r2i forum

Wanted to know u opinion on the offshore R&D centers.

Do they lack quality ?
Is the hiring bar lower in these centers as compared to offices in US ?
Is the mindset like u hire 15 engineers here to do work of 10 (in US) as they cost 1/4th (at the entry level at least) ?

I am talking about the top firms like MS/Google/Adobe and their development centers in India :p

Probably the best place to ask as you R2Ied guys have worked at both places :)

Thanks
JAG :e

IME, we've dealt with some offshore developers and PMs. Out of 10 developers, 2-3 are good, the rest are average and sometimes below average. The stats are the same with PMs. Some of the PMs are very meticulous in their work and ensure quality results. The rest of them have poor communication skills and over-commit themselves.
I think outsourcing is still the best bet for us since quantity over quality can still produce the same result with lower costs.

Again, the above experience depends on the type of company that we've contracted with, our requirements and our interaction with their subsidiary in the US.

A few weeks back TOI carried an interview with Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of iGate when he acquired Patni computers. In that interview he said that when he started iGate, the average experience of his employees was over 7 plus years. It was designed that way so that his company stood out from the rest of the pack as a service company which offers higher level of service at a higher price. According to him, this didn't workout very well and after Patni acquisition they are planning to recruit horde of freshers so that the average experience comes down to around 2.5 to 3 years thus making it at par with the other service biggies like TCS,info,wipro etc.
This is the state of the IT service industry in India - the model works only when a majority of your employees are less than 3 years of experience and making less than 5 lakhs p/a. I work for a US based product company here in India and what I see is that most of the high end development work happens either in US or in Europe and most of the support and such low end work happens out of India. This is a general observation and of course there are some exceptions.

The general trend here is that one will do technical work hands on for may be 6-7 years and after that he or she is promoted as a team lead / PM and then on it is mainly shepherding work. In my company in the US, there are many extremely knowledgeable technical people who are working with the same company, on the same technology for 15-20 years and the amount of knowledge they have accumulated over the years is invaluable. That kind of environment doesn't exist in Indian IT industry as it is still evolving and chaotic - people constantly moving between companies,technologies etc.

JustAnotherGuy;391404
Q1. Do they lack quality ?

No, I haven't worked in the 3 places you mentioned, but will pitch in what I have gathered regarding R&D in particular as that seems to be your focus.

A1 - Quality: Quality is a relative term. You get great quality when you induce a good system to produce it. It's not just salaries or name of the company or the IIT/IIM degrees they hold. It's a complete mixture of how effectively a company can motivate, manage & extract top quality research work from its staff in India.

For instance, very few people would have heard that a Chinese major Huawei filed for 200 patents from its Bengaluru R&D center in 2008. Compared to its 27,000 patents worldwide, this is a small number, but for the 1600 engineers in the India R&D center, 200 patents was a big deal.

Yahoo! filed its second largest number of patents from its Bengaluru R&D center after the headquarters at Sunnyvale.

IBM in fact files the max patents from R&D centers in India, but my contacts within IBM say that the company refuses to break down its patent counts based on country of origin.

If I have to take an educated guess, less than 5% of the IT industry staff in India actually indulge themselves in trend setting R&D. The total number of patents filed from India each year is somewhere between 2500 and 3500. That's 8 to 10 times less than what even a small country like South Korea files each year. So it's not a industry changing quality you can expect, but surely its growing in the right direction.

JustAnotherGuy;391404 Q2. Is the hiring bar lower in these centers as compared to offices in US ?

A2 - Hiring bar: Hiring bar is again dependent upon what the person is intended to work on. If you are hiring an AJAX expert for a mission critical product due in 4th quarter, companies will get the best brain available. The scrutiny during interview might be more stringent than even US offices.

But if you are hiring a bunch of folks to an upcoming, non-mission critical research material, then the bar might be lower. Since India has probably the world's second largest pool of English speaking IT professionals today, I don't see why any company would lower the bar. Yes attrition is high, but for a well paid & well taken care of team, that wouldn't be an issue.

