Indian IT Industry

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Javee
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Javee »

ha, so true. To me, sitting here in India and taking care of the backbone of a company like JPM, Target or Nielsen (Both are TCS customers and believe it or not, TCS-Nielsen alone has more than 5000 people) is a wonder by itself, not only as a delivery head I'm managing TCS but also Nielsen, a company with in a company with in a company, that too for a decade. Yes, they are probably getting called by users who have forgot their password most of the time, but they also do build and maintain their products, data center including customer analytics and so on. For all the ill talk on TCS on how they bring in freshers who dont know to code, there is no other software provider, Indian or foreign owned who runs a tight delivery ship like TCS; literally companies keep TCS as the bench mark on a lot of delivery parameters and aspire to be like them. Their customer churn is less than industry average but their margins are as good as ever, that tells about their operations. The only company that has lower than industry margin avg's is CTS, but then they plough back the money in as account investment, which has done wonders to their top line.

A legion of software product companies starting from Microsoft to eBay to Symantec have outsourced their platform engineering to Indian service providers, again, not because we are cheap, but we are good in what we do and cheap, that's 2 for 2.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

my relative is a higher level type in TCS been there 15ish years now after msc from a iit. he says at the higher levels they really take care of people so attrition is fairly low in his peers. currently abroad on a long posting. my nit buddy has been in tcs mumbai from day1 ie back from 1995!

and we ofcourse know tata power systems is in many overt and covert defence projects incl pinaka and nukular telars.

the constant ranting has gotta end. its unseemly and makes the ranter himself look bad.
Javee
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Javee »

Agreed, after 15+ years its prolly one of the best units to work for. Just a quick ex, they pay for business class for overseas trips at my levels and my KB will send me inside a suitcase if it can save some money for the company. Infact, we got a surprise email from the higher ups, that we need to get his (SVP) approval for every travel that's made for the next 3 months, because he wants to reduce travel cost by 20%. Such is life...

And for every TCS, we got 100 startups in Bengaluru that does equally good cutting edge work. The startup I had, through another vendor worked with the rocket guys(wouldnt say what), Samsung (power mgmt for LE Bluetooth), Display, battery and Sound for KA govt tablet :P
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Marten »

Javee wrote:Agreed, after 15+ years its prolly one of the best units to work for. Just a quick ex, they pay for business class for overseas trips at my levels and my KB will send me inside a suitcase if it can save some money for the company. Infact, we got a surprise email from the higher ups, that we need to get his (SVP) approval for every travel that's made for the next 3 months, because he wants to reduce travel cost by 20%. Such is life...

And for every TCS, we got 100 startups in Bengaluru that does equally good cutting edge work. The startup I had, through another vendor worked with the rocket guys(wouldnt say what), Samsung (power mgmt for LE Bluetooth), Display, battery and Sound for KA govt tablet :P
More power to you Saar.

Nasscom hosts 10,000 startups. It is a wonderful eco-system and quite open in terms of folks getting mentoring and in some cases angel funding as well! Not all of them will succeed. Some will make it really big! Look at Ver Se innovations for instance. Newshunt is a truly innovative concept and their CEO is a very unassuming gent. I'd like to wait a couple more decades to pronounce judgement about the IT-ITES industry in India. After all, if not for this industry, we would not have been able to grow this quickly. In fact, we grew so quickly that the education industry has been unable to keep up. In a decade, that gap will also be closed. Overall, India needs to be grateful to the likes of FC Kohli, Premji, NRN, even Nadar, for their immense efforts in bringing home jobs. Not everything has to be perfect at this stage. Not all of us have to develop leading products yet. It will happen, but the future of most tech firms is firmly in Indian hands. Once the strategy and control also moves hands, opinions will change.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Sachin »

