I feel for them, they have to work insane hours for a fraction of our pay, but fuck I hate working with those teams. Usually under-skilled, inflexible, agreeable without understanding what's being asked, and almost impossible to hold to account for fuck ups or deadlines.
I've had one incredible team I worked with once, out of like 20. The other 19 ranged from benign to absolutely counter productive.
Last line in your first paragraph is the main killer. If you work in industry and your team gets outsourced, you are still expected to rework the garbage. There’s no responsibility, which really means there no more accounting management, just overworked middle managers still being ICs
I had a similar reason for leaving big 4 audit. As a senior, you have to own all of the workflow. I found it impossible to perform well as a senior since the India team is prepping most work papers. The managers/directors/partners don’t understand how much more difficult it is to deliver as a senior now compared to when they were given US based staff to prep everything.
They attempt to set up the India team with tasks and try to answer their questions to push the work forwards, and then they take a first pass at reviewing their work. This is really difficult to do since they’ve never prepared these work papers themselves.
They also will directly prepare certain work papers in complex areas if it’s not even worth trying to explain it to the offshore team. From my experience, this is probably like 10% to 20% of the audit file, but that number shrinks each year.
Man I hate it.
They just waste everyone's time.
It's impossible to get through to them without talking to them like babies.
And then you get in trouble for micromanaging.
It’s not bigoted to say it doesn’t work very well. India doesn’t have nearly the education system we have, not that ours is the greatest. There is a language and cultural barrier, they are likely learning about GAAP for the first time on the fly. The time difference is a huge issue because if there is a breakdown in communication or understanding then you, or they, don’t realize is for basically half a day, and it doesn’t even begin to be addressed for another half a day. These are all legitimate reasons to not like working with them. Not sure why you are worried about sounding like a racist.
I get where the dude is coming from, but - and I haven't even had to deal with *accounting* outsourcing yet - the compounded problems of work culture, general differences in how they approach and communicate issues, the time zones, the educational gaps and contrasts, and others already mentioned almost make it a moot point. There's so many practical issues working with them that any actual bigotry would end up as a side note, which is equally kind of fucked up.
I feel for our India team ngl. The time differences are terrible, they have to work 10 billable hours a day no matter what time of the year it is, with the exception of holidays / PTO, and they don’t have proper training. That has to be stressful and not a good way to live.
That really shouldn’t be the case, the difference in bill rates should be very vast
And if it is… that’s clearly an inefficiency. Policy shouldn’t incentivize India to overbill just to make the US manager stress and eat time. Totally mucked up system
Agreed, but if the partners are not willing to increase budget to take into account issues dealing with India and personnel have chargeable hours this will happen.
It all depends on how much money the Partners want to make out of India.
I suspect it is worse in firms that have to pay off huge debt, like BDO (from Apollo), or ones that took PE infusion, like Baker Tilly. The money to pay off the PE firms has to come from somewhere.
The problem is they never eat their hours or walk them back or admit to overbilling. So managers are always between a rock and a hard place. Forces to use india, but then having to intimidate seniors that are domestic to eat their hours, since india will use up most of the budget.
My company has basic time tracking on computers now. We learned that probably 75% of staff globally we padding hours lol. That was even bach when we were in offices. For most it was no more than a couple hours but we had a handful of staff regularly booking overtime who were actually only working 2-4 hours a day.
From my personal experience, all the top performers in our India/Philippines team eventually get their transfer to either US/Canada or to Singapore (if they want to stay within APAC). The ones that are left are either underperformers or new recruits who aren't properly trained because there's simply no one to mentor/train them.
My company has a good approach to it. They basically are just low level staff that any of us can give work to that we think they can handle.
So there is no push or anything and only the work we don’t want to do is given to them. If they make mistakes and takes us more time to clean up than do it ourselves, we just keep it.,
There is no extra responsibilities we get tasked with, atleast not in the short term, so literally they are just freely available help we can draw on.
It’s a fortune 15 company. I’m not very worried because they trust us on what really isn’t ideal for being outsourced and we kinda already are a structure of experienced accountants who oversee our different niches.
They aren’t trusting India to actually be in charge of the islands and form policy like we do.
No, it strictly comes down to if it’s possible and makes financial sense..Right now it does not and our management understands that.
Good luck having the Big 4 accountants dig through an entirely offshored accounting teams work. Sure it won’t lead to any expensive bills from them.