JustAnotherGuy;391404Q3. Is the mindset like u hire 15 engineers here to do work of 10 (in US) as they cost 1/4th (at the entry level at least) ?

A3 - Team composition: At lower skill set level, you can consider about 1/7th of US expense, factoring in operational expenses in addition to compensation. As the skill set increases, the benefit of having an offshore team decreases, unless you get that 'deal changing' guy/gal. I have seen these from both sides of the pond over an 8 years period, and I am convinced that India has plenty of talent. You just need to figure out on getting the top talent, as in my experience, it's 5 or more times tougher than finding in India. The main reason being the lack of hiring background checks (quality ones), uniformity and maturity at the 'soldier' level of IT crowd. So, to answer you, you might actually hire 25 or so, if you need to get 10 US top rated developers' quality & quantity of work. As your team & company matures & becomes famous, you can reduce that factor to about 2:1.

For serious initiatives like Software Architecture, Product development, EAI etc. Indian IT has a long way to go in quality before it catches up with the likes of US and Europe. This observation is based on working in India for last two years in 2 different product development setups. The lack of passion for disciplined self study and growth is one of the core reasons for low quality. Majority has flocked the IT for monetary reasons but a true passion for technology and its alignment with business is surely missing. As stated in one of the earlier posts Indian IT is currently thriving on quantity and with the increasing employee attrition and double digit salary increases, IT companies (including Indian vendors) are seriously exploring South American, Eastern European and near shore options. Philippines has already started to overtake India in BPO services. I see serious challenges ahead for Indian IT in next 4-5 years to come.

thanks for the replies guys :)

KirKS;391452 At lower skill set level, you can consider about 1/7th of US expense, factoring in operational expenses in addition to compensation.
So, to answer you, you might actually hire 25 or so, if you need to get 10 US top rated developers' quality & quantity of work. As your team & company matures & becomes famous, you can reduce that factor to about 2:1.

I am comparing the top firms offices in India and US . Based on the actual entry level figures I know, the salaries are around 1/4 to 1/3 of similar positions in US.

Secondly, 2:1 even for these best firms ? U mean not even the best guys/gals in India can match the quality of US developers ? I know we have a big sub-standard pool of IT professionals but we don't even produce similar number of quality developers as US ?
I thought the number should be around 1.2:1 (at least in the firms i mentioned) and that too due to natural over-heads which effect work in an offshore center

As a researcher in a research lab in the US, my group has had interactions with software development service companies in India. When we feel our research is mature and we have ironed out most of the hard challenges, we contract with a software development team to help build a prototype/demo of components of our research (usually an external company as we don't have any development centers in India).

Our group has worked thrice with well-known IT services teams in India and have found that:

* Team sizes are usually large and most of the communications to the offsite group are through the project manager/team lead. The PMs/TLs have been pretty good about communicating the deadlines and timelines. They also have been very good about providing detailed weekly status reports.

* Technically the offsite team has been of mediocre quality. They need quite a bit of hand-holding and require extremely detailed specifications from us. We have had to invest a significant amount of time in phone meetings/emails with them - much much more than we had factored in initially.

* The software delivered has been mediocre as well - not quite up to the mark.

* Most of the developers had about 2-5 years of experience. They seemed were hard-working, but not quite passionate about their work.

* High employee turnover also meant that some deadlines slipped.

One of the major reasons we decided to experiment with outsourcing in India was due to the cost. Over the past 2-3 years, we have found that outsourcing costs have gone up significantly in India. For our last project, we were able to hire a senior contract software developer with over 20 years experience in the US and found that it was not much more to hire him versus hiring a whole team in India. The passion and experience of this developer and the fact that we can now have face-to-face meetings have been a huge plus.

