Indian giant Tata fluffs its lines as it takes on Amazon and Walmart

Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Tata has launched its attempt to rival Amazon.com and Walmart's e-commerce efforts, but suffered a bad case of the first day scalability jitters. India's e-commerce market is dominated by Amazon.com and Walmart-owned Flipkart, each of which enjoys around one third market share. Indian …

[Anonymous Coward]

No surprise

Given the calibre of the "engineers" from TCS I've had the displeasure to encounter, the fact they couldn't build and properly test a scalable platform is no surprise at all.

TCS deserve to fail, and any CxO that willingly brings them in needs to be first checked for any evidence of bribery or corruption, and if none is found they need an MRI scan to check whether or not they're suffering from a degenerative brain condition, including whether or not they actually have a brain.

Anon because I still occasionally have to work with them on mutual clients, much to my distress, and although my management know (and share) my thoughts, I'm not so dumb as to out myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No surprise

Agreed. We have had the "pleasure" of working with TCS for several years now. I will admit that some of their QAs have been very good, but the vast majority of the devs are awful.

There are significant cultural issues within TCS: obvious clangers will not be challenged; number of hours worked is very important, quality of work- not so much; issues are ignored right up to the point the business is on its knees; high turnover destabilises teams; easily avoidable disasters are walked into because nobody wanted to be the one to speak up; opportunities for innovation and growth are routinely overlooked but (ironically) to prove their value, devs must show that they make a contribution so they routinely claim other's achievements as their own, etc, etc. It's very toxic and draining to work with them.

We only cope by keeping a close eye on them and mixing our in-house people with the outsourced people. I dread to think what they would be like if left to their own devices with no external direction and monitoring.

Anonymous because like you, my senior management team have bought right into it, to the point where TCS have us by the danglies. To get out of this hell will require a lot of very senior managers getting serious egg on their faces, so quite unlikely. There is also the huge mountain to climb to re-build the internal IT team, a task that just becomes more insurmountable as time goes by.

Modern IT has improved so much with Agile and DevOps but we risk throwing it away at the hands of these huge conglomerates who have tried to turn the art of software development into deskilled sweatshop work with a similarly demotivating, counterproductive and unpleasant working environment.

[Ozmosis]

Re: No surprise

I was nearly TUPEd over to TCS several years back, as part of a "re-structure of IT". Thankfully I was able to find another job and avoided that, but my colleagues weren't so lucky. All bar one left soon after, and the one bloke who is left is there waiting to retire, and lets them get on with whatever they are doing.

Only TCS staff has Domain Admin accounts so there is no visibility of what they are doing from within the company. It has been a complete car crash, and most systems have been taken offline during working hours, sometimes for days. Projects are stupidly behind agreed timescales and, most infuriatingly for company staff, complaints to IT Senior Management are met with replies of "you need to take this up with our IT provider".

They are cheap because they employ under qualified staff, and that is apparent in everything they do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No surprise

Came here to say exactly that !

[An_Old_Dog]

Testing at Scale

... seems like one of the few things "the cloud" could be good for -- many VMs emulating users going clicky-clicky-clicky. Or tappity-tappity-tappity.

Did Tata test? Not well enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Testing at Scale

They are probably more expensive than cheap Indian workforce... thus they preferred manual testing, and undergo usual Indian software QA. But don't worry, you can always call Tata tech support, I guess...

[TeeCee]

...Consultancy Services – which professes expertise in e-commerce...

But it's Indian, so that actually means: "Its people learned Java at university and have been given a book on e-commerce to memorise so they can trot out the right answers parrot-fashion.".