> The allegations “could severely damage the company’s pristine brand if true, especially in the IT services industry,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana wrote
Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.
Programmers do not hire Infosys. Senior management does and their reputation is different there: those complaining programmers are just trying to protect their turf, the cost savings are compelling, etc. and there are a million ways to spin the inevitable failed projects.
Infosys had a reputation as one of India's most transparent companies. Reputation is somewhat a nebulous concept so I am going to use a proxy: P/E ratio [1].
According to theory, investors pay up a premium PE for well managed companies and although it is an imperfect measure, lots of evidence suggests that it works (Look up HDFC Bank in India relative to its peers or government owned companies v/s their private counterparts)
In India at least, Infosys had always had a premium PE compared to its peers [2]. So the "pristine brand" may have been with the investors.
I have only ever run into dealing with InfoSys' services (back in 2011 or so they provided the entire media / marketing / advertising tech stack for Diageo, called Neo at the time).
Complete black-box. Impossible to work with. Impossible to get documentation. We literally had to debug via crash reports delivered to us every 24h. Of course it was ALWAYS their machine images somehow differing from their environments, so our tests passed locally and then failed in their black box.
Horrific performance problems (think services locking up at 200 concurrent connections...for mobile apps, when advertising-apps were still a thing. Released across virtually all pubs in a whole country. You can imagine how that went).
Of course they would continuously blame all their issues on the company I worked for at the time. And Diageo even fought tooth and nail to defend them.
We had to waste an insane amount of resources just proving to them that their system sucked. Easily one of the worst examples of a company wasting huge amounts of money, thinking that outsourcing would save them money. It's so stupid.
None of these companies - Infosys, Tata, Wipro etc - actually has a business beyond convincing technologically illiterate Western senior managers, by whatever means, to outsource the core of their businesses for short term gain.
I worked for a small IT company that serviced only a handful of clients, but had done so for several years. We got bought by one of the big outsourcing firms, and in a remarkably short time they were winning large new projects from our customers - we could never have convinced them to part with so much money!
All of the projects we run have a mix of western and Indian people, a mix of onsite and remote. There are always several manager types involved in nebulous ways that nobody understands, and there are always random Indian devs based in India who the client pays for, but they literally do nothing.
I can't help but notice the bias people from the west tend to have against Indian outsourcing companies. They have issues and downsides, sure. Major long term downsides, as an Indian programmer (not working for any of these companies), I agree (just like outsourcing to ANY company, be it American e.g. Cognizant).
Comments talking about Infosys/TCS, not being a brand: programmers are not Infosys' customers, in fact it's quite the opposite of that. Infosys' services replace programmers for their customers, who are non-technical managers who want to abstract the IT part of their projects and not be taken for a ride by technical people (not saying that all of them do, but a lot of times engineering department heads demand HUGE budgets to just become more important) and managers feel that a dependency like that makes it necessary for them to be obedient.
Just because they have downsides, does not mean that they are not brands. Infosys has innovation labs in universities all around the world. They award the Infosys prize to the tune of $6.5M to scientists for research. TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
I actually view Indian outsourcing firms to be firms that trade human hours, which turns out, are a lot cheaper in India. Maybe POTUS should actually impose duties on importing software too.
Update:
I also agree with fellow developers on the fact that these outsourcing cos. produce bad code and documentation and usually result in a net loss for organisations where technology is in inherent competitive advantage.
However, these downsides are not because of the lack of skill. It's because of the nature of project based model that outsourcing firms follow. If anyone is to blame, it's the myopic or misconstrued managers who employ them for projects where outsourcing is not the solution.
However, there are many applications where outsourcing firms do just fine. And hiring a separate engineering department could be a risky alternative.
I would agree if Wipro, Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and HCL were in the business of offering up skilled people that they have promised to clients. But every single one of my clients who engages these companies has a story where they were sold X cloud or devops or security people and the people put on their engagements had 0 experience.
I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the same thing. And the managers overseas want to charge me expert rates while I have to train up their staff on the basics of how to do their job. And I mean the ABSOLUTE basics.
Here is an anecdote which might help you understand why.
One of my classmates joined infy out of college. His job for the first one year was - email the list of files changed in the day to the client. This friend was called newton in the college, one of the smartest person around. And he was doing one of the most boring job. Client was paying more than 3000 USD per month for this. Of course he automated the work on second day, used time to study for CAT and left to enroll in IIMA.
Not implying that there isnt anything good with these big companies, but there are lot of such stories. This particular one sounds more like defrauding the client more than anything else to be honest.
TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
That project is a disaster of overblown budgets and under delivery. Like everything these companies touch. But the imaginary savings earned a few Western managers big bonuses before they quickly moved on before the chickens came home to roost.
Infosys and TCS remind me of Uber and Lyft: business models based on magical thinking-rooted exploitation. Engineers need to form their own worker-owned consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large corporations.
Infosys and TCS have been around for decades. If their business model was based on "magical thinking-rooted exploitation" then their customers must be real fools. Or maybe they thrive because there were huge demand for IT projects, which continue to the present time, and businesses have traditionally not considered software engineering their core competency, despite the fact that outsourcing is inherently inefficient.
