My last full-time job in a corporation involved managing many EPAM developers and after working with offshore developers on multiple continents I can tell you they were the strongest technically that I had encountered. I had never heard of EPAM until my boss told me we were bringing them on board to help us scale our app dev efforts! We had IT consultants from a Big 4 firm who felt more like the model of hire undergrads and teach them a few technical things to throw jargon around in front of the client. I realize in both cases it can be luck of the draw but I feel like firms such as EPAM are focused on bringing serious technical skills and experience to the table rather than a general consultant demeanor.
Big shops will be sending their cheapest (aka youngest) consultants to all their small clients, or at least until they complain enough about the quality of work that they send someone more senior along to right things. That's what allows other smaller consultancy shops to compete, because such clients would be considered our "big" clients that we send our best people to. You're just waiting for that moment where they get fed up with a big shop and open it up for a new contract, and you can swoop in and pick up a new client.
The Big 4 consultancies hire college grads give them basic training on the big cloud platforms and then fill up projects. Otherwise they hire cheap engineers from Eastern Europe or India.
They are not looking for experienced engineers. At least in the Technology Advisory space.
That's how these offshoring consulting companies make money: for every 7 fresh undergrads, there is one senior person. They pay $3500 per annum for these cheaper resources; the senior resource gets paid about $16000 per annum. Profits for these consulting companies come from these $300 per month resources.
I can speak for their Ukrainian offices starting pay is around 1.2K/month USD and it quickly goes up mid level (3+ years) would be 2.5K+ and senior 4k-6.5K/month. Tech leads architects can make over 8K. Keep in mind that given a tax regime in place of like 5% and cost of living being low you are in very solid shape.
Thousands of undergrads are happy to even get that job in India. That's what TCS/Infosys/Wipro pay for fresh graduates; that's why they milk from the billable hours model.
There are countries in Africa that pay more than that for unskilled manual labor. Even the cheapest software developer should be able to get $1k before tax per month. Of course I am assuming that these people actually became software developers, if those 7 juniors are merely trainees who haven't written a single line of code in their life then that salary may be justified.
>The Big 4 consultancies hire college grads give them basic training on the big cloud platforms and then fill up projects.
that's correct. i went thur that with Avanade. they teach us some basic about the security system that they implemented for their client and client ask for tech support and guess who they send.
Such big* consulting/outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe(epam, globallogic and the like) have competent engineers.
I can see it especially clearly after moving to the US and having to interview engineers from other big consultancies.
*big - everything with several k employees is considered big in Eastern Europe.