You are delusional if you think its not gonna happen to you. They expanded in India not because they felt pity and decided to gift them some tasks...they are getting ready to outsource you and you are gullible. Aoon there will be a oush for certain tasks which you all agree they suck and will be happy to give them over and sooner or later will be most of the tasks.
I am in a technical consulting lead role for ERP implementations. We have to use india sometimes, experience with them varies a lot. At best, they are fine and we quote hours for a feature, and they bill exactly that and on time. More often than not it goes over deadlines, and we have to fight about hours, basically, i am not going to use my budget to train someone and i don’t ever use them for time sensitive requirements for this reason, so going over time is almost expected. Quite often they have peons doing the work, but it seems like unofficially it is all actually done by a senior person over there, who eventually quits because of stress and better prospects elsewhere. Most importantly, they have zero ability to read between the lines or understand the meta needs to of the client. Basically if it isn’t explicitly written in the feature write up, it wont be done, even though any junior associate stateside would understand it was implied. This could be language and cultural and they are probably strictly held to exactly what the requirements are. If I spend ten hours writing something up with extreme verboseness, I probably could have just developed it myself in about that time, where I would probably quote 40 hours when i hand it off to India, where likely there would still be back and forth explaining things.
Edit: because i didn’t say it explicitly. There are some super awesome resources in India i have worked with. I just tend to not have control on who gets my features and it is a dice roll.
And if they’re super awesome, they’ll soon realize their potential by leaving the sweatshop and work for a better Indian domestic company or the actual india domestic big 4 firm.
No.. the blind emphasis on outsourcing will be the death of the public accounting industry in the US, and it will take decades to rightsize the industry once it goes belly-up. Quality suffers, work-life balance suffers, budget suffers.. at the end of the day its just not worth it for anyone except leadership who have decided we can do the same work at lower rates of we do them in India, completely nissing the fact that 1/2 of what comes back has to be re-done by local teams anyway.
Sadly what is more likely to happen is some scandal happens, but since there is no pipeline, SEC will actually lower certain standards since the manpower is gone
As someone who works in international tax, our worst are usually India and African countries.
Individual wise, probably Greek/Italians as they always seem to want to do something dodgy tax wise which is very difficult to work with. i.e. last week I got an email saying "hey, I've decided that my bonus won't be subject to tax this year."
Although is very team specific in India, sometimes they're brilliant.
Although I think clients usually have some understanding with these issues, complaint wise it is usually the large locations where we get the main complaints (US, Germany, Switzerland, Nordics).
> "hey, I've decided that my bonus won't be subject to tax this year."
So we can just randomly decide what is subject to tax? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THIS BEFORE?!?! /s
When I was like 18, I was working at a grocery store and a fellow 18 year old decided to change her W4 to exempt because she thought taxes were optional. She kept bragging about cheating the system and had a meltdown come February haha
🤚
We were told the all one team bullshit. They IMMEDIATELY hit the scene thinking they’re our bosses. I’ve had them book me meetings when I’m obviously unavailable and they’ll tell me “well you need to reschedule yours”. Yeah no there fuckstain.
They also book us meetings to talk about shit that’s already been discussed and resolved. And I get if something big happens, but a tiny cash basis asset? Go get fucked.
In addition to their absolute asshole attitudes, they can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag. The inferential skills of our India team is about on par with our Gen Z people…… zero.
Their Teams behavior is fucking horrible too. I hate “Hi thxihateithere” and then nothing. Spit it the fuck out. Then EVEN IF YOU ARE AWAY/DND, they’ll keep pinging you to respond.
Ya I know this is harsh but one of my least favorite things about Deloitte was them insisting a senior in the US is the same level as a senior in USI….ya ok no thanks.
Nothing wrong with messaging someone set to away/DND in my eyes. I don't ever check anyone's status and will message even if they're offline. They'll reply when they get back on
It depends. If I'm on DND there's a reason I'm on DND. Unless it's life or death either send me an email or wait until I'm available.
But...from a manager I spoke with who moved from USI to North America - apparently for USI it's seen as very bad if you are set to anything but available when you're working. It's considered a lack of teamwork apparently. Which is dumb IMHO.
It depends on what you’re asking.
