because they themselves are least bothered about quality. I have seen many executives in suit and tie visit them, get treated like royalty and shake their heads and talk bullshit.

I always used to wonder how can someone be so stupid repeatedly but then I learnt along the way that engineer's opinions hold very little value in the way of making money at the lowest cost and quality possible that they can get by.

[darkarmani]

> based on where they work. If someone did the same based on a different attribute of a population, they'd be banned.

Why is that surprising? Are you making reference to judging people on the color of the skin versus where they CHOOSE to work? I'm don't know anything about WITCH companies, but this is a serious false-equivalence.

[kras143]

I understand your sentiment! Do you have any references or stories to share which show WITCH companies in a good light?

[nell]

They lifted millions of us at least a class or more, financially.

Lower -> middle

Middle -> upper middle

Some even got rich.

In a caste discriminating society, they leveled the playing field.

Their business partners continue to do business with them. I remember an internal story, during the GFC, we worked on credit for a client who couldn’t pay their invoice($ millions). These companies are not angels, nor they only hire the best. But they’ve been the launchpad for millions of IT careers that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

[terminal_d]

It's a business, they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an unintended byproduct.

WITCH salaries are a joke, no wonder they deliver substandard results.

[kamaal]

>>WITCH salaries are a joke

Getting a job in India is not a joke. And that's saying something.

Most poor people in India, are not the same poor you see in the USA. Many people who make it to WITCH companies are likely succeeding despite all odds, and are starting their career at such companies, while they can get trained, and work on projects and later use the experience to do some thing good on the longer run. Several lucky also get overseas travel opportunities many even settle outside India.

Sure things are way less than perfect. And if you come from a rich family do not join a WITCH. You can either wait out for a better job, or may be go overseas for studies or just try to immigrate to some western lands.

Most people complaining about WITCH companies are typically from a background which is already better off. And they generally find such companies to be downgrade from their current social class. The remainder do just fine.

[sumedh]

> Do you have any references or stories to share which show WITCH companies in a good light?

They made lot of their shareholders very rich

[iaml]

Even though hn commenters like to pretend otherwise, if you have a close look you can find many outright bigoted takes here.