OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and then she has to navigate the buereucracy writing emails to get access to some proprietary database or OS.

I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and configured.

I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and billed the client.

To be fair we did use clearcase for source control, but the outsourced teams were equally awful. There was a genuine concern that a lot of the team members out there were people's friends/family/neighbors because they never ever spoke in meetings (the lead would answer on their behalf if they were asked a question), and either we never saw any code from them or what we did was delivered slowly and was usually awful verbatim copy-paste work or simply just plain did not work.

A couple of times in the past, I saw the pattern of one person as the VCS proxy for a whole team. Eventually I realized it was not because there were team members who didn't know how to use VCS. It was because individually-tracked commits would reveal that only one or two of the people contributed 90%+ of the work.

Edited: this was _not_ exclusively from Indian IT firms.

That makes complete sense this is a scam they are pulling.

WoW so not much has changed from when you use to work there and now. Also outsourced teams are awful at large companies like IBM because the people who hire them are usually not current with the technology and have this 20 yrs of experience writing some SAP thing. I mean it awful, they do 1-2 hours of standups.

IBM India is primarily a service arm. I have a sweet story for IBM India too. I hope I'm not offending anyone. I had a friend working there long back after he was acqui-hired for a JavaScript tool he wrote. He kinda looks up to me. Once I was looking for a job, he told me that they are looking for a "Head of Design" and introduced me to have a meeting with one of their Heads.

In the pursuing interview/talk, my response to how I can build a team meant for the web/app was -- design alone is pretty meaningless, so let's create a team that understands designers' creativity and the power of engineering.

He thinks I was crazy because I told him I code my designs. Some of his words;

- "Designers should be shielded from Engineers, so their creativity is not limited."

- "I have avoided the other team and kept to my design team, and when the deliverables are passed-on, my job is done."

Of course, I looked up the guy later and learned that he has steadily grown his career like a well-designed graph, from an intern designer to the head of a design team in about 20 years.

> I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes

I had to document and then teach over multiple sessions a small team from Infosys how to use Git. 3 weeks, and they all said they understood. Months later nobody could still check code out let alone commit. Then again, I’m not sure I’d be happy with them committing - a lot of their code was actual copy and paste from multiple Stack Overflow questions and answers unmodified into the same file!

I didn’t mind that they were being paid double what I was on, but I was mightily angry with the quality of their non-work :(

What's the deal with this? I worked with an Info Sys contractor from India. He was supposed to be the Apache Spark expert we so desperately needed to start being more productive.

Not only did he not have expertise on Spark, he could barely type and I had to do everything for him with regard to Git. I suggested it would actually be a better use of his time to brush up on these essential skills than to try being productive without them but he refused. He actually seemed to think that _I_ was the one who needed to work on my skills and that he was doing fine.

Did he just lie his way through the interview process? It seriously seemed like he watched some YouTube videos about big data and then decided he was a black belt in the area.

"Centres of excellence" was something promised to my last company after a round of outsourcing to TCS. They claimed that since TCS is such a large company that they had these COE teams that were domain experts on certain enterprise software.

Once the contract was signed we never heard of this again. We were stuck hiring consultants that were almost as bad as TCS.

Can confirm, I worked for Publicis Sapient (formerly SapientRazorfish) for a bit and heard some horror stories about consultant firm software devs. (Ironically enough, SR/PS is a consulting firm too...)

Depends on managers and who pulls for what work.

Western companies take all the great work and push down to Indian firms not interesting work, some dumb enough managers will bow to client( bootlicker ) without much of know how take that job and come to us.

I worked in MNC and Startups seen my fair share of so called types of projects/managers.

I had the same experience in Shanghai with a similar top tier agency. I was hired by a Fortune 500 apparel brand to be their digital project manager to handle the agency and Q/C deliverables.

It was 2013, but even then I was blown away by the extent to which the engineers on their end didn't use any modern version control. All of the deliverables were send over FTP updates, and zipped file directories.