This practice has only accelerated since 1995. The growth in the IT services industry has been led by firms like Cognizant, Hitachi, Wipro, TCS, Infosys, HCL and others. The big consulting firms like Deloitte, PwC, EY, and IBM also rely on offshore IT staffs, so even spending the big money with the premiere consulting firms does not assure competence. These offshore firms employ hundreds of thousands of Indian employees. I worked for one of these companies for a few years. I can say at the technical level I saw nothing but total incompetence. The Indian staff had no business experience and little technical competency. The sales people would agree to whatever scope the client wanted at whatever price the client was willing to pay. 6 to 12 months after the contracts were signed, Indians imported, and client's US staff terminated, the incompetence of the Indian firm became evident. But, by this time, the client was stuck - the project was too much of a mess to hand over to another firm; the work could not be completed on time or on budget, so the client got less than they contracted for, they got it late, and for more money than they planned. This was not an "occasional" occurrence - it happened on every project I had direct knowledge of.
The only part of the organization that was competent was the legal department. They were pretty good at making sure the clients got screwed in court as well as on the project. Buyer beware.
This practice has only accelerated since 1995. The growth in the IT services industry has been led by firms like Cognizant, Hitachi, Wipro, TCS, Infosys, HCL and others. The big consulting firms like Deloitte, PwC, EY, and IBM also rely on offshore IT staffs, so even spending the big money with the premiere consulting firms does not assure competence. These offshore firms employ hundreds of thousands of Indian employees. I worked for one of these companies for a few years. I can say at the technical level I saw nothing but total incompetence. The Indian staff had no business experience and little technical competency. The sales people would agree to whatever scope the client wanted at whatever price the client was willing to pay. 6 to 12 months after the contracts were signed, Indians imported, and client's US staff terminated, the incompetence of the Indian firm became evident. But, by this time, the client was stuck - the project was too much of a mess to hand over to another firm; the work could not be completed on time or on budget, so the client got less than they contracted for, they got it late, and for more money than they planned. This was not an "occasional" occurrence - it happened on every project I had direct knowledge of.
The only part of the organization that was competent was the legal department. They were pretty good at making sure the clients got screwed in court as well as on the project. Buyer beware.
This is one of the better comments I’ve read in a long time. If you can find a supporting source, you should make this a post.