nukavarapu wrote:Candidates with 8 years and above work ex only strong at fundamentals. I guess talent is restricted to Bengaluru! Unable to find quality @ Hyderabad. Now I feel that putting a startup in Hyderabad was a bad decision, sigh!
The experience (in years) is a bit misleading, and I have burnt my fingers already here. We just hired a 4 year experienced Java (Tech. Lead) who when given the first major assignment tells that he can only one work in one specific area "Content Management" and that too only using a specific tool set. Off course these people know the theory/fundamentals right out of their minds (may be by mugging the standard interview questions). We must also understand that what people do during those "nnn years of experience" may be very basic tasks, with lot of hard work being done by the IDE they use ;). But things are just not really bad, as I have also seen people with the same level of experience actually putting extra efforts and finding solutions. Yes, they may be coming from StackOverFlow or Google, but these people do have the ability to look at the right places and ask right questions. Communication (especially articulating well in E-Mails) is one area where I have seen lots of problems in HYD area. From what I could make out, folks generally frame their question/response in Telugu and then just use the English words (but that would make it grammatically incorrect English).
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by negi »

Good people come at a premium currently a good developer the kind this forum cribs about will come for a lot of money because of the likes of PayTm, Flipkart, Snapdeal and tens of such startups which don't mind paying big bucks to people who are needed to build stuff. Linkedin and Uber are also rapidly expanding in India . Now when you start a startup in desh on a limited budget you are trying to find candidates from a pool which has been sucked dry by well established Product cos and VC backed startups. I think it is better to look to B towns provided you have a local MD who can run a lean ship and knows where to look for resources.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Javee »

+100. Pretty much all the engg grads who can think are no where to be found and if found they ask for a big pay package. We used to hire ITI and cdac diploma holders. The guys we hired were not great in communication,but had the zeal to work and move up. It took us 2 years to stabilize but well worth the effort.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

my BU had a tough time over last 2 yrs getting right candidates. in one weekend hiring event, 0/20.
late last year, all the senior TLs were asked to take a hackerrank C programming sample test of 5 somewhat hard questions and give feedback. VP promised to keep our scores "secret". since then any candidate has to pass a randomized test from hackerrank before called for interview and last week I heard our conversion rate has remarkably increased. our hiring has also slowed down given the market conditions .... revenue in sequential slow decline for consecutive 5 qtrs now with trickle layoffs every few months...

Negi is right that a top candidate from nit/iit will expect around 15-20L pkg now out of college. just as in amrika they will start off with a girlfriend iphone7p and a car :twisted: the truly outstanding programmers and puzzle crackers get 25-30L probably in certain cos like google, msft, linkedin and mostly get flown on L1 :(( :mrgreen: direct to palo alto etc. http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/del ... jJN3M.html
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Yagnasri »

If anyone is having a start up which can work in the banking industry or has something helpful to banking people. I have a contact which will help the startups in India. Please do not suggest non-Indics.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by TKiran »

The attraction for IT outsourcing is not only cheap labour, it's tax loophole as well. I know atleast GM is heavily into the tax fraud.

They show that they are investing in India, but they never showed profits in India. They say that Rs1100 Cr. loss they incurred, kpmg shows that it's money invested in India, to Indian tax fellas they show that as capital expenditure, where as that money is used as salaries of tech. Center in Bangalore, but nothing invested in Gujarat plant.

It's possible as there are no insiders who can do whistle blower. Only very small number of people know their business model, whereas in China, it's joint venture and party guys sit and watch them, there's none in India.

Also they pay only $500 for L1 fee, where as infy or TCS has to pay $4000. Also if you go on L1 through GM, you don't pay any taxes, you get only allowance, and later you have to file tax returns, which the company gets the refund and not the employee. I could not believe when I myself saw such blatant tax evasion by an American company in America.

Also the main reason they started tech. Center in Bangalore in 2003 was to disrupt ISRO. They recruited more than 60 pH.ds from ISRO, still ISRO progressed, but I personally met some of the fine scientists, when they were mass sacked in 2007. They all regretted leaving ISRO. Some of them could not get any employment, even for 8 years.

A very dangerous company, in India.

None of the MNCs pay taxes in India. No wonder why they don't flock to India.

