Reply to: would you trust indian IT outsourcers ?

[minestrone]

The Indians will get better at programming but the UK will start to lag behind. Where are the young clever British programmers? One day UK companies may onshore or outsource development to India not because of price, but a paucity of talent.

Let's face it, they cannot get any worse.

Sure there may be diamonds in the rough but taking the average they are miles below UK IT staff.

[expat]

The Indians will get better at programming but the UK will start to lag behind. Where are the young clever British programmers? One day UK companies may onshore or outsource development to India not because of price, but a paucity of talent.

There are few young programmers here. Offshoring, as encouraged by HMG in the name of trade with India and reducing costs to business, has kicked away the bottom rungs of the ladder so no-one goes into it any more.

As for getting a degree in Comp Sci, forget it. Grants and other funding are available for students in Further Education, but not Higher Education. So if you go to a college to study as a hairdresser or chiropodist, you can get financial assistance from the government, but if you go to university to study Computer Science, you get none.

[swamp]

The Indians will get better at programming but the UK will start to lag behind. Where are the young clever British programmers? One day UK companies may onshore or outsource development to India not because of price, but a paucity of talent.

[Mich the Tester]

You are all picking upon the negatives of outsourcing to the injuns, what about the positives.

1/ The laughs I get from reading their attempts at documentation
2/ The laughs I get from their attempts at testing
3/ when they request the needful and doing the muchness
4/ errr...
4/ umm...
5/ thats it!

The money I get paid for retesting all the untested cack they’ve delivered. Sorry, I mean the money I get paid for posting on CUK and getting permies to test the cack the Injuns have delivered.

[Mich the Tester]

that's precisely the problem we're having on the current project I work on.

Yes, that’s called ‘compliance’. In other words, make it impossible to properly test the applications that handle people’s life savings while ignoring the traders that piss everyone’s money into the wind.

[MrsGoof]

You are all picking upon the negatives of outsourcing to the injuns, what about the positives.

1/ The laughs I get from reading their attempts at documentation
2/ The laughs I get from their attempts at testing
3/ when they request the needful and doing the muchness
4/ errr...
4/ umm...
5/ thats it!

[Cheshire Cat]

Another thing I found with outsourcing financial work to India is that by regulation they are not allowed to see the real data in the database, so someone onshore always has an overhead masking the data and making sure they can only see what they are meant to see.

And when the bugs come in they are usually data related "oh, we have a problem with the greeks on this instrument that client X has a call on" but as they are not allowed to see this data it is always someone onshore that has to fix it in a system that is undoubtedly crap.

that's precisely the problem we're having on the current project I work on.

[MPwannadecentincome]

Insane, no wonder IBs are totally screwed just now if that is the way they work.

I think they had an attitude when it went over budget that it was cheaper than what was quoted by onshore so they just got in the habit of kicking them another few hundred K. They got into that habit.

When it started to go past 5 mill it was "well they must be nearly finished by now". When it hit 8 million they knew it was time to put a stop to it.

Maybe Plan B should be to set up shop in India, hire 50 rickshaw drivers as java developers and rent them out to big European banks by the day, I mean that is what they are doing just now anyway.

Surely at current exchange rates it must be better to get Europeans to outsource to the UK!

[minestrone]

And they paid time and materials not fixed price? Lucrative!

Insane, no wonder IBs are totally screwed just now if that is the way they work.

I think they had an attitude when it went over budget that it was cheaper than what was quoted by onshore so they just got in the habit of kicking them another few hundred K. They got into that habit.

When it started to go past 5 mill it was "well they must be nearly finished by now". When it hit 8 million they knew it was time to put a stop to it.

Maybe Plan B should be to set up shop in India, hire 50 rickshaw drivers as java developers and rent them out to big European banks by the day, I mean that is what they are doing just now anyway.

[pmeswani]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7815031.stm

those IT indians are tulip. personal experience

I'm glad you have such high praise for me.

[MPwannadecentincome]

I have seen an outsourced project go 100 times over budget, seriously 100 times, it's hard to believe but true.

Admittedly it was the clients fault, they should have questioned the ability of a bunch of guys in India who had never worked in the financial arena writing a trading platform for £100,000 in a technology they had never used.

And they paid time and materials not fixed price? Lucrative!

[Purple Dalek]

do you mean £2k or £200,000?

or do you actually mean two pounds?!

Yes, 2 pounds.

[jmo21]

I know one really much worse than that. Our team quoted £300k for a security system, and the "tame" off-shore said they'd do it as an add on to their existing system for £2.

The management really thought they were going to get for £2 what we'd quoted for £300,000, and thought it right through until testing when they found out it was just a pop up dialog box with nothing behind it.

do you mean £2k or £200,000?

or do you actually mean two pounds?!

[BrilloPad]

no

[minestrone]

Another thing I found with outsourcing financial work to India is that by regulation they are not allowed to see the real data in the database, so someone onshore always has an overhead masking the data and making sure they can only see what they are meant to see.

And when the bugs come in they are usually data related "oh, we have a problem with the greeks on this instrument that client X has a call on" but as they are not allowed to see this data it is always someone onshore that has to fix it in a system that is undoubtedly crap.