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.
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.
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.