If you’ve ever been to India you see that clearly the general approach to things is just throw people at the problem. Why have one person inspecting your ticket when you can have four?
The problem with the Indian outsourcers is that they’ve broadly failed to move up the technology value chain. These firms were quite good at the “just throw a bunch of people at it” solutions to brute force get work done but the tech sector has moved on.
Need a company to give you 1000 mechanical turks to perform some tasks you haven’t been able to automate yet? Go to an Indian outsourcing firm. Need some people to design technology to make the mechanical turks no longer required? That talent is generally not found within these Indian firms.
In that sense what McKinsey said in the article is probably true. Advances (largely built elsewhere) will probably make 80% of what these firms do irrelevant in the next few years.
It seems to me, time and time again, India, ( actually pretty much all the other BRIC ) are trying to copy China without actually understanding how and why China got there in the first place.
10 to 15 years ago one would have thought India to be better in programming, largely due to English for Chinese are not as common. Turns out with a whole Ecosystem, China has been able to adopt and produce some very decent engineers.
There is nothing wrong with throwing people at the problem. You create jobs and employment, there are still industries and area in China continue to do this. But you must also acknowledge how this is a temporary solution and what needs to be done afterwards.
The problem with the Indian outsourcers is that they’ve broadly failed to move up the technology value chain. These firms were quite good at the “just throw a bunch of people at it” solutions to brute force get work done but the tech sector has moved on.
Need a company to give you 1000 mechanical turks to perform some tasks you haven’t been able to automate yet? Go to an Indian outsourcing firm. Need some people to design technology to make the mechanical turks no longer required? That talent is generally not found within these Indian firms.
In that sense what McKinsey said in the article is probably true. Advances (largely built elsewhere) will probably make 80% of what these firms do irrelevant in the next few years.