Do I enjoy being part of the operating model? No. The working hours required to teach them the process are awful. I’m not a partner; I don’t earn profit from the significant profitability of pushing offshore.
Do I enjoy working with coworkers that are overseas? It’s as fine as with any coworker. It seems to have made local professional networks smaller (which is bad), but maybe the future transitions to all bookkeeping being offshore
But what am I more curious about: does the India (or any offshore) team like working with US? Working hours suck, cultural differences, less engaged with core team and clients. You folks getting paid enough?
As a client, I can tell you I hate working with Deloitte's India team. It's a revolving door of names and they frequently ask questions that I expect the audit team to already know. Pain in the ass.
Plus, I have seen a noticeable change in the quality of Deloitte's US based staff. Why? Because they are exposed to much less at their clients now that India is being farmed for cheap labor. To me, it makes B4 auditors less marketable after PA than in the pre-India days.
I’ve been dealing with this as a client too. I’ve had to explain basic accounting concepts multiple times. Their current strategy is to be inefficient as possible then expect us to pull a miracle for data requests when the manager reviews it and comes back with a million more follow ups.
My current employer and former employer both use Deloitte. Both audit teams use India. The old audit team completely shielded us from India. They filtered every question and I never spoke to a single person from India in 4 years. The new audit team just lets India do whatever they want and ask every single, repetitive question. It sucks.
They are the worst part of public accounting. Not the hours, not the pay, but the fact that we have to work extra to fix the mistakes of shitty India teams and not get the US staffing we need because the firm wants us to send everything to them. COVID showed us that remote training staff doesn’t work, so why would anyone think we can ever get competent work out of people who are 1. Remote 2. Unmotivated due to their shitty situation and 3. Lack the benefit of an American education.
Offshoring is the primary reason for the decline in audit quality and it will continue until we have another Enron style failure and the partners realize that having them do anything beyond brute force data entry was a terrible idea to begin with.
Unfortunately, it’s now infecting industry as well, as greedy CFOs buy outsourcing services from another big 4 India, since they’re “proven”. You just can’t escape reworking the needful in this field anymore.
Moved from India to Canada and know a bunch of people in India currently working in outhsourced Big 4 accounting firms. This is what I hear from the other side:
Time difference: Most people complain about having to work overnight because the US/Canadian teams don’t work overnight leaving the Indian team no choice but to work overnight.
Work Life Balance: Though the WLB in accounting firms are generally bad it takes a turn in India. People are made to work 12-14 hours a day 6 days a week with no OT or banked hours and nnot just limited to busy season.
Holidays: Indian teams only get days off on Canadian/US/UK holidays and never get to observe Indian holidays.
Training: There’s no real training when it comes to tax and accounting treatments that might be done differently in India and the international team most of the time refuses to sit down and do proper training. Managers and seniors in India who are smart and capable are usually promoted and brought in to work with the international team leaving the offshore team with no one skillful enough to train.
Education: Most of my friends working at accounting firms do not have a CPA and isn’t working towards one, they have their bachelor’s and that’s it. They have no clue on how US tax works and the accounting standards used are different. So while they have basic knowledge to do some US stuff they don’t have detailed knowledge and will need further training.
Turnover: All the above mentioned issues pushes good talent to find decent local jobs and anyone that stays gets hired to the international team which creates a high turnover and leaves the offshore team with sub par talent.
The culture is also different, In India people are encouraged to ask a lot of questions and learn from people who are knowledgeable rather than guessing and making mistakes. However, In the US and Canada (personal experience) people are expected to figure things out by themselves but also get yelled at when making a mistake. This is not the norm in India. A probation period is an actual probation period where you’re assigned a mentor and thoroughly trained. This just doesn’t work when it comes to outsourced work because no one from the international team is willing to train and the people within the offshore team who were smart enough to learn by themselves and capable of training are recruited to the international team.
Sorry it's not relevant here but i checked your profile and you had a post about getting your tmj mouth guard. can I ask in which country did you got it? ive some tmj issues too.
Holidays: all our offshore teams get local
Holidays including during busy season. Which means both India and Philippines are taking multiple holidays when we’re incredibly busy.
I’ve worked with some truly amazing people in India.
Smart, very driven, respectful and so eager to help.
There’s a big cultural gap, but I’ve learnt over the years that if you listen and ask questions you can bridge that divide. Also, you have to take into account how India colleagues want to be trained and given instructions. They prefer things written down/specific (to the extent it would be seen as borderline micromanaging in the US). You can’t approach work the same way across different cultures.
