Infosys and Cognizant are everywhere. Who actually hires them and how are they so massive? Has anyone personally worked for them? Or used them as a client?
Yes, we have a large cognizant contract right now. My company has hired about 300 cognizant resources both onshore and offshore. The overall strategy seems to be leverage each employee with ~5 contractors. All employees are actually just product managers, PMs and SMEs and management. All dev, QA, dev ops, dba, networking, L1-3 monitoring etc has been outsourced.
I also used to work for a well known national retailer who employed a similar strategy. There were only ~40 employees running a project of 400 people, 3 years and $100M. It's a common approach.
Loads of companies do! Mostly bigger companies though. They've got tons of IT resources in India, resources that are scarce & expensive in US/Europe. So they outsource IT work for you while having consultants at the client as liaison between business & the outsourced development.
Most fortune 500's. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a good development team. So once you have swapped internal for external it's very difficult to bring it back in house.
Going from a good team of 10 developers to a good team of 100 developers can easily take 5 years if you want to maintain quality. And you probably won't see major dividends for another 5 years on top of that. How many senior managers are invested enough in a company to take a 10-15 year view on it?
On the other hand if I need a $50 million project finished within the next year I can get 150 average quality developers next week from Infosys.
Now as a startup if you are trying to compete with the big players who have 100x as much capital you need the top 20% developers. And you won't get them going through the consulting giants.
And having someone to blame is very important for a senior manager.... But useless for a startup founder or small business owner.
6 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] threadI also used to work for a well known national retailer who employed a similar strategy. There were only ~40 employees running a project of 400 people, 3 years and $100M. It's a common approach.
Infosys reports they focus on the following industries [1]:
I wouldn't hire them, but I'm not Proctor and Gamble so they'll probably survive my disinterest.[1] http://www.infosys.com/investors/reports-filings/annual-repo...
Going from a good team of 10 developers to a good team of 100 developers can easily take 5 years if you want to maintain quality. And you probably won't see major dividends for another 5 years on top of that. How many senior managers are invested enough in a company to take a 10-15 year view on it?
On the other hand if I need a $50 million project finished within the next year I can get 150 average quality developers next week from Infosys.
And having someone to blame is very important for a senior manager.... But useless for a startup founder or small business owner.