World Bank confirms Wipro is on contractor blacklist

East Meat West

Reminds me of the old Russian joke about the ram.

An Old Georgian man is trying to get into Moscow University carrying a tied up ram on his shoulder. The security at the door starts shouting at him. "Tovarish, vy kuda s baranom?" (translation - comrade, where are going with this ram?). Answer: "Kakoj, baran? Glupuy Baran v universitete, eto bakshish assistentu" (translation - What ram, the daft ram is in the university, this is just a tip for his tutor". Or the story when one of the Georgian (or russian... forgot) teams got disqualified by the UEFA for bribing the officials. They apparently gave each a welcome present - a real ankle length beaver fur coat. And I am not even talking about the slavic habit of doing all business at the table during a 5 course meal.

What is a bribe for us, in some parts of the world is actually the means of doing business. If one does not like it he should not try to do business with these parts of the world are limit himself solely to other parts which share the same concepts of hospitality and presents.

At least Wipro are consistent...

In that their their financial controls are equally as bad as their consulting practice, project management and delivery controls.

Worked with Wipro before

I've worked with useless Wipro folks before. The ones we got were as thick as pig shit. I was actually part of the interview process until so many were getting rejected (17 in a row) that my manager (Indian himself) asked for the list of questions we were using!! No joke. We gave him a dumbed-down list.

Their next trick was to have a 'customer representative' sat with the candidates during interviews (all interviews were initially phone based). The amount of times the phone went on mute whilst they the customer rep 'explained the question' to the candidate was crazy.

And then after a week of them having the dumbed-down question sheet we started getting scripted droid answers to the questions... until we asked them questions from the sheet we'd kept private, at which point they face on their asses again.

It was comical to watch but at the same time it wasted so much of our time that in the end we got quite pissed off.

Anyway, in the end both myself and the other interviewer was taken off 'interview duties'. Suprise suprise two weeks later six turned up!! My manager just over-ruled our decision.

We than had to live with these idiots for 2 years until I left the company (then got re-employed but in a different team).

We all thought that he was on the take back then...

just a quick thought...

Are bungs a documented part of their CMM accredited processes or do they need to be reassessed?

"What is a bribe for us"

Is a bribe for us.

We shouldn't do it.

Much like the Japanese minimum age of consent is (IIRC) 14. Yet Gary Glitter popping over there for a bit of Asian Teen action would be arrested for paedophillia in the UK.

So what if we lose contracts? We don't lose the bribe either.

And what if "their way of doing business" was ritual cannibalism? Would that be OK?

If it's a bribe to use, WE don't do it.

Hopeless, but lessons wont be learnt.

My old form was one of the first to send work over to India. Biggest mistake we ever made. We all knew it was bad but the board saw a way to save a buck.

After just a short time a man days work was twice as much in India as it was to do in the UK. Projects slowed to a crawl, specifications were screwed up, consultation was endless and we had to send no end of them back to India as when we got them in front of a PC to do their thing, they just stared at it apologetically. Yes we got so 'into India' we were bringing them to the UK to do work. We kept reporting how bad it was yet they still kept turning up, something was afoot.

Most of the work has now been pulled back to the UK, and a lot of rental apartments in the city are now empty. Still the damage has been done, we didnt deliver one major piece of work in the whole 5 years or innovate anything. It was a shambles.

The latest? My Gf's boss is now saying that all the 'hot code' is now coming out of Vietnam.

Strewth, here we go again.

@TeeCee

Wipro claims the scheme was SEC approved.

People who dealt with WB IT might tell you this is pot and kettle stuff.