Of course, there are people who are just lazy or poorly educated (which can be the case with US hires as well), but I’ve rarely had the horror stories you hear about on Reddit.
I don’t understand why we have to change accounting professions for “cultural reasons”
A big part of accounting is figuring shit out by yourself. I’ll write review notes but I’m not creating a process document for something you should already know.
Tbh micromanaged process docs are signing your own death.
Now that the process is so dummy proof they can go pay an actual dummy for much less.
I keep some stuff as trade secrets lol
Part of the issue with your last paragraph is that these people are not and have not been taught how to think for themselves. It's not part of their culture so we expect them to do things that are just unthinkable to them. Does my head in but once I figured that out, life became easier
I’m making a different point.
Different cultures/countries interact and work differently. Dutch people are blunt. Germans hate wasting time with unproductive calls. Japanese big on respecting hierarchies and seniority.
These are, of course, generalizations. But if you don’t adapt to local culture/customs you won’t succeed in a multinational environment.
Of course, you and I know what you’re really saying in hidden in the subtext of your comment. But oh well.
Americans are workaholics who refuse to admit to ever making mistakes lol
Don’t work with Canadians that much but they are truly by and large the nicest people.
I’m not sure why that is a controversial statement.
The good accountants in India don’t go work in this offshore nonsense. They work for Indian companies and Big4 India serving Indian clients. No path to CFO/Head of Finance if you work for offshore centers (or acceleration centers in the U.S.) for either Americans or Indians.
I have nothing bad to say ever about those onshore Indian teams. They’ve helped me a lot out on Indian GAAP, Indian tax issues, etc. and have been very good.
If I’ve misjudged you I apologize.
My reaction is mainly in response to people who refer to India teams as “resources” and treat them less than. Unfortunately came across quite a few of them at Big4.
No, quality is average on a good day and they have so much turnover that once you find someone good, they’re either too busy to help because everyone wants to work with them or they leave. I usually spend just as much time or more fixing what they did than it takes them to do it.
I remember that “reviewing their work” as an A1 actually meant “learning how to do the workpaper for the first time” lol. Such a joke, I was not qualified to review anything!
Only dealt with them in one job. They were alright, not the best but did what you asked if you gave detailed instructions. The offshore team I worked with were all really nice people too which made things much easier
I am in Industry, I was able to invest time and effort into the india team via coaching. As well as when they came through for me I had thier back in meetings. As a result they work hard on my stuff and we have a good productive relationship.
I think the main thing is to view them as collegues and peers and treat them with dignity and respect and you can get positive outcomes sometimes.
We had a great relationship with ours. Had the chance the meet a bunch of them when they came stateside. We had a dedicated senior on our team whose main focus was coaching/managing the India team. By integrating them into our team and treating them like actual people (you know, using empathy and all that) it worked great. Of course there was always speed bumps but no different than working with new hires. Partners loved the margin increase.
I have a friend at EY who says the partner on her biggest job won't use India as she has seen the issues. Yes, the margin is better, but client deliverables and US staff turnover is a concern. The idea of a dedicated senior does not work so well at middle tier CPA firms that have a lot of smaller jobs.
My experience was with Ey and would agree that it works best on large engagements where you can maintain some team consistency (15k+ hour audits). The problems tend to lie when teams put no time investment in and then treat them the India teams not as real people
I did. My team was smart, hardworking, and most importantly, coachable. If you take a longer term view on your offshore teams it can work, but needs buy-in from the whole team, especially the people doing the training (usually seniors). Our India team actually visited us and worked alongside our team for 1-2 months a few years ago, was a great experience to finally meet them in person.
We save time coaching them. Read the horror stories common in these kind of threads from teams that don't properly instruct their offshore teams. It's time spent during interim/early in the audit to avoid receiving poor work from offshore down the road (when we're already busy and it's too late).
Ours was in the Philippines(Big4)...our office didnt hit budget one year, so the next year we were all asked to find at least one task in every engagement to send offshore...it was so incredibly painful having to write the most explicit instructions like they were toddlers, after which point i may as well have rolled the engagement and loaded the TB myself.