Four factors are combined.
1. Cheaper Labor.
2. Tax Avoidance.
3. Abundance of Talent.
4. No Government Regulation as long as you show some employment for masses

That's advantage India for MNCs.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

Do they pay corporate taxes in amrika? Apple etc atack their takings in ireland

They also negotiate state level benefits like tax breaks and subsidized power

They are plenty greedy everywhere
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by kapilrdave »

Sachin wrote: The experience (in years) is a bit misleading, and I have burnt my fingers already here. We just hired a 4 year experienced Java (Tech. Lead) who when given the first major assignment tells that he can only one work in one specific area "Content Management" and that too only using a specific tool set. Off course these people know the theory/fundamentals right out of their minds (may be by mugging the standard interview questions). We must also understand that what people do during those "nnn years of experience" may be very basic tasks, with lot of hard work being done by the IDE they use ;).
Sorry to say but you should fire your interviewer first and straighten the recruitment process. I can understand cribbing about not finding good talent, but one has to blame himself for recruiting unsuitable employees.

We're placed far away from blr, pune, hyd etc. We knew the limitations of our place and our resources. So we "chose" our business according to the people we would be to recruit easily. Today we are having fair number of developers who are uber smart but working at 25k per month or less. And we are a fairly successful business in our domain. We too mainly hire fresher's and train them for our needs. We simply avoid IIT type graduates. Our exp is that they are simply useless and too arrogant for their own and company's good.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by SRoy »

nukavarapu wrote:Right now struggling with setting up an offshore center. Massive skill deficit. Candidates with 8 years and above work ex only strong at fundamentals. I guess talent is restricted to Bengaluru! Unable to find quality @ Hyderabad. Now I feel that putting a startup in Hyderabad was a bad decision, sigh!
What skills are you looking for?
It is a misconception that talent is restricted to Bengaluru.

As a part of switch over, planing to move to Bengaluru. Maybe my skill sets would be of your use. Lets get in touch.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by ArmenT »

Sachin wrote:
nukavarapu wrote:Candidates with 8 years and above work ex only strong at fundamentals. I guess talent is restricted to Bengaluru! Unable to find quality @ Hyderabad. Now I feel that putting a startup in Hyderabad was a bad decision, sigh!
The experience (in years) is a bit misleading, and I have burnt my fingers already here. We just hired a 4 year experienced Java (Tech. Lead) who when given the first major assignment tells that he can only one work in one specific area "Content Management" and that too only using a specific tool set. Off course these people know the theory/fundamentals right out of their minds (may be by mugging the standard interview questions). We must also understand that what people do during those "nnn years of experience" may be very basic tasks, with lot of hard work being done by the IDE they use ;).
I made the exact same point in this very thread, two pages earlier.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by SRoy »

@ArmenT & Sachin,

These engineers are not to blame.

Culprits are the HR and VP, CxO level morons.
"We just hired a 4 year experienced Java (Tech. Lead) who when given the first major assignment tells that he can only one work in one specific area "Content Management" and that too only using a specific tool set."
This exactly the mess that current hiring practices would lead to. Look at the advertised openings ".NET architect", "Java project Manager" .... kid you not "Thread Dump Analysis, IT Head".
These are very senior positions, the last one is still listed there in Naukri.com.
4 year experienced Java (Tech. Lead)
This is another problem. Since when engineers with 4 years of experience become leads? I would actually put the blame right on you Sachin. You were cutting corners to get a lead at cheap rates and you got what you paid for. Sorry, 4 year experienced are not even competent enough to be senior engineers let alone leads.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

Economic times

Accenture to create 15,000 jobs in US
By Reuters | Updated: 18 Feb, 2017, 02:43 hrs IST

Accenture said on Friday it would invest $1.4 billion to train its employees and would open 10 innovation centers in some U.S. cities.
Accenture Plc said on Friday it would create 15,000 "highly skilled" new jobs in the United States, as IT services firms brace for a more protectionist U.S. technology visa program under President Donald Trump.

The company, which is domiciled in Dublin, Ireland, said the new jobs would increase the company's U.S. workforce by 30 percent to more than 65,000 by the end of 2020.

Accenture has more than 394,000 employees, of which about 140,000 are in India.

IT services companies have come under the spotlight after Trump said that his administration would focus on creating more jobs for U.S. workers, who had been affected by the outsourcing of jobs abroad.

Major IT service companies, particularly those based in India, fly engineers to the United States using H-1B visas to service clients, but some opponents argue they are misusing the visa program to replace U.S. jobs.

