Thursday, January 10, 2008
Indian Outsourcing Firms are Horrific at Networking
Many folks are aware that I have started a local chapter for OWASP where I have attempted to invite many of the transient resources from outsourcing firms such as Wipro, Cognizant, TCS, Accenture and others to participate. Guess what I discovered?
One individual who will remain nameless wanted other folks from his firm to participate and realized that there was no way for him to even figure out which of his peers were working in the area. He proceeded to ask his Chief Architect in the area whom he learned also didn't have the ability to know who was deployed in the area.
He figured out that the best way to figure out who was deployed in the local area for his firm was to email a bunch of folks in Chennai whom could provide him with the contacts for the lead of each customer account in the area whom then could put him in touch with whomever happened to be deployed in the area.
The funny thing though is that this outsourcing firm has locations in places other than Chennai and I bet you have already guessed that the folks in Chennai have no ability to know who is deployed in the same account if the person happened to come from another development center such as Delhi or Bangalore.
My original charge to this individual is that networking with others is a good thing and that participation in user groups such as OWASP is an even better thing. The thing I asked for him to figure out is how could OWASP chapter leads be successful in sending out invites to members of his firm if even he couldn't quickly figure it out.
If you think about how many employees work for Accenture, Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam, TCS, etc that are in the United States on L1 Visas, you would probably come up with 10K to 20K in terms of headcount. How many of these individuals know about user group meetings that are happening right in their backyard?
| | View blog reactionsOne individual who will remain nameless wanted other folks from his firm to participate and realized that there was no way for him to even figure out which of his peers were working in the area. He proceeded to ask his Chief Architect in the area whom he learned also didn't have the ability to know who was deployed in the area.
He figured out that the best way to figure out who was deployed in the local area for his firm was to email a bunch of folks in Chennai whom could provide him with the contacts for the lead of each customer account in the area whom then could put him in touch with whomever happened to be deployed in the area.
The funny thing though is that this outsourcing firm has locations in places other than Chennai and I bet you have already guessed that the folks in Chennai have no ability to know who is deployed in the same account if the person happened to come from another development center such as Delhi or Bangalore.
My original charge to this individual is that networking with others is a good thing and that participation in user groups such as OWASP is an even better thing. The thing I asked for him to figure out is how could OWASP chapter leads be successful in sending out invites to members of his firm if even he couldn't quickly figure it out.
If you think about how many employees work for Accenture, Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam, TCS, etc that are in the United States on L1 Visas, you would probably come up with 10K to 20K in terms of headcount. How many of these individuals know about user group meetings that are happening right in their backyard?
