RBS has government's blessing to transfer jobs to India

[kingshuk]

What MoscowMule said.

My experience is that - while the lot I worked with were technically competent - they had absolutely no initiative.
Example - their code needed to work with a popular affiliate scheme. I sent them the documentation to do this and the contact details for the support people, code got delivered and quite obviously wouldn't work. I told them this (and why), they argued for two fcking days so I rewrote the code (not my job) and sent it back to them, along with an long explanation. They rewrote the code and sent it back - still wouldn't work. Turned out they hadn't read the documentation so all the parameters were wrong, hadn't contacted support and hadn't even tried to test it (or contact me for help). It took two fcking weeks to get the bugger working.
The attitude seemed to be - well, it's outside our system so ... meh.

I've seen this argument many times and thought I should bite

It goes something like - "I have worked in 1/2/3.. projects where there were Indian developers/testers. It all went bad because they wrote bad code/can't write english/don't communicate.. We then fixed all their code/documentation/test case.. Hence its obvious that outsourcing to Indian companies is a bad idea and doing work here (UK/US/France etc) is a good idea."

This is hasty generalization.

I am sure all your experiences are true but I would like to provide a bit more perspective -

Like anywhere else there is a shortage of competent people in Indian IT sector. Most of the top notch graduates out of Indian universities go to US colleges and eventually join companies there. The next lot (many as good as the first) choose to stay but join US software/hardware companies who have set up shop in India. Think any big name in IT - they have R&D offices India. They pay a lot (in local terms) and they are highly coveted as employer (as opposed to banks or consultancy companies).

IT services companies (the lot you meet) are not the employers of choice for most of these people. So these companies higher a lot of freshers from 2nd/3rd/4th rank universities. Train them for a few months and assign them to projects to shadow someone else with a bit more experience. After about a year or two they are sent on-site or made 'visible' in a project. Which is when you see them. The good ones quit fairly quickly to find better oppurtunities. The ones who stay (many are good) get people management responsibilities in about 4/5 years. So you stop seeing them in technical role. You are unlikely to meet technical people with a lot of experience from Indian IT services companies. About 5 years is max.

That said from my personal experience offshore Indian team can provide very significant cost saving and you can get adequate quality work done by them if you manage your project well. They can however not *yet* be as good as a bunch of senior developers you can get here with loads of experience in a particular domain. But they cost a lot and many times you don't need that.

[Moscow Mule]

I've seen this argument many times and thought I should bite
<snip>

Yes, we find our lot very good at donkey work.

[Evil Hangover]

That said from my personal experience offshore Indian team can provide very significant cost saving and you can get adequate quality work done by them if you manage your project well. They can however not *yet* be as good as a bunch of senior developers you can get here with loads of experience in a particular domain. But they cost a lot and many times you don't need that.

Can't say I've ever experienced anything even aspiring to "piss poor" quality work from all of the offshoring teams I've worked with.

Maybe all the IB's use the same consultancies. In any event I make a point of pleading to my project sponsors to avoid using ANYONE from India on any of my projects. Don't want testers, developers, or even support staff.

They just can't be trusted to deliver anything. I'm so sick of listening to the greasy spiv managers explanations, as to why they were unable to deliver yet again.

[JoJoGabor]

They just can't be trusted to deliver anything. I'm so sick of listening to the greasy spiv managers explanations, as to why they were unable to deliver yet again.

That sounds like my experience trying to get a tailor made suit in India. I had to go and lsiten to their excuses a total of 12 times over 4 days. Then I brought it back to England and got it fixed.

This has turned into an analogy hasn't it?