A Sad “IR35” Day

[helen7]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

[cojak]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

Well good for you.

Since you obviously didn't negotiate too well in the first place, this is probably for the best for your company.

[Paralytic]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

You're right, but you are kidding yourself if you think there are not potential issues with offshoring, and not just to Indian contractors, but to other areas too (eg. Eastern Europe).

I've built a technical team in India in the past and they do have a great education system that produces people with great technical skills, but there are also major cultural differences that if not understood and catered for can lead to significant quality issues further down the line. In my experience, the SI's are not very good at this (because they really only care about quarterly billing targets).

Labelling such opinions as racist is just burying your head in the sand.

Will going to IBM/TCS/Cognizant be cheaper than contractors? Yes, initially. What is more difficult to quantify is the end-to-end costs (eg, to correct technical debt because the message was deliver fast) where the impact of these decisions are not realised until further down the line, and at that point things have moved on and its either work with what you have to find a way to fix it under a BAU budget.

But, that doesn't matter in todays corporate world - those costs are pretty much hidden and its the headline cost that gets people promoted to CIO

[Amanensia]

In my experience intelligence, diligence and aptitude for virtually any skills are pretty much evenly distributed across populations. There are hard-working, brilliant Indians just as there are hard-working, brilliant Brits, Poles, Botswanans, Paraguayans, Laotians and Russians. Maybe even Martians. All these populations also contain their fair share of slackers, dullards and muppets. It's quite easy to waste money by picking up a British contractor, if you don't recruit carefully. It's also quite easy to waste money on an outsourcing relationship, if you don't build that carefully.

"The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India."
All? Some folks might think of that as a racist comment in itself. Just sayin'.....

[dx4100]

I think the cultural element plays a part. Like most of us have said every person from india or Eastern Europe I have ever worked with has been highly technically skilled. Something gets lost when it comes to many business orientated demands which good contractors often bridge the gap on, even vs our perm “friends”.

But we are talking in the general here and walking a very fine line on racism.

[edison]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

Speaking as an IT Director () I think things will be more nuanced.

FWIW my experience with the likes of Wipro, Infosys and Accenture hasn't been anything special but I have worked at clients who used some of the mid-tier Indian providers who were much better.

There will be more contractors who find out that their skills weren't that special after all and these are the ones who are going to be most at risk of being replaced by someone offshore.

Longer term, I think we'll see other sourcing models gain prominence. I'm seeing more small consultancy type firms going head to head with the big boys on transformation programmes. Their resources are typically practitioners who have been very senior level and don't cost much more than a relatively junior resource from the likes of Accenture.

The cost advantage of places like India will diminish and other offshore centres will continue to grow in Eastern Europe and Asia, e.g. Vietnam.

Given China's massive investment in new technologies like AI, they could well be the biggest threat to India.

All in all, it's looking grim if you were just a bum on a seat.

[cosmic]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

Well my experience handling teams from India is very bad. These off shore teams are a revolving door. Their attitude stinks and are rude in meetings.

One project I will not forget is with wipro on a multi million pound project for a large org. They simply messed it up. End result was a joke. They the specialists and architects would argue with the client so they brought me in. I had to go through everything and i mean everything they did and coded to explain why/what they have produced was bad. I had to fight tooth and nail to the point where wipro directors got involved so their team would listen and make the required changes.

Yes they are skilled but requires a lot and I mean a lot of hand holding. Speaking with all these guys and girls that come to uk on rotation are only fixated on staying in the UK and not leaving.

If they the client bought in just 2 or 3 contractors the client would have a functional system built to spec in half the time at a fraction of the cost. These Indian and Easter European companies are cheap on face value but when the client is billed for other things it spirals out of control. Getting a contractor at 400 per day x3 is cheaper then being billed 1200 for an architect then 1000 for a specialist then 800 for per dev and the if required a director around 1500 and these costs are per day for the run of the project.

[sal]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

If the world of outsourcing to IBM / Cognizant / Accenture and offshoring to India is so wonderful, why haven't you done it by now?

If you are actually a CIO and reading this forum, you should know that there is nothing to be afraid of next year - just acknowledge that the right of substitution in the contracts is genuine and enjoy the cream of the crop contractors flocking to your outside IR35 roles.

If half the public sector managed to "get it right" and not blanked declare everyone inside, I doubt the private sector will do any worse.

Sure just like in 2017 - permitractors and people already using umbrella will fold in round one. Hand-to-mouth contractors on low rates and unlucky ones with exhausted war chests will follow.

Personally I'm digging in to blow out my measly 6m war chests, before I even think about folding. I will enjoy some family time, the missus will have more spare time away from the kids to refresh her skills and go back to work after 5 years of housewifery. Then if push comes to shove I might finally go Perm for 1-2 years for a career pivot I have contemplating for a while.

No effing way am I going to pay employee level tax/NI without the benefits.

[oliverson]

as a cio, for the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and i won't show anyone how to do it.

cio : Ibm / cognizant / accenture etc... Can you do this job please?

service providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that indians are rubbish. the most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people i have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from india.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

[ChimpMaster]

As a CIO, For the avoidance of any doubt; this is how it will play our for stubborn contractors.

Contractor : I have special skills and knowledge that nobody else has. No permie can ever do my job and I won't show anyone how to do it.

CIO : IBM / Cognizant / Accenture etc... can you do this job please?

Service Providers : Yes we can, and we can do it offshore for half the price if you like.

End.

Gone are the days where we pay 1500 a day for consultants from service providers. And don't give me that racist cr@p that Indians are rubbish. The most skilled, innovative, progressive and hard working people I have worked with over the last 10 years have all come from India.

The part in bold is complete and utter cr@p.

But it won't stop medium/large corporations from moving to the offshore/onshore Indian model, because the number crunchers simply see £££savings and will use the April 2020 ruling to enforce their vision.