Reply to post: Offshoring generally sucks for all involved

Ex-IT staff claim Disney fired them then gave their jobs H-1B peeps

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Offshoring generally sucks for all involved

I'm currently working on a large upgrade / migration project for a brand-name US financial institition (which is why this is anonymous).

About ten years ago they outsourced almost all their IT to TCS, Wipro, and Syntel - out of 2500 IT staff in the US less than 300 are actual employees of the company. We were brought in to upgrade from a 15 year old system that is 10 years out support. Fortunately I and a couple of colleagues in our small consulting firm have grey hair so we know the original system. The client had attempted to upgrade and migrate multiple times using their offshore staff - every attempt failed.

If you were to look at the underlying code base you would all fall on the floor - it is a tangled mess of VB, ASP, SQL, stored procedures, java, javascript , python, etc etc. There are no design specs or documentation. It takes 90 seconds to log into the system and 3-5 minutes to return search results. There is not a single resource at the company or TCS who has any idea what the data does behind the scenes and scoping calls frequently degenerate into arguments over how the current system actually works.

Needless to say we are completely replacing this entire front end and finding and fixing lots of data inconsistencies too. The h1b people we work with (along with their offshore brethren) may have a limited set of technical skills but they have not been trained in planning, design, documentation or project management so the garbage that is produced is to be expected. There's a real cost that companies bear for this outsourcing fiasco - starting with 15,000 employees taking 10+ minutes to run a search for documents that should take less than 15 seconds, and continuing into the endless notice of production system outages that I see on my client email account every day.

I've no doubt that whichever MBA / VP who negotiated the outsourcing deal got a fat bonus (and probably a free holiday or two from TCS and co.) and then moved on to another sucker. The rest of us have to pick up the pieces. I've noticed that this trend is not as bad in the UK as it is in the USA and Australia, but given UK industries penchant for copying US ideas just when the yanks work out they don't actually deliver, I would expect this trend to ramp up more in the UK too. Fortunately for you the UK has some employment protection. In the US we are all "at will" employees meaning unless there is federal discrimination, you can get sacked with zero notice and zero compensation for any reason at any time.

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