India's software services industry is also concerned about a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress seeking to double the salary paid to H-1B visa holders which would dramatically increase the costs for the companies employing them.

Accenture said on Friday it would invest $1.4 billion to train its employees and would open 10 innovation centers in some U.S. cities.

The company's U.S. business accounted for 46 percent of its total revenue for the year ended Aug. 31.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by KJo »

I'm not saying this, CapG's India CEO is sounding the alarm.
The IT industry can just become an ostrich in the sand or figure something out, because the Tsunami is coming and it is not just because of Trump.

Capgemini India chief says 65% of IT employees not trainable
MUMBAI: With the domestic IT industry staring at a shift in nature of work due to increasing use of digital technologies, a leading firm has said a majority of the workforce cannot imbibe the required emerging skill-sets, and warned of high job losses at the middle and senior levels.

"I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them are just not trainable," Capgemini India's chief executive Srinivas Kandula said here over the weekend.

The domestic arm of the French IT major employs nearly one lakh engineers in the country.

"A large number of them cannot be trained. Probably, India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level," he said at the annual Nasscom leadership summit here over the weekend.

He also flagged concerns surrounding the quality of IT workforce, saying much of the 3.9 million IT employees come from low-grade engineering colleges which do not follow rigorous grading patterns for students in their zeal to maintain good records.

The remarks come days after the industry lobby Nasscom said there is a need to re-train up to 1.5 million, or nearly half of its sectoral workforce. This is primarily on the back of a change in nature of work in newer, digital technologies.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Marten »

KJo, he was Chief HR officer at Powergrid corporation, and then HR Director or VP in Sasken, then at Patni/iGate, and then at Cap Gemini.
What would you expect an HR turned Ops head to say? He is leading a large dumbing down internally and these messages to the world are mostly to his own staff. I mean isn't it apparent from the term "largest unemployment" when hardly 5-8% would be at that level?

It could well be true, but apply some math to this statement and see if it holds:
4mn workforce > 400k supposedly "senior" > 60% are untrainable > how many are unemployable? Even if 200k were unemployed, would that qualify as the largest unemployment? Something smells.
There is a major Nasscom push to "retrain" senior folks in emerging technologies. I'm sceptical purely for the reason that the obsolescence has been happening for decades now, and only when a recession looms that such statements abound.
PS: I find it appalling that he was not called out immediately. What specific work is performed by iGate or CG teams that requires super specialized skills? The issue is that they train folks for maintenance projects and ensure adequate skills are passed on to ensure billing does not stop. After that, to turn around and claim 65% are goners due to the educational system is ludicrous. He himself is from Andhra University -- what if someone were to turn around and the issue is specifically with Andhra technical graduates? Would be as accepting then? Basically, "XL" makes them "special" even these days.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by arshyam »

Marten wrote:It could well be true, but apply some math to this statement and see if it holds:
4mn workforce > 400k supposedly "senior" > 60% are untrainable > how many are unemployable? Even if 200k were unemployed, would that qualify as the largest unemployment? Something smells.
Saar, why bother to do all that, when one simply wants to believe what one wants to?
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by asgkhan »

Well there is a lot of rubbish who come with questionable experience certificates. They are mostly interested in a$$ kissing and bask under the glory of the minority who actually know something on the project.

If and when the recession hits, most of them would not know much other than basic key words of emerging technologies.

These guys are good only at asking status reports, build a wall and pretend that they are the SPOCs with the goras.

Good riddance to this rubbish. I am a developer turned project manager. I manage to hold on to my turf with confidence and identify the professional bull$hitters from a mile away.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

automation and programmatic interfaces over manual ops to is a threat to everyone gora or kala esp in IT depts

if you look at the IT operations of the certified gora-uber-geek-need-apply-only cos like uber, airbnb, netflix, twitter and other SFO cos where there is no peecha L1/H1 recruitment at all, they would be relatively tiny and highly automated and with almost no manual operations/infra monitoring or test activity.

also status reporting and logging is also being automated at real pace via dashboards and such with increasing sophistication. so definitely the layers of line mgrs are definitely thinning out now.

in short its not a usa vs india issue, its a industry in transition, one of many in the time-space line. all are feeling the effects. india maybe more as our pool of students graduating with some IT edu is more and they need to find work. perhaps new entrants into engg will go for other branches more and more.

days of big5 landing at a large place like anna univ and recruiting 5000 people in one shot are probably over for good.
Melwyn

Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Melwyn »

The biggest problem problem for Indian IT industry is that people like Srinivas Kandula with MBA in HR become the CEO of the company while the technically skilled people toil day and night to meet the impossible delivery dates set by these same a*holes.

