Reply to: RBS has government's blessing to transfer jobs to India

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Fred Bloggs]

And they will and then it stops being a problem. We don't outsource our development to Japan.

However, you're clearly wrong. I see sw innovation coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe. Not in 20 years time, but now. It is only India, where this sort of incompetence is rife.

It's blessing in disguise that all the management-types hear about is India. You couldn't find a worse place.

No, you're incorrect about Russia and eastern europe. They were already developed economies as far as technology was concerned long before the Berlin wall was even built. You cannot fairly compare (say) Poland or the Czech Republic with India. Totally different set of circumstances.

[minestrone]

Of course they are not going to be as advanced, I have had some kind of programmable computer in my house since the 70s, I was taught computing nearly 20 years ago by someone with decades of experience using computers. Most Indians have had a PC for 10 years minimum, the next generation will be much different.

And don't think that it's only Indian outsourcing teams that fanny about and waste time, I have seen plenty of western companies filled with western developers producing unworkable tulipe at the last minute. That's how they make their money and they are all at it.

Contracting as we know it will be almost gone in 10 years, we might as well get used to it.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

That's naive and simply daft way of thinking. It used to be said about Japan back in the 60's and 70's. China and India have yet to move up the technology ladder. But they will. In 20 years time once the Indian and Chinese economies mature, you'll be saying that the Vietnamese and the Cambodians can't innovate............ and so it goes on.

And they will and then it stops being a problem. We don't outsource our development to Japan.

However, you're clearly wrong. I see sw innovation coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe. Not in 20 years time, but now. It is only India, where this sort of incompetence is rife.

It's blessing in disguise that all the management-types hear about is India. You couldn't find a worse place.

[Fred Bloggs]

You can't compare mechanical, labour intensive work to software-engineering. The latter is an innovative process. Show me innovation coming out of China or India.

That's naive and simply daft way of thinking. It used to be said about Japan back in the 60's and 70's. China and India have yet to move up the technology ladder. But they will. In 20 years time once the Indian and Chinese economies mature, you'll be saying that the Vietnamese and the Cambodians can't innovate............ and so it goes on.

[Zippy]

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.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

I might not have been clear about my experience, which is the following:

Big companies think outsorcing to their India centers is working, because the locals are keeping mum and fixing all the issues they (India) cause. Noone likes a moaner, so they just usually take it on the chin, fix what's broken, tell them to play nice the next time and move on. They never learn anything from past mistakes and we (example us, current project) don't have more than 5-ish % of the code delivered by them (even though there's twice as many of them as us), working in the application, which has not been rewritten by one of us. The remaining 5% are candidates (scheduled to be) rewrites, since they are either security, performance or maintenance nightmares.

The same story held anywhere I went.

The industry is in for a rude awakening the next time it thinks it can get by on India alone. In fact, as things stand now at our firm, India is nothing more than ballast.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

Shockingly naive thing to say.

I have the benefit of experience. Again, this is nothing new. Remember 2002? Show me anything non-trivial manufacturing being brought to glory in India or China.

[Moscow Mule]

My experience is generally in line with Malvolio's.

If you could point me to an offshore company that can:

• work on their own initiative,
• produce an estimate that is under 300% of what a reasonable on-shore team could achieve,
• take responsibility for their own work,
• actually learn from their previous experience on your software,
• produce work that has been properly unit tested,
• not complain about doing integration testing between two delivered modules

then I'd be happy. As it stands at the moment, I haven't got a single one of the above from the company we use and I'm pretty ******* far from happy...

[HairyArsedBloke]

I've just logged on to Conservatives.com and and using the 'Contact Us' option have asked what the Conservative parties views are on this issue.
If I get a reply I'll post it on here.
( - This appears to be a popular thread maybe others may want to do the same it can't do any harm).

You're very funny.

[minestrone]

You can't compare mechanical, labour intensive work to software-engineering. The latter is an innovative process. Show me innovation coming out of China or India.

Shockingly naive thing to say.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

the way all clothes, gadgets are anyway produced in countries like china, bangladesh, india by exporting the technology etc..

You can't compare mechanical, labour intensive work to software-engineering. The latter is an innovative process. Show me innovation coming out of China or India.