Indian business news site Business Standard published a story the other day with the following headline:
Amid GCC boom, Big Four in India are boosting hiring of ‘tech architects’
This should be good.
If you don’t know the GCC acronym, you certainly know the concept. GCCs, or Global Capability Centers, are the offshore warehouses where they stuff all the people who work cheaper than you (the average cost of a full-time equivalent at a GCC was $22,939 including salary and other overhead, we’ll cover that in a moment below). Except GCCs aren’t like the cramped back alley cube farms where scammers named “Patrick” attempt to rip off your grandma, many of the offices look a lot like yours. GCCs could be worth more than $110 billion by 2030.
Last year, Reuters reported that Big 4 accounting firms were going to spread their tentacles out from big cities in India — Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru, for example — to so-called “tier-two” cities because the big city operations are starting to cost too much:
The world’s major accounting firms are stepping up investments in new Indian facilities away from bigger cities as global demand for cheaper back office operations grows and smaller towns move up the economic value chain.
…
Business service exports have become a critical part of India’s economy but the sector has been hit by a slowdown in global demand for software and challenges in big urban centres such as rising costs, high attrition and slow progress in getting workers to return to the office after the pandemic.
Said EY in its Future of GCCs in India – a vision 2030 report published June 2023 [PDF]:
In India, the focus cities for GCC set-ups continue to remain Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi NCR. However, tier-II cities such as , Jaipur, Vadodara, Kochi, Chandigarh are becoming popular for new set-ups owing to its improving infrastructure, favorable state policies, and lower real estate and talent costs. The total number of new GCC set-ups every year can jump up to 115 by the year 2030.
In that report, EY said the cost per full-time equivalent at the approximately 1,600 GCCs currently in operation in India has increased by 27% from 2019 to 2023. That figure is expected to increase by 30% from 2023 to 2030. 85% of that is salary, the rest is travel and other overhead. EY estimates the current headcount of 1.9 million at Indian GCCs will surge to 4.5 million by 2030. For the moment, GCCs account for only about one percent of India’s GDP.
But let’s discuss the matter at hand: the latest on Big 4 firms hungry for tech architects in India:
Deloitte India has over 500 such architects and the company says there is a growing demand for them across the consultancy’s clients.
“With the overall demand for architects across our clients growing at 20-25 per cent, Deloitte India has robust hiring plans in place to meet these growing demands,” said Deepti Sagar, chief people and experience officer at Deloitte India.
Purushothaman KG, partner and head – Technology Transformation & Telecom, KPMG in India said that they have also increased the hiring of these architects. “Our hiring strategy has been domain specific and platform specific,” he said.
Ranjan Biswas, EY India leader for Technology, Media and Entertainment, Telecom (TMT) and South region, said, “Our proposition for GCCs is a strong combination of business consultants and technology architects who work together to solve their business problems and, in many cases, lead their end-to-end transformation needs.”
EY India’s team servicing GCCs, including tech architects, has grown almost three times to about 11,000 people in 2023-24 from 4,200 in 2020-21.
The EY report mentioned in this article is embedded below for anyone who would like to read it.
Amid GCC boom, Big Four in India are boosting hiring of ‘tech architects’ [Business Standard (India)]
We just assumed that we had heard the last of the cubicle-side chats with KPMG’s leadership but lo and behold, this morning we find yet another convo with KPMG’s three amigos – T Fly, JVeih, Keizer Soze – sitting in the mailbag. 
I understand that it’s a global economy, and the most important thing in business is maximizing profits, but whenever I read a story like this, it still feels icky and unpatriotic.
Also, anyone who says that the quality delivered by offshore service centers is comparable to that of U.S. workers is either stupid or full of shit. The term “you get what you pay for” is a fundamental truth in this world, and it applies in all circumstances, regardless of the country. There are all sorts of costs included in the firms’ cost-saving strategies which they either don’t contemplate, or purposely don’t include in their cost-benefit analysis. This shit is going to come back to bite the firms in the long run, not that any of the current partners will care because they’ll be long gone.
Not true. Quality is 10 times better overseas!
Sorry, you either do it or your competitor will do. It’s like a BYD, it’s going to sell regardless whether you ban it here in the US or you don’t!
Is this sarcasm?
Hard to tell…if this is serious, it sounds like you’re one of those senior managers that sucks at training anyone and the only people that tolerate working for you are the ones that have to choose between absolute poverty or hearing you scream at them for failing to meet expectations after the weekly status call where you shifted deadlines without telling anyone but yourself.
It has been going on for decades and is only increasing.
What’s that noise – it’s like a giant sucking sound….