Having interviewed a few candidates from CG in the past I know they pay ridiculously low salaries to freshers, so this whole idea of hiring freshers is for improving the company bottomline not because seniors are useless. But then what can you expect from a bean counting MBA in HR? Everyone is just a resource to be exploited for him.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by kapilrdave »

^^ The times of behemoths like Infy, TCS, Accenture etc. will definitely end sooner or later. Small to mid level companies who are nimble and efficient and more "sane" are the ones who will survive in long run. Also, these companies have more per capita talent than the larger ones, so automation will hurt far lesser to them.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Javee »

Agreed, automation is the big key thing in almost any vertical today. But then you cannot compare a S&P 500 enterprise to Uber, Twitter, FB or Netflix. Although negi will cringe, but these companies are born digital. The complexity of operations for a lot of these customers (Oil & Gas, manufacturing of any sort etc) are silo'd today and they will remain the same for years to come unless a new business model emerge. What ever it is, transition will happen fast, for eg, a bunch of PE folks were trying to buy Unilever for $143 billion, reason they quoted was that their margins are 7-8% less than P&G and they think its a potential opportunity to look at cost from ground-up (ZBB) and bring in an additional $4B to their net. So a big shakeup like that would turn the industry on its head. Until the days of big ERP is over, we will have large support projects. Just for kicks, for all the software engg prowess of the Kidikki company, they still use SAP for a Order mgmt, Finance, Inventory etc.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

Arista a L2 switch co just crossed 1b $ in revenue. From day1 their developers were asked to automate the testing of whatever code each committed. Sometimes they take more time doung these python scripting than the actual change in c++ code. So they have very less feature test team..more like system test team is there.

They also use only open src tools to save money and even use arista switches with addl sw to generate test traffic than buy expensive network testers.

The customer support team is allegedly only around 70 worldwide.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by negi »

I think CapGem executive is just trying to assume a higher moral ground as if when he joined the field he had papers and patents to his credit while the chaps who are joining today are inferior. I think he is merely giving sound bytes on the lines of ; this year we will not recruit as much as last year due to 'automation bla bla' . I have seen the transition from onpremise heavy to cloud and seen how SIs have adapted to it and I did not see a lot of churn or loss of revenue in this journey ; players who quickly took the initiative to position themselves as someone who could help customers to move to cloud or even make business processes talk to each other across cloud and onpremise are now generating revenue from cloud grwoth. All this talk of automation eating jobs is right now not yet quantified to a level for any reasonable person to worry about ; yes chatbots are improving by the day to a level where one can argue that individuals manning desks to answer questions on a chat window will become redundant in a year or two but that is not the space where IT services companies make revenue from ; BPOs and call centers will be the first one to be impacted. IT services will get impacted by adoption of self service software however catch is it is only in new areas where self service software has seen adoption ; the old school backend heavy systems are still relevant (I heard IBM released a new version of mainframe in 2016 as well ) so there will always be need for people to support 24*7 operations for processes that run on such systems. In product dev circles people are talking about perpetual development and how one does not need a dedicated QA team ; the catch is with agile Ejs on the rise who prescribe agile for all that ails prod dev. the amount of rework has increased which means regression issues are increasing . I am sure lot of us here work for companies which claim how our product does things faster without manual work ; I see automation hype masters as no different they are exagerating things to a level which is practically not possible.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

And the have shippable code every two weeks thing :mrgreen:

Btw netz seriously tried agile in many bu for 2 yrs and most have abandoned and gone back to waterfall model.

