How Much Work Claimed by Indians Employees is Done by their Indian Network?

Executive Summary

• Indians have developed a reputation for using other Indians to do work they submit to their employers.
• We investigate how Indians routinely use others to do their work.

Introduction

The US employer-employee model is that the employer will hire the employee to do work. However, with Indian employees, this assumption is not valid. In many cases, Indians will add fake skills to their resumes, or share credentials with other Indians to get jobs, as we cover in the article How Indians Coordinate to Falsify IT Certifications.

This means that on average, Indians are much more likely to occupy positions for which they do not have the experience they say that they do. Indian consulting firms like WiPro and Infosys for adding any skills which their customers are interested in to their resumes close to immediately. I worked for one SAP consulting company, where it was routine that those that worked on demos, for say, Disney, would then change their resume to state that they had implemented software at Disney. This massively inflates the experience level.

The Indian Network

Indians do not think that they have to be qualified to have the right to fill a job. And one reason for this is that they often rely on a network of other Indians that they can have do their work. And Indians typically have no compunction about doing this. Furthermore, this is facilitated by the fact that Indians typically have large social networks, which allow them to trade favors or to hire very low-cost resources back in India to do what the work requires.

How Indian Consulting Firms Manage Improperly Skilled Resources

Indian consulting firms win their customers almost entirely on the basis of their low cost. The typical strategy used by Indian consulting and outsourcing firms is to supplement a team of permanent employees with skilled contractors. This becomes apparent to experienced resources who have dealt with these companies.

This is explained in the following quotation.

TATA and IBM knows they are super unskilled….

I always get agencies calling me for work with TATA or IBM – they want a Unicorn star developer -otherwise they can’t make it.

Basically they get the project, hire all cheap unskilled resources and few unicorns.

They want to make sure project does not fail and the cheap ones get trained by unicorn.

As with all consulting companies, the consulting firm makes the subcontractor pretend that they are permanent employees. This creates the illusion that the consulting firm has better resources than they do. Firms with large numbers of Indian resources have large numbers of resources that have fake skills on their resumes. With a high percentage of employees on H1-B, this allows consulting firms to reap significant margins. But it also means that they need to tap outside contractors to either fill a gap in skills or just to make the team look better than it is. Consulting firms that have a large Indian contingent that goes out to the contract market will always pay lower than a job with no Indians that work for the consulting firm and or without any Indians involved in recruiting.

Conclusion

Just because an Indian submits work does not mean that they performed that work. Indian employees are not like other employees in that they frequently pretend to have knowledge and skills that they do not have. This is part of Indian culture and is also motivated by the desire to migrate to other countries. Indians are not only fighting for their own right to migrate but hope through chain migration to bring family members to these countries.

References

https://financialpost.com/legal-post/employees-loving-their-wfh-set-up-beware-your-jobs-could-be-outsourced-to-remote-workers-in-other-countries