DXC was selected as the MSP for my previous employer and we were shifted over to DXC. During my time with them I have seen almost nothing but shear incompetence and no common sense from the majority of the offshore teams. Simple tasks that a European or American engineer would accomplish rapidly and without guidance have to be thoroughly explained and reiterated over and over to the offshore teams, and even then the work is either performed improperly or not at all. Obtaining status and timelines are also met with frequent, and obscure "we're working on that" or "we will check on that" without ever receiving useful information. The offshore team members outnumber the onshore team members by 3-4x's yet the work output is abysmal. When the offshore teams encounter something that isn't thoroughly outlined, rather than working through the issue by researching or even using simple tools like Google, they immediately stop and proceed no further and you're lucky if they reach out to someone about the issue in any reasonable amount of time. The client I support is absolutely exhausted from dealing with the non-stop issues, lack of accountability, constant back and forth and overall terrible support from DXC's vast empire of offshore employees that there is serious talk by leadership of ending the contract and bringing support back in house. This isn't only limited to this client either, my former team was split to multiple clients and the sentiment is the same across the board. This isn't a dig on foreign workers, but when the support provided is barely better than partially trained interns it makes it difficult to speak highly of them.
17 replies (most recent on top)
@186 that's about as good as it gets. Getting paid by DXC to do nothing while everyone pretends it's business as usual is pretty close to corporate heaven. Don't ruin it by getting too greedy. Even DXC's stupidity has its limits. As they say, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it's gifted by a company or a client who doesn't need you...
@16z If only on the pointless meetings front. I'm paid appearance money. I don't have to say anything or contribute, but am expected to dial in. It's a tie I don't really need, but cannot justify just quitting if that's all I need to do for my $$. I would however be very happy to get the same money to just be on call directly to the client with a 3 working day SLA. Ie. Come about now - it doesn't matter if I don't get back to them until next Tuesday. But they probably realise when someone's not touched the system for 12 months they probably aren't going to be very useful - but nobody seems to be able to see it, or if they do, they don't do anything about it. But that's how a lot of society has gone, so why would we expect anything more here!
@16v that’s about as good as it gets. why do you complain. DXC can’t afford to fire you, the client won’t pay your regular rate but appreciates keeping access they have absolutely no use for.
So what does that all mean?
You get paid to sit around doing absolutely nothing, without a client breathing down your neck, complaining about everything or management pretending to have any meaningful expectations of you. Meanwhile, the DXC Account Manager and country leaders can pretend they haven’t actually lost the business, that the client still wants to keep us close and that they’re simply waiting for the right moment to win the contract back.
No workload, no accountability, no pointless meetings, no stress. Just a monthly salary for the privilege of being left alone. In DXC's terms, that’s not a problem, that’s a perfect work arrangement as everyone gets to maintain their own little corporate illusion.
@16j We have, and in fact they have. They've brought in new suppliers. But somehow we're all still here. We're basically now just backup incase the new supplier can't do anything. That or we've just been forgotten about. Maybe the company can't afford to pay us off, or is hoping that it'll bore us into just quitting. Why would I - I've already as good as retired!!
Tell your client to fire DXC. Easy fix.
@ph It doesn't save money as it takes 50 times longer to get anything done
Have you ever heard of paragraphs and spacing?
Yes I do agree Offshore teams even with all their CERTS, need step by step instructions on anything. They can't debug themself out of a soaking wet paper bag
@ph have you just started working in IT?
Offshoring and the arguments against it are over a quarter of a century old now.
The world hasn't ended, the customers haven't dropped suppliers using it and the practice hasn't ended.
You might as well be arguing against the tide coming in.
Not saying it's good mind you...
What management doesn't understand is that offshoring saves money, but carries ten times the risk. Gambling on that risk just to save on payroll is unethical and unprofessional. Management will realize soon enough when sh-t does hit the fan.
@d4 What you describe can be called a work to rule policy. If DXC do not incentivize people with proper rewards you get exactly what you state, irrelevant of the location.
DXC cannot have it both ways, but is so badly managed sadly this will never be fixed.
I will say it's not just offshore anymore. I am surrounded by people who only do what they are asked. They do not question if it's right. They do not point out there's a better way. They will happily setup something that is clearly wrong, but that's what the spec says and that's what they will do. And then fold their arms and wait for the client to find it doesn't work. They won't offer any suggestion why it's wrong, only pointing out it's as per the requirements - which to be fair it is. Game players the lot of 'em. Meanwhile there is no progress, and everyone wonders why clients try and put as little work in DXC's direction as possible.
Had all these ‘outsourcing’ issues 20+ years ago on the Zurich account. Nothing has changed for the better!! That was with CSC. DXC is even worse.
generally I find indians + indian management to be inadequate
don't get me wrong, indians can be great, some of the best staff you can work with, the problem is that's CAN - not that they are unviersally
in the MSP space it's a race to the bottom, so you get incompetent managers, middle managers who point fingers at each other and their subordinates
staff who don't really have any sort of reference point beyond a script and flap at the slightest thing
no lie I've been called out in the night by indians because a printer ran out of ink for an office floor and they thought that constituted a major incident
they are literally like children, you cannot trust them
also, another thing, indians seem to put more stake in saving face and being present than actually doing anything. so you can explain something to them, they will nod or say "yes" without actually understanding it. you will have big war room type calls where fifty indians will join, occcasional tuk tuk and clogged toilet sounds in the background, but maybe 1 person actually doing anything
or they are process hounds that have no common sense, Ive seen indians refuse to do work or allow work to go ahead because of a typo, that I corrected in writing / voice, and they said "but its not on the record"
I was TUPE'd into DXC quite a long time ago now. When they first came in, they spent a considerable amount of time being shown how everything was done. The expectation was that they would gradually transition things over to well-defined, standardised and automated processes.
The reality has been rather different.
Instead, they seemed to just add their own layers of bureaucracy and administration on top of what was already there, with some of the work handed to offshore teams. But fundamentally, everything continued to be done pretty much as it always had been.
Having since moved between accounts, I've found exactly the same situation everywhere. There is very little consistency between clients, so skills and experience gained on one account aren't necessarily transferable to another. Every account has its own way of doing things, its own processes and its own quirks.
We're still relying on scrappy spreadsheets and Word documents being emailed around. And if nobody tells you who you're supposed to email or where to find something, good luck working it out!
Meanwhile, those who stayed behind seem to have continued receiving pay rises and enjoying Christmas parties and all the other benefits of being part of the original organisation. Those of us who transferred got very little in comparison.
Some people left and were simply never replaced. Ultimately, that's how a significant part of the promised savings was achieved.
After all these years, I still struggle to see where the promised transformation, standardisation and efficiencies actually happened. It feels as though the bureaucracy increased, the people were reduced, but the underlying way of working barely changed.
DXC see their workers as fungible, they're literally just a unit of labour on a spreadsheet.
As such they don't value experience, they don't value local knowledge etc.
It's simply another case of "you get what you pay for."
This is the overall problem with IT. There is nobody quantifying the delays in terms of dollars and adding it to the expense spreadsheet of the vendors, so the MBA class only goes on raw salary saved.
Until that can be quantified, this will continue to happen.
@OP it's a very mixed bag in my experience.
I work frequently with some who are absolutely brilliant. Really good by anyone's measure.
Others yes I agree with you.
The problem is that you can't find and keep this many brilliant people... And you certainly can't keep them with dxc's appalling pay and promotion policy.
Whether that's any different in any other map... I'd doubt it.
Your former employer decided to reduce costs. Not entirely sure how they imagined that was going to play out.