I agree with most of the previous posts about all the shortcomings they listed about the India teams. For my group, the overhead of working with India has been quite a lot and the cost savings not as much especially if we factor in the amount of time researchers have had to invest in the whole effort. Its unlikely we will contract with India development teams again - but my research group's experience is not quite the norm, and it is likely that for well-defined software requirements, India development centers might still work well.

I moved to India through financial services firm and manage a 70+ team. Here are my observations so far.
* Some are willing to work hard, but the rest are just in for the ride
* I get a feeling that folks are in tech because the money is good. If BPO/KPO had paid more than IT then more than likely every one would be queuing up there rather than tech shops
* 1/50 seem to have true passion for technology but then these folks get confused about their career paths. In services, pure techies are relatively less valued than their PM peers who move up nicely in the delivery value chain. Product cos presents other option but many seem to be doing some kind of low end work (ex. Sungard - this is not a broad brush painting i am sure there are exceptions/norms)
* Requires lot of monitoring/administration. Services companies have tightened the screw around monitoring login/logoff/screen locked times etc. In firms where such system doesn't exist - people tend to take it easy: long lunches, snack breaks, dinner etc are norm in a 8 hour window. Gets fixed when tough talk happens/stern commo goes out, but then history repeats itself
* Management role does not have any scope for true leadership. The focus is inward i.e. staff management. Ensuring that people are not pulling wool through your eyes. This attitude is clearly evident in corporate India - hardly any true innovation comes from India (I think people often get confuse Jugaad with Innovation - i feel jugaad is innovation killer). Casing point - If you want to be billionaire in India, you make connections and get good at copying (exceptions do exist, but lethargic majority is the norm) and that is why companies like Apple or Google will never be out of India (in a foreseeable future at least)
* Outside work people are biggest user of cellphones/commo devices. At work folks prefer email. Problems that could be solved by picking up the phone and talking to person in the region gets related to sending an email and waiting for a response (having cognitive dissonance on this topic)
* Attitude & Communication: Cant say no but then cant do the job. Says yes to getting the job and doesn't deliver. Very common theme.
* Follow up: One has to keep following up to ensure progress is being made. To assume that when one said yes he/she will get the job done will generally be a recipe for disaster. Mostly one will to have follow up to make sure progress is being made.
* Too much multi-tasking: Lack of queue any where is symptom of this problem. Guy at food counter tend to entertain 10 people at the same time getting money from all of them. Gets totally confused who should get what and then makes all ten wait longer than what could have been done sequentially. People bring in the same attitude to work. Tend to take up 10 things at the same time, multi-task among 10 and deliver none.
* Too much ambition: The underlying capability doesn't exists (but doesn't give a sh$$ if is there or not) but desire big roles. Every single on my staff want my job irrespective of if they can do it or not.
* Self Worth: Every one thinks they are exceeding the expectations. During the year end review majority argues they are "Exceeds". It has now become a circus act
* Integrity and Ethics - People still tamper medical bill to get a tax benefit of Rs. 300.

As long as things continue like the way they are, i am not so sure if India can ever be a developed country. At least in my opinion something fundamental needs to happen for India to even catch up else this country will always be playing a catch up game copying every thing that is out there!

100% agree with every point, very well analyzed, thought and articualted! I also moved to India last year and managing a big team and my observation has been pretty much on the similar line as yours....