People were hiding for 2 weeks fixing 1 bug writing a agile story around it...
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by negi »

Short release cycle beemari has come from Salesforce iirc they release a patch in every 1 month ; issue with setting such benchmarks is not everyone is in same space . Salesforce as a platform is not used by any mission critical business process unless there are real time transactions involved you can afford to have a system which goes down once in a while . Conversely speaking high ups who quote Salesforce or someone other vendor's release cycles as a template to be emulated need to introspect .

This malise is actually deep rooted in the fact that higher ups are more interested in getting a visibility into things and see things moving; 'direction' , 'quality' ,'relevance' be dammned . A PM who deliver 3 features in 3 Qs is better than a PM who delivered 1 feature in 3 Qs , feature kya karta hai is irrelevant.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by asgkhan »

Automation is here. There is a new tool from IBM which our KB has purchased. Uses 10 % of resources required to do complex deployment.

Already the vendor had to reduce head count. And this massive where deployment and BAU support is spread across years.

I hope most of these chaacha-bhatija colleges offering IT courses close down. I dont see much future for copy pasta coders in the next 10 years.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by asgkhan »

Singha wrote:And the have shippable code every two weeks thing :mrgreen:

Btw netz seriously tried agile in many bu for 2 yrs and most have abandoned and gone back to waterfall model.

People were hiding for 2 weeks fixing 1 bug writing a agile story around it...
I work on both agile and waterfall model. Trust me, a delivery will be successful when you have a good team with a better proj mgr. Else it will end up in a cycle of next review we will deliver.

Any project in Amber will get highlighted and leads to embarassment in the manager's ranks during the monthly review by the sponsors.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by SRoy »

A lot of tasks around the software development projects have got automated, not the software development itself.

Likes of CapGem executive are whining for a reason. Legions of testers, build engineers, support engineers (those dealing with first contact), release managers and config managers are not required in properly set up environment. All these low end jobs will vanish (are vanishing).

Agile is a different beast, requires a cultural change. If N features can go in sprint, that is it. It cannot be N+x all of sudden because some one higher up want something to be included. And of course a$$h0l3$ on the customer side, that despite participated in all the sprints would want "the look and feel" a bit different or "oh that business case needs implemented that way". So, that's the recipe for that 1 bug fix orgy for 2 weeks after close of a sprint.

So, that's the reason many have gone back to waterfall with iterative model.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by negi »

Well more than culture one should have experience of delivering both a successful as well as a failed product/project to know for real what works and what does not.

To substantiate when in the field be it just implementation or consulting everything is driven by SOW (interpretaiton is a ugly can of worms but let us assume for now it was correctly drafted and signed) ; so if nothing else at least the boundaries of the project are well defined and you start working from there . In such cases using agile is still easier because you know the end state.

Coming to product development using agile is very tricky if you are making a new product ; beauty of the thing is no one not even PM would know what the end deliverable is because definition of a product to that loevel of detail needs time and unfortunately most of the product cos who jump on to the agile bandwagon include the initial discovery phase too in agile; the sophisticated types realize this and hence the mantra "fail-fast" (pretty way of saying humko kuch nahin maloom)
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

in all these discussions there is a common thread - clueless SVP types wandering around with great power and doing great damage.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by asgkhan »

Key to success is planning. Invest in planning, identify the risks and then execute. But the urge to present the PPT and get credit or a space in the monthly newsletter is too much.

Advertise vaporware, setup a committee, attend a few meetings, once the focus shifts to something else, quietly hand it over to a abdul willing to step on the land mine. Move on to the next 'thing/buzzword' from KPMG/McKinsey etc.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Javee »

Singha wrote:in all these discussions there is a common thread - clueless SVP types wandering around with great power and doing great damage.
Tell me about it, couple years back, we took one of our EVP's to a customer meeting and after a few hours, the Deputy CIO politely suggested to us to not bring him ever again, being our chief sponsor and who became the current CIO, this EVP has never met him after that.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Singha »

I once asked a friend of mine, a product mgr in a server major who had faced a rotating list of VP types who he reported to. I asked him what these people really wanted.

he said few had any understanding or even interest in technology and they always wanted to "slash costs" and "meet big customers"
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by ArmenT »

Singha wrote:And the have shippable code every two weeks thing :mrgreen:

Btw netz seriously tried agile in many bu for 2 yrs and most have abandoned and gone back to waterfall model.