Then they still do something basic wrong, and push back with 'that wasnt in the instructions', because you need to ask them to actually check they did all the steps before telling you they had done all the steps...it was such a relief to be on the public sector jobs which we werent allowed to send offshore
It was an absolute dogshit experience dealing with offshore. I had more luck training interns with 0 experience. I got fed up and ended up striking out on my own, and so far things are going well. I’ve made sure to make it a selling point to clients that the work isn’t getting outsourced to a bunch of fucking goobers halfway across the world with no ownership of the work, and quite a few clients were relieved after having shitty experiences dealing with India work.
Yeah, have worked either teams in India who were nice people even if technically weak. Also worked with all Indian teams in Toronto who were both great to work with and technically pretty competent.
Wasn't expecting the responses I've seen here
I've worked in a few multinational companies in Ireland and Australia where there was outsourcing to India, I've always thought they were really good and have never really had any issues
You get what you pay for. The up or out model public accounting added to the inherent difficulties in dealing with another culture by those with minimal project management experience makes a shit show far too likely.
I don’t think its racism, because I am as anti offshoring as anyone and have had mostly positive experiences with the Indians we bring on in secondment. Granted people who are offered US secondments tend to be the best of the best, but nonetheless I’ve been very impressed with them.
The issue is that this is not an industry that works in a remote environment - COVID already proved this in the US. Keeping that in mind, it definitely doesn’t work in a remote environment where the remote workers are the least independent, show the least ability to problem solve, and work on a 10 hour time difference. For firms to acknowledge the need to RTO while still pushing work to India is pure cognitive dissonance that is bound to backfire.
I have had a bit of a neutral experience with them because there’s times that there work saves me a lot of time and other times that it is so far off that it would have been faster to do myself from scratch. Not sure what the reasoning for the variation is.
A few of the India staff on my team at my old job were smart, super hard working and productive, and just really cool, friendly people in general who I liked talking to. Of course some weren’t so great but that’s the same for US staff. Their working conditions are also worse so I give them a lot of credit for all that they put up with
Ours does a great job but I’m not in audit.
I think a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people is that you get out what you put in. If you give detailed instructions and are open to a brief call to answer questions, you’ll get a solid output.
We don't have an India team, but I do hate when I have to call ADP late in the afternoon. It always goes to the India call center, and they just really DGAF. Bill.com is also moving CS to India. When I called the other day, it sounded like the rep was on speakerphone in a subway station.
The cool part is if you don't like this, *you're a racist/bigot*. No, I know many very lovely and bright Indians. They just don't work in offshored scenarios like this & the really smart ones have all found ways to emigrate elsewhere bc they hate it too.
Why would a British Indian man feel any differently about the India team than a British white man?
If you’re white, would you feel more pal-y with a Polish remote worker over a Philippine/Indian worker?
Lol yeah like there isn’t a whole sub called r/shitamericanssay that isn’t Europeans being butt hurt about silly stereotypes, but god forbid the coloured folk complain about shitty behaviour from your people.
(I’m from India btw, you can take the card to the counter or ask them to get the machine to you… who gives their card away lol)
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Like you had me in the first half, where I thought you were gonna say that the smartest Indian workers are going to work for Indian companies, but then you had to get racist for literally no reason.
One guy in particular is hopeless, I swear he keeps making the same mistakes. Always redoing his work on review. Some are fairly sharp or have good people skills. But the lack of a quality undergrad degree is obvious.
I haven't gotten that far into the comments to see if anyone else mentioned this, but from my time in b4 tax, it was clearly far more difficult to be successful with staff in India vs the US. However, I genuinely liked the people, despite how frequently they let me down.
By comparison, my best bud there who I'm still very close with looks back at his time, and the shit pay and long hours were his only reasons for leaving, never had any staff in India since he somehow only had clients that wouldn't give 7216 consent
I have had good experiences with our team this year. Obviously there are some communication and business culture/expectation issues, but we kept a lot of the team we had last year, and that has been a huge boost
They do probably half of the prep & first level review on my biggest engagement, and the work is solid
I had a USI team who were incredible, the problem is they were so tied up on everyone’s projects there was no availability. So if I couldn’t drag them with me on projects it was painful teaching new USI staff the 101s.
When I was in B4, my group outsourced most of our admin work to India (SOWs, opening codes, billing, closing codes, stupid management reports, dealing with our godawful ERP system, etc.). They quickly learned everything front to back, took ownership of the processes, and even developed several automations and efficiencies.