Tsozum;392413I moved to India through financial services firm and manage a 70+ team. Here are my observations so far.
* Some are willing to work hard, but the rest are just in for the ride
* I get a feeling that folks are in tech because the money is good. If BPO/KPO had paid more than IT then more than likely every one would be queuing up there rather than tech shops
* 1/50 seem to have true passion for technology but then these folks get confused about their career paths. In services, pure techies are relatively less valued than their PM peers who move up nicely in the delivery value chain. Product cos presents other option but many seem to be doing some kind of low end work (ex. Sungard - this is not a broad brush painting i am sure there are exceptions/norms)
* Requires lot of monitoring/administration. Services companies have tightened the screw around monitoring login/logoff/screen locked times etc. In firms where such system doesn't exist - people tend to take it easy: long lunches, snack breaks, dinner etc are norm in a 8 hour window. Gets fixed when tough talk happens/stern commo goes out, but then history repeats itself
* Management role does not have any scope for true leadership. The focus is inward i.e. staff management. Ensuring that people are not pulling wool through your eyes. This attitude is clearly evident in corporate India - hardly any true innovation comes from India (I think people often get confuse Jugaad with Innovation - i feel jugaad is innovation killer). Casing point - If you want to be billionaire in India, you make connections and get good at copying (exceptions do exist, but lethargic majority is the norm) and that is why companies like Apple or Google will never be out of India (in a foreseeable future at least)
* Outside work people are biggest user of cellphones/commo devices. At work folks prefer email. Problems that could be solved by picking up the phone and talking to person in the region gets related to sending an email and waiting for a response (having cognitive dissonance on this topic)
* Attitude & Communication: Cant say no but then cant do the job. Says yes to getting the job and doesn't deliver. Very common theme.
* Follow up: One has to keep following up to ensure progress is being made. To assume that when one said yes he/she will get the job done will generally be a recipe for disaster. Mostly one will to have follow up to make sure progress is being made.
* Too much multi-tasking: Lack of queue any where is symptom of this problem. Guy at food counter tend to entertain 10 people at the same time getting money from all of them. Gets totally confused who should get what and then makes all ten wait longer than what could have been done sequentially. People bring in the same attitude to work. Tend to take up 10 things at the same time, multi-task among 10 and deliver none.
* Too much ambition: The underlying capability doesn't exists (but doesn't give a sh$$ if is there or not) but desire big roles. Every single on my staff want my job irrespective of if they can do it or not.
* Self Worth: Every one thinks they are exceeding the expectations. During the year end review majority argues they are "Exceeds". It has now become a circus act
* Integrity and Ethics - People still tamper medical bill to get a tax benefit of Rs. 300.

As long as things continue like the way they are, i am not so sure if India can ever be a developed country. At least in my opinion something fundamental needs to happen for India to even catch up else this country will always be playing a catch up game copying every thing that is out there!

I am working in India after R2i and this is 8 months down the line.
I agree that how much change was brought into me by India work environment after 12 yrs of US experience.
Great point you told is - sending email and waiting on. How stupid it is that I am doing the same rather up picking the phone. I just got into the mode by working among all here which was not before.
Annual reviews - I am shocked to see that even fresher argues with you expecting 30% hike and cannot take below met expectations and wanted always above. If experienced, then the talk hovers around salary hike all the time in reviews rather improvements to be made. In US, never I could expect more than 5-10% hike and this was not even an issue at all.
Work Pressure - One thing is sure that while I was Onsite Manager managing offshore teams was much more easier rather I find difficult working as PM offshore. The work environment US vs India is very different as I found that I am more bothered with Training programs Internal, CMM Level 5 process, Internal Audits, Status checks, Status reports (multiple reports for the same deliverable) and so many other quality checks which really do not allow to concentrate on the deliverables. Also the leadership above you does not come to forefront and always busy safe guarding their jobs. They are limited to award cermonies.
I wonder now why I could not get hold of offshore PMs when I worked onsite. These PMs are so much into other stuff that deliverables suffer. Focus is more into domain knowledge with overdose of processes that leave no room to get into real technical stuff and often forced to leave the same on your reportees most of whom have tall claims of 5-7yrs out of which few yrs are just spent on the ride.
As you said, only few work while others act very busy. For me, I even find hard to work with my own few resources as they tend to act highly busy.

These are my 2 cents based on place I work !!

But one this is sure - I am having great fun at work ( lot of activities, red tape, "Sir" kind of attitudes etc) and outside with food, liesure time, old friends, great evenings, Monsoon smell of air bringing rain, series of fruits I am eating which I was missing in USA.
Fruits do come spontaneously one after other taking breath out of you if you are lover of fruits. I ate so many varieties in last 8months.