Sundarrajk's Weblog

To read what will happen to the big Indian IT companies read What happened at Yahoo?, The same thing that happened to Yahoo is going to happen to the Indian IT companies sooner or later. The time period seems stretched than it was for Yahoo. The only reason for this timeline being so long is that India has been the only company to give people for software development at a cheap rate. Other countries are yet to reach the levels of the rate offered by Indian IT companies and they undercut each other.
The revenue of the Indian IT companies grows because of the quantity of mediocre people that they can supply and not because of the superior quality of the people. That is why most India IT CEOs are talking of linear growth and non-linear growth. They have been in the linear growth mode for so long and company that has tried to shift to the non-linear growth has failed.
The mindset in such companies is such that one should get immediate results and one should get it with inexperienced programs. The concept of promoting, what the article calls, “Hacker Culture” is completely missing in these IT companies. And for the consequences of this, see the paragraph below.
See the paragraph “In technology, once you have bad programmers, you’re doomed. I can’t think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.”. And if any company in the Indian IT industry wants to refute this, it is doomsday for that company.
See the paragraph “So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are “in the software business” in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.”
So can any of Indian IT company claim to be producing good software on their own. The answer is a big NO.
So how do these companies propose to exist a few years down the line. They are only hoping that the trend of the big MNCs giving them work to code will continue long enough for them to survive and probably thrive. Does India progress in any way because of this. Monetarily yes, but knowledge wise it is in no way benefitting.

The last para of the article sums up the entire premise “Why would great programmers want to work for a company that didn’t have a hacker-centric culture, as long as there were others that did? I can imagine two reasons: if they were paid a huge amount, or if the domain was interesting and none of the companies in it were hacker-centric. Otherwise you can’t attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. And without good programmers you won’t get good software, no matter how many people you put on a task, or how many procedures you establish to ensure “quality.””
No matter what ISO certification one has, no matter what CMM level one is at, no matter how many PMP certified Project Managers you have, no matter how many ITIL certified people you have, no matter how many other IT certified people you have one cannot establish Quality.
To survive and thrive, the Indian IT companies need to come out of this complacency and need to take drastic steps to reverse this “Death Spiral” that they are into.