> Engineers need to form their own worker-owned consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large corporations
"Infosys was established by seven engineers in Pune, Maharashtra, India with an initial capital of $250 in 1981" [0]
$250 in 1981 is $706 in 2019 dollar. So yes, looks like they started out exactly like how you advocate.
Easier said than done, though.
The problem is that potential clients aren't able to assess quality easily.
That system works for lawyers and doctors because there are bars and boards to not only vet theit credentials, but also restrict supply through quotas.
One solution might be for that coop to sell service around a valuable piece of software they own (or at least have demonstrable expertise with).
Thats how the SQLite developers work, for example.
Uber and Lyft are loss making experiments. Whereas Infosys and TCS are profitable corporations, responsibly hiring hundreds of thousands of people (which they do not plan to fire impulsively like Uber), bringing in huge volumes of trade revenue to India for over a decade.
Uber and Lyft use contract workers, rather than getting people on their payroll. Infosys and TCS hire freshers on bonds at salaries that are not very high, but hire thousands every year on their payroll in a country where IT engineering programs have near 100% placements. If those engineers want to work for themselves or other non-corporates, no one is stopping them.
My early years were in a big outsourcing firm & man everything was delayed & over budget. 3 months of development became 9 months. Projects promised in 6 months took 1 year of development.
Projects with older technologies like VB - which worked quite well, code was clean were rewritten for no benefit whatsoever. These rewrites were sold by marketing people. People were overbilled everywhere.
Glad I left the Indian corporate scene & started working remotely. Now I run a small remote QA team for an international firm at 30-40% less cost & delivering at least 2x times these corporate giants.
I see a lot of comments here attributing outsourcing firms to fraud. Let's remember that these cos. win contracts fair and square by taking advantage of myopic tendering processes.
If there's something to blame then it's obsolete tender process that make it impossible for quality vendors to compete or for outsourcing firms to make realising proposals.
Overpromising and underdelivering is not fraud. Fraud is what VW, FB and Theranos and the likes have done.
Dude, you are obviously biased and try to portray the "pure play" companies in a positive light. Stop it, you are not fooling anyone. Stop defending them, those companies are the literal cancer of the software engineering world from the most literal point of view and the people in this thread talking bad things about them are doing that because they have very good reasons to.
One of the issues creating poor impressions of Indians at least in Canada nearly every resident gets a fairly regular stream of calls from Pakistan and India that are actually fraud, dealing with IT and credit cards, duct cleaning and taxes.
I think India is a challenging place to make a living and thus many people do whatever they can to make a buck, at least that is how I explain this behavior to myself.
If there's a knowingly broken process, both sides of it are to blame. One party for using a broken process, the other for exploiting it.
Imagine you own a store with broken locks. A thief learns of that, and comes one night, and plunders your store. Yes, you'd be to blame for being irresponsible and stupid. But the thief would still be liable for theft.
If you knowingly misrepresent a material fact for the purpose of inducing someone to act (E.g. give you money), then you have committed fraud. This is literally the definition of fraud.
Maybe in the your household blaming the victim when they hire a company with such a well known track-record of failing to deliver is acceptable, but many people have different values.
RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago
Bloomberg must have a different definition of "pristine brand" than a lot of programmers I have met.
RyJones|6 years ago
acdha|6 years ago
divs1210|6 years ago
vmurthy|6 years ago
According to theory, investors pay up a premium PE for well managed companies and although it is an imperfect measure, lots of evidence suggests that it works (Look up HDFC Bank in India relative to its peers or government owned companies v/s their private counterparts) In India at least, Infosys had always had a premium PE compared to its peers [2]. So the "pristine brand" may have been with the investors.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INFY/infosys/pe-ra...
[2] https://www.motilaloswal.com/article.aspx/1202/How-and-Why-t...
C1sc0cat|6 years ago
Though of course it might make developers wary of joining a company with accounting discrepancies like this.
throwaway77384|6 years ago
Complete black-box. Impossible to work with. Impossible to get documentation. We literally had to debug via crash reports delivered to us every 24h. Of course it was ALWAYS their machine images somehow differing from their environments, so our tests passed locally and then failed in their black box.
Horrific performance problems (think services locking up at 200 concurrent connections...for mobile apps, when advertising-apps were still a thing. Released across virtually all pubs in a whole country. You can imagine how that went).
Of course they would continuously blame all their issues on the company I worked for at the time. And Diageo even fought tooth and nail to defend them. We had to waste an insane amount of resources just proving to them that their system sucked. Easily one of the worst examples of a company wasting huge amounts of money, thinking that outsourcing would save them money. It's so stupid.
esotericimpl|6 years ago
Nothing ever worked and their technical stack was an absolute joke.
Eventually the agency lost the business due to not delivering, which was solely due to their platform not doing anything promised by infosys.
goatinaboat|6 years ago
GordonS|6 years ago
I worked for a small IT company that serviced only a handful of clients, but had done so for several years. We got bought by one of the big outsourcing firms, and in a remarkably short time they were winning large new projects from our customers - we could never have convinced them to part with so much money!
