Reply to post: Outsourcing is never a good idea

'World's favorite airline' favorite among hackers: British Airways site, app hacked for two weeks

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Outsourcing is never a good idea

Been in IT for 20 years now. Seen a lot of the India outsourcing companies and how they operate and they never come close to a UK team competence.

I'll have to keep my comments light for libel reasons. I've worked with TCS personally and I have personally experienced a lack of technical skills when they were claiming to be specialists. That's especially hard to take when you see someone that is competent being made redundant to make room for them. In the end, you build a rapport with the TCS technicians, after all, they are human and they are merely a cog in the Tata machine. When you find yourself having to find an extra number of hours a week to clean up after them though, it gets harder to digest.

When I worked with them, I found myself scrutinising everything they did. Reviewing every line of code and config, because the level of inconsistencies and errors was high. We found ourselves constantly chasing TCS for actions which ultimately, delayed projects and caused additional expense in onshore teams due to replanning and repeat effort. I have personally seen a farm of servers built by TCS. Every single server looked different and had it's own problems. Classic inexperienced stuff like setting different file ownership/permissions on each server which left a server open to an attack. This is the sort of thing an experienced member of staff solves with scripting and automation.

The costs of outsourcing are not clear. There is an indirect cost on everyone else, covering up and keeping the business running.

You would think these outsourcing companies would learn from their mistakes, but that takes personal responsibility and that isn't profitable. I have worked with a TCS team that changed it's staff on a monthly basis. It just felt like setback after setback. Instead of continuos improvement, you find yourself training the next offshore guy because the previous offshore guy told him half a story and didn't write up a process for transition.

I could blame TCS all day long for this sort of stuff, but I have to hold UK based Project Managers and Senior Managers accountable. They are the ones hiring these guys. They are the ones not holding them to account. They are often the ones that do not know IT and are merely there because they know the business. They are the ones that might have done some coding 20 years ago when things were very different and are therefore out of touch. They are the ones that are not auditing offshore for their true cost and just accepting this as IT culture. The sooner IT starts treating bugs and defects as incompetence, the better. Right now, you're a hero when you release something broken and fix it. I can't think of any other profession where you reward a tradesman for making a mess of the first attempt, then pay him extra to fix it and take him/her out on a night out to celebrate.

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