A Business case for Indian offshoring to deploy its “bench” towards FOSS

http://sandeep.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/a-business-case-for-infosys-to-deploy-its-bench-towards-foss/

by sandGorgon • 17 years ago

16 7 17 years ago

sandeep.wordpress.com

An open letter to several of India's IT offshoring companies, who are suffering the problem of too much idle manpower to utilize this lean period to contribute towards Free and Open Source Software and in the process gather free PR and Marketing, as well as expose their employees to excellent mentorship.

statictype• 17 years ago

Expecting them to be able to work on llvm and MySql is... highly optimistic.

sandGorgon• 17 years ago

Every project needs developers and testers. Contributing to projects may take different avenues and opens up opportunities to climb higher on the development foodchain as their experience matures.

ajju• 17 years ago

Based on my experience over the years at least 10% of the developers who join these companies are actually really good. How can they not be? While someone graduating from an IIT might not work at these companies, they hire the best candidates from local engineering colleges. Most of these people either burn out and leave in 3 years or lose interest but trudge on. I think they would not only be able to work on llvm and MySQL but do well at it. Like the previous commenter points out, they could start with testing but I'm sure they would pick up fast. Work satisfaction would shoot UP!

The reason this might not work unless it comes down as a diktat from top management at these co.s is - there are very few outsourcing companies that think long term at the middle management level.

braindead_in• 17 years ago

Good point. Never occurred to me. Doh.

I used to work for TCS at the start of my career. During those dot com bust days saw a lot of my colleagues working on internal projects. Open source was not a big draw those days.

Guess the FOSS community in India should take this up. Would be a good place to start.

manish• 17 years ago

IBM has its own business interests to contribute to FOSS, it would be interesting to know what interest FOSS could be for companies like Infosys. Open source contribution requires dedicated interest and a sense of community, which cannot be developed as a temporary option to work on while on bench. The people who might have already worked on FOSS stuff might be able to make some useful contribution, working on new stuff as a temporary option are unlikely to produce useful results

known• 17 years ago

I suggested this to my company chairman in 2001. I got a nice appreciation letter from the chairman. Actually nothing really happened after that.

dont• 17 years ago

Talking about the talent that is sitting on these (very) long benches...

First, lets look at how Microsoft structures its business in India. Even the mighty Microsoft follows a stratified talent pool system. They have 2 companies / teams here. The one that builds their products is called Microsoft R&D and the people there are _GOOD_. Whereas all their global internal IT systems needs are supported by Microsoft IT Services, which is staffed by simpler developers who are not good enough to contribute to products, but can cut all the HTML needed as well as make all the CURD applications that the business operations need.

Indian IT companies are no different, they have a small cadre of excellent developers, who form the core of their teams, and are very busy -- even now. The rest of the millions are poor developers, not algorithmically sound, but can make simple CURD applications.

Its this second layer that fills up the benches. And they are not going to be valuable contributors to any of the projects you've picked -- (unless of course you want coded an Add/Update form on the project's website ;)

If you look at the biggest revenue earners for Indian IT you'll realise its this kind of internal CURD applications. Why should an Indian IT company hire super smart developers, when it makes more by hiring (_and billing for_) many warm bodies who'll hand code stuff because they are not smart enough to create their own frameworks?

A Business case for Indian offshoring to deploy its “bench” towards FOSS

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