OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and then she has to navigate the buereucracy writing emails to get access to some proprietary database or OS.
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.
IBM India is primarily a service arm. I have a sweet story for IBM India too. I hope I'm not offending anyone. I had a friend working there long back after he was acqui-hired for a JavaScript tool he wrote. He kinda looks up to me. Once I was looking for a job, he told me that they are looking for a "Head of Design" and introduced me to have a meeting with one of their Heads.
In the pursuing interview/talk, my response to how I can build a team meant for the web/app was -- design alone is pretty meaningless, so let's create a team that understands designers' creativity and the power of engineering.
He thinks I was crazy because I told him I code my designs. Some of his words;
- "Designers should be shielded from Engineers, so their creativity is not limited."
- "I have avoided the other team and kept to my design team, and when the deliverables are passed-on, my job is done."
Of course, I looked up the guy later and learned that he has steadily grown his career like a well-designed graph, from an intern designer to the head of a design team in about 20 years.