People were hiding for 2 weeks fixing 1 bug writing a agile story around it...
Agile is not for everyone and is not a one-size-fits-all product. Anyone who claims that it works everywhere is a fraud and is only trying to sell his/her book or promoting their consulting service. If it works for you, then good, but it doesn't necessarily work for the next guy.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by KJo »

Marten wrote:KJo, he was Chief HR officer at Powergrid corporation, and then HR Director or VP in Sasken, then at Patni/iGate, and then at Cap Gemini.
What would you expect an HR turned Ops head to say? He is leading a large dumbing down internally and these messages to the world are mostly to his own staff. I mean isn't it apparent from the term "largest unemployment" when hardly 5-8% would be at that level?

It could well be true, but apply some math to this statement and see if it holds:
4mn workforce > 400k supposedly "senior" > 60% are untrainable > how many are unemployable? Even if 200k were unemployed, would that qualify as the largest unemployment? Something smells.
There is a major Nasscom push to "retrain" senior folks in emerging technologies. I'm sceptical purely for the reason that the obsolescence has been happening for decades now, and only when a recession looms that such statements abound.
PS: I find it appalling that he was not called out immediately. What specific work is performed by iGate or CG teams that requires super specialized skills? The issue is that they train folks for maintenance projects and ensure adequate skills are passed on to ensure billing does not stop. After that, to turn around and claim 65% are goners due to the educational system is ludicrous. He himself is from Andhra University -- what if someone were to turn around and the issue is specifically with Andhra technical graduates? Would be as accepting then? Basically, "XL" makes them "special" even these days.
Just relaying nyoos saar. I saw the article last night. I am not sure about 65% (how the F did he estimate it??) but I think a large number of them are unemployable. How much I have no idea.
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by KJo »

asgkhan wrote:
Singha wrote:And the have shippable code every two weeks thing :mrgreen:

Btw netz seriously tried agile in many bu for 2 yrs and most have abandoned and gone back to waterfall model.

People were hiding for 2 weeks fixing 1 bug writing a agile story around it...
I work on both agile and waterfall model. Trust me, a delivery will be successful when you have a good team with a better proj mgr. Else it will end up in a cycle of next review we will deliver.

Any project in Amber will get highlighted and leads to embarassment in the manager's ranks during the monthly review by the sponsors.
Frankly, I think companies make too much about Agile or Waterfall. It's just a dev process. What is the big deal? I get asked "How familiar are you with Agile??? Are you an expert???". To me as a Product guy, I am more concerned with creating a product that generates revenue, does not matter if we use Agile or whatever else. It is highly annoying. Many companies are more focused on these processes than actually generating revenue.

I agree with Armen. I also think that no one uses 100% Agile, everyone claims to do so but everyone has their own versions with Agile elements in them so they can tell the idiots in senior management that they are "agile".
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Re: Indian IT Industry

Post by Santosh »

ArmenT wrote:
Singha wrote:And the have shippable code every two weeks thing :mrgreen:

Btw netz seriously tried agile in many bu for 2 yrs and most have abandoned and gone back to waterfall model.

People were hiding for 2 weeks fixing 1 bug writing a agile story around it...
Agile is not for everyone and is not a one-size-fits-all product. Anyone who claims that it works everywhere is a fraud and is only trying to sell his/her book or promoting their consulting service. If it works for you, then good, but it doesn't necessarily work for the next guy.
That is so true. Unfortunately a lot of CIOs/CTOs have either drank the coolaid or face peer pressure if they don't adopt Agile. They just don't have the guts to say that we are not there yet and hence we cannot implement Agile. It's more of a journey than destination. It has caused a lot of anger and confusion at my work place. People are asked to create a user story if they are having a conversation that lasts more than an hour. People openly mock SMs saying that the conversation will only last 59 mins and 59 secs. Then there a a thing where developers are done with their work in the first 5-6-7 days and take rest of the time off to work on "self-development". Our org is not at all ready for Agile and yet it is being forced down the throat. There was an effort to shoehorn operational work like infrastructure and content through Agile. Don't know how that makes sense. :eek:
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