All of the projects we run have a mix of western and Indian people, a mix of onsite and remote. There are always several manager types involved in nebulous ways that nobody understands, and there are always random Indian devs based in India who the client pays for, but they literally do nothing.
Cthulhu_|6 years ago
throwaway77384|6 years ago
r_singh|6 years ago
Comments talking about Infosys/TCS, not being a brand: programmers are not Infosys' customers, in fact it's quite the opposite of that. Infosys' services replace programmers for their customers, who are non-technical managers who want to abstract the IT part of their projects and not be taken for a ride by technical people (not saying that all of them do, but a lot of times engineering department heads demand HUGE budgets to just become more important) and managers feel that a dependency like that makes it necessary for them to be obedient.
Just because they have downsides, does not mean that they are not brands. Infosys has innovation labs in universities all around the world. They award the Infosys prize to the tune of $6.5M to scientists for research. TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
I actually view Indian outsourcing firms to be firms that trade human hours, which turns out, are a lot cheaper in India. Maybe POTUS should actually impose duties on importing software too.
Update:
I also agree with fellow developers on the fact that these outsourcing cos. produce bad code and documentation and usually result in a net loss for organisations where technology is in inherent competitive advantage.
However, these downsides are not because of the lack of skill. It's because of the nature of project based model that outsourcing firms follow. If anyone is to blame, it's the myopic or misconstrued managers who employ them for projects where outsourcing is not the solution.
However, there are many applications where outsourcing firms do just fine. And hiring a separate engineering department could be a risky alternative.
primax|6 years ago
I've moved into a consulting company that has an offshore branch and it's the same thing. And the managers overseas want to charge me expert rates while I have to train up their staff on the basics of how to do their job. And I mean the ABSOLUTE basics.
I really don't see how it's not fraud.
iamsb|6 years ago
One of my classmates joined infy out of college. His job for the first one year was - email the list of files changed in the day to the client. This friend was called newton in the college, one of the smartest person around. And he was doing one of the most boring job. Client was paying more than 3000 USD per month for this. Of course he automated the work on second day, used time to study for CAT and left to enroll in IIMA.
Not implying that there isnt anything good with these big companies, but there are lot of such stories. This particular one sounds more like defrauding the client more than anything else to be honest.
goatinaboat|6 years ago
TCS is a strategic partner for projects like the British Rail Network.
That project is a disaster of overblown budgets and under delivery. Like everything these companies touch. But the imaginary savings earned a few Western managers big bonuses before they quickly moved on before the chickens came home to roost.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
campfireveteran|6 years ago
jryle70|6 years ago
> Engineers need to form their own worker-owned consultancy co-ops and eschew corporations to capture more of the wealth they generate for themselves rather than as underpaid servants of said large corporations
"Infosys was established by seven engineers in Pune, Maharashtra, India with an initial capital of $250 in 1981" [0]
$250 in 1981 is $706 in 2019 dollar. So yes, looks like they started out exactly like how you advocate.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infosys
pnako|6 years ago
That system works for lawyers and doctors because there are bars and boards to not only vet theit credentials, but also restrict supply through quotas.
One solution might be for that coop to sell service around a valuable piece of software they own (or at least have demonstrable expertise with). Thats how the SQLite developers work, for example.
r_singh|6 years ago
Uber and Lyft use contract workers, rather than getting people on their payroll. Infosys and TCS hire freshers on bonds at salaries that are not very high, but hire thousands every year on their payroll in a country where IT engineering programs have near 100% placements. If those engineers want to work for themselves or other non-corporates, no one is stopping them.
anm89|6 years ago
If you don't want to work for a corporation, don't work for a corporation. Why do you need to tell the entirety of engineers how to do it?
thunderbong|6 years ago
kalesh|6 years ago
Glad I left the Indian corporate scene & started working remotely. Now I run a small remote QA team for an international firm at 30-40% less cost & delivering at least 2x times these corporate giants.
gobins|6 years ago
hereiskkb|6 years ago
mathattack|6 years ago
Mahindra didn’t survive accounting fraud as an independent company. This could hurt Infosys too.
r_singh|6 years ago
neonate|6 years ago
hc91|6 years ago
r_singh|6 years ago
If there's something to blame then it's obsolete tender process that make it impossible for quality vendors to compete or for outsourcing firms to make realising proposals.
Overpromising and underdelivering is not fraud. Fraud is what VW, FB and Theranos and the likes have done.
hc91|6 years ago
hereiskkb|6 years ago
It is. That's like saying selling a Merc with a Suzuki Swift engine inside is not fraud.
bhouston|6 years ago
I think India is a challenging place to make a living and thus many people do whatever they can to make a buck, at least that is how I explain this behavior to myself.
TeMPOraL|6 years ago
Imagine you own a store with broken locks. A thief learns of that, and comes one night, and plunders your store. Yes, you'd be to blame for being irresponsible and stupid. But the thief would still be liable for theft.
nullc|6 years ago
Maybe in the your household blaming the victim when they hire a company with such a well known track-record of failing to deliver is acceptable, but many people have different values.
peteradio|6 years ago