India's major IT outsourcers slow hiring and fret about deal pipelines Having spent 2022 struggling to retain workers in the face of high staff attrition rates, India's top four IT outsourcers have since slowed hiring and are worried their workers may not have enough to do. "FY 23 was a year of transition, as supply-side challenges abated while pandemic-depressed travel and discretionary spends …
Those companies are meat-renters, they exploit the misery and put people with insufficient training in front of clients. Their level of service is very low, the only happy ones are beancounters and shareholders.
When a company uses their services, don't expect this company to be a performing one.
No doubt. I have to deal with Indians in my job quite often, and I absolutely hate hearing that accent come onto a call. It means I'm not going to get any work done because the person I'm speaking to is fucking incompetent, and they are going to refuse to get anyone on the phone that can actually do the job. So, I'm caught between my customer that doesn't care why I can't get their circuit up and being unable to force the other company to do their job because of an Indian roadblock. Half the time, if they can't understand what's being asked of them or don't want to get in trouble by transferring me to a US based tech or a manager, they just hang the phone up which means calling back and sittng in a queue for another half hour.
I'm sure there are competent Indians out there, but they most certainly aren't the ones answering the phones at other telecom companies.
Outsourcing is a temp solution used by poor managers and bean counters.
I do admit that there are some amazing people out there BUT you are more likely to get a trainee or poor performer and ONLY when you scream do you get the good ones.
Bring the jobs home scrap IR35 incentive to use Rishi’s family company.
So they thought once they capture the UK market with IR35 changes, the business will be flowing in.
They didn't predict that most businesses don't actually like their crappy service?
Human nature is to adapt, so businesses will always find a way to get around the spanners thrown at them, but it's a shame politicians call it "issues with productivity" rather than what it really is - dealing with their corrupt policies.
Let's just hope for further decline of these outsourcers. They are the embodiment of what's wrong with late stage capitalism.
"parasites"
They feed off unwitting companies with PHBs who think IT simply comes down to "Have you tried switching it on and off?". They make wild promises, cream off huge contracts and pay the poor saps daft enough to sign up to work for them, way below market rates. UK and European businesses suffer due to short-sighted management, all the while home grown tech talent gets shafted every few years as companies think you can short change on skills, only to discover too late they got sold a service that's a second rate con.
I used to dread working with the big Indian outsourcers - HCL, TCS and IBM India in particular. At first I felt sorry for poor saps sent to replace me as a skilled freelance DBA. But I resented their lamentable quality, education, training and language skills and the stupidity of any client who could only see the bottom line of the day rate In the end I realised the outsourcers were actually good for business, because businesses recognised they needed proper work. You ended picking up shedloads of contracts fixing and generally putting right the rubbish software and systems they'd left behind. More often than not you just threw away their work and started afresh, because they lacked even basic foundation knowledge. Some of them even turned up with 'borrowed' CVs - I'll never forget one so-called DBA who turned up with a CV claiming 7 years' experience of Linux and the first question he asked is 'So is this Linux like Unix?'
So glad to be out of that game now.
Although I don't think generative AI models like gpt for code generation are a threat for decent software engineers and just a productivity aid. I do think they represent an existential threat to outsourcing companies that charge a low wage for poor quality code. Why outsource for £100-200 per day for crap code when you can pay £20 per month for code generation that might make existing engineers two or three times as productive? We're not there yet but I can see is getting there in the next few years. Once this happens the people you want are those who know how to code and how it all fits together, not people who can't write unit tests and write poor quality code no matter how cheap they are.
HCL Tech has not even paid it's European people an inflation increase for the last 8 years which is a 30% pay cut in purchasing power. Thus all the skills and experience have left and only bluffers or offshore are left.
Great work by the leadership to focus on the notional % margin while having no idea how the implementation or operations service business actually depends on skill experience and commitment.
So it's a hollow shell that over promises and under delivers worse than before. Only the purchasing and financial community like them. Only the lack of understanding and accountability enable adequate customer satisfaction scores.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
