One in five employees at top Indian outsourcers left in the past year India's big four outsourcers averaged 22.7 percent attrition over the last 12 months, according to their recently published results, and that massive loss of personnel means customers will likely be served by less experienced staff. The attrition rates ranged from 27.7 percent at Infosys to 17.4 percent at Tata Consulting …
I started a role with Infosys during lockdown.
It was a remote role (obviously, given the time) but it lasted roughly 3 months. It took almost 7 weeks to get a laptop. It took me another 2 to get a working login to said laptop. I spent the next 3 weeks twiddling my thumbs not even knowing who I officially reported to or what contract I was supposed to be assigned to. And then they terminated my contract due to "making myself unavailable".
By which time I'd already found another job because while I know some people may find being paid to sit around doing nothing quite pleasant, for me it's horrendous.
The weirder thing is that when I started the new job I had a colleague who they had done the exact same thing to just before me!
That sounds rather similar to a situation I found myself in. Did a stint working for Accenture. They sent me an Accenture laptop despite knowing the contract I was working on had the client providing me a laptop to do all work on. I was expected to then maintain this Accenture laptop despite having no reason to use it. Now I can't seem to get rid of the bloody thing. They won't send anyone by to pick it up and I refuse to go even a single step out of my way to return it to them after the way I was treated. So I'm stuck with this useless laptop just sitting around collecting dust.
The quality was poor to start with.
I've cycled though a few of these over the years (not by choice I might add), and poor quality is the one consistent thing I've seen across them all. There have been more than a few meetings I can remember where the customer was literally screaming down the phone to have people removed from their account because of the mess they created.
The competent people (and there aren't many) don't last long for a couple of reasons. Money, and burn-out.
Some of the hypotheses put forward by the various executives in the OA could be tested if we knew the median length of service of those leaving.
A rough distribution (even just the median and quartiles) would be better.
Commercially sensitive information I guess.
For example UK teachers in schools: 9% leave teaching each year roughly. 15% leave after first year of teaching. The whole distribution is on the ONS Web site
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england#dataBlock-7419641d-0360-4cca-ac9a-8d30f527ae8b-tables
Although annoyingly I can't link to the retention table directly
Over the years I've consulted for several clients who had India based teams I interacted with regularly enough that I got to know who on the team knew their stuff and who was dead weight. In my experience, yearly turnover for the best people was probably around 100%, and even for the dead weight was in the 25-50% range.
It was really annoying to be in a project that lasted six months and have to replace my POC for the India team twice during that time, requiring a week of catch up for the new guy each time. I actually fought with a project manager wanting to build in time for "India staff turnover" once, he wouldn't let me have it. I gave him a big "told you so" when their top guy left and it turned out he hadn't been keeping any of his underlings in the loop about what he was doing so we basically had to start their part of the project over from square one.
I guess the rule that pretty much the only way you can get a really big raise is to change jobs is just as true there as it is in the west.
That's outsourcing in a nutshell, cheaper but worse.
Well, its cheaper if you stay within the terms of the agreed deliverables and then gets very expensive quickly when you ask for a variation...
But afer all these years, plenty of companies don't seem to understand this - I guess their "IT managers" also suffer from rapid turnover and muppetry.
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