[dotps1]

I'm sure he was an amazing capitalist, but my experience with Tata consulting was the worst.

I worked for a division of GE during the Immelt years that outsourced large portions of IT to Tata, and was in charge of the transition.

It was a masterclass in waste and inefficiency.

Definitely one of the larger nails in the coffin of a former Fortune 5 company.

[gautamsomani]

Have same thing to say. I worked for a very large e-commerce company in India, who when they were building their DC, contracted TCS. TCS gave a nightmarish experience on execution and ethics. They were horrible.

[lgleason]

Not to mention all of US jobs that we said "Ta ta" to as they went to India. I worked for GE during that time and the US divisions were pretty bad as well. The handwriting was on the wall with the future of the company. I'm sure someone in the C-Suite wrote a Kaizen to shift that inefficiency overseas and probably got a bonus for it as well.

[hyggetrold]

This is all I ever had heard about Tata consulting as well so I have to say it's been an education seeing how sad everyone is to see Ratan Tata pass away.

It does make a kind of sense to me now though - if Ratan Tata's goal was to pull money into India, he was massively successful. How he got there might be a different story. But that's just as true of all previous great capitalists as well.

[berniedurfee]

I think this is a big part of his legacy. I’m sure his contributions to the Indian economy are staggering in total.

That’ll conjure different emotions depending on where you sit in the world.

[justmarc]

I for one would love to read about these types of stories, I'm sure many on HN too.

I started a thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41800114 let's see if people pick up on it.

[dotps1]

I'll just share a little more here.

The scale of the outsourcing I am talking about is far greater than whatever you're imagining.

We brought teams of people from India over to the US, housed and fed them, so they could be able to work with their counterparts overseas. On the India side we found their operating infrastructure to be woefully inadequate, so we helped them build entirely new facilities with perimeter fences, proper security, the works.

After all was said and done, the skills of the people we were getting were on par with someone with no programming experience that skimmed a java book in their spare time. The code quality was abysmal at best, and this was in the days before source control was popular.

One of the other huge problems was just the time zone difference. You get into work in the morning to have a meeting with some second-shift team in India, and find out about all of the work that didn't get done because they didn't know what they were doing .. spend the time to correct them, they say they will fix it the next day .. next day comes, same issues, no progress, repeat ad nauseum.

It physically hurt to be a part of all of this.

[justmarc]

Thank you. That's a good one!