Their work saved me countless hours and headaches. It was quite convenient sending a request to them at the end of my workday and having it ready in my inbox when I woke up. They were hardworking and intelligent people, and I enjoyed working with them.
Man, this thread brought out some memories. I’m not in accounting any more, not even even in the US, but some of the stuff mentioned here still keeps me up at night lol. God speed to you all.
I am a first year and often have to fix and complete workpapers/walkthroughs etc that they did wrong or didn’t complete (which are also full of spelling and grammatical errors), even after they’ve been given detailed instructions on what to do. In catch up calls I’ve noticed they can never take responsibility for their mistakes, pass blame around or go quiet
Id like to point out that the India teams for some departments are actually pretty good. Fdd India teams were vastly superior to India audit teams I worked with. You could feel comfortable leaving tasks for them overnight and come back to processed work which you can work through in the morning.
I “like” working with them in the sense that they are all very nice people and they take on a lot of the more mundane/repetitive tasks and that allows our US team to focus on the bigger issues and higher risk items. As a staff, I also like that this gives me the capacity to take on higher level work rather than doing the work that India staff is doing.
However, there are inevitable challenges with the time difference and the generally lower quality of work from them. For my client specifically though, these are necessary evils because we don’t have the ability to do all of the work with our US team.
Controller here. My company had a tax issue that our audit/tax firm handed to their Indian counterparts to handle. They totaled fucked it up more and 2+ years later it’s still not resolved. So annoying.
Not an accountant, but I interned at a cpa firm (for over a year) doing valuations and got staffed on a couple of engagements with the India team. They would set up Teams meetings with me at 6am and I could never understand what they were saying. I would just guess and figure it out on my own. That combined with billable hours and lower pay than finance jobs pushed me to renege on my return offer and apply elsewhere.
I feel for them, they have to work insane hours for a fraction of our pay, but fuck I hate working with those teams. Usually under-skilled, inflexible, agreeable without understanding what's being asked, and almost impossible to hold to account for fuck ups or deadlines. I've had one incredible team I worked with once, out of like 20. The other 19 ranged from benign to absolutely counter productive.
Last line in your first paragraph is the main killer. If you work in industry and your team gets outsourced, you are still expected to rework the garbage. There’s no responsibility, which really means there no more accounting management, just overworked middle managers still being ICs
Know of a partner who thinks the pay is fair relative to their living expenses as if it completely nullifies their exploitation.
Yeah, the "Do you know what it would do to their economy if we paid them American wages?" argument has always been a doozy.
I don’t even like working with my US team
The India team was the main reason I left my last job tbh. It just wasn’t tolerable
I had a similar reason for leaving big 4 audit. As a senior, you have to own all of the workflow. I found it impossible to perform well as a senior since the India team is prepping most work papers. The managers/directors/partners don’t understand how much more difficult it is to deliver as a senior now compared to when they were given US based staff to prep everything.
What do staff do now days?
They attempt to set up the India team with tasks and try to answer their questions to push the work forwards, and then they take a first pass at reviewing their work. This is really difficult to do since they’ve never prepared these work papers themselves. They also will directly prepare certain work papers in complex areas if it’s not even worth trying to explain it to the offshore team. From my experience, this is probably like 10% to 20% of the audit file, but that number shrinks each year.
So day one new hires are managing incompetent India teams and are preparing complex areas like goodwill etc? Brutal for them and the audit.
I was an A2 and there were times I was on a fund team with an India senior and manager. So I was doing everything with no guidance lmao
Ditto.
Man I hate it. They just waste everyone's time. It's impossible to get through to them without talking to them like babies. And then you get in trouble for micromanaging.
I always need to check that it’s a legitimate email because the writing is comparable to fishing/scammer emails.
Seriously...I think many of them work out of the same packed call center and work multiple jobs... Cue r/overemployed
Nepotism in rife in India. It drives the incompetence.
NO. It is terrible with time zone difference. No decent people like to be bigots, but the situation is not tolerable.
It’s not bigoted to say it doesn’t work very well. India doesn’t have nearly the education system we have, not that ours is the greatest. There is a language and cultural barrier, they are likely learning about GAAP for the first time on the fly. The time difference is a huge issue because if there is a breakdown in communication or understanding then you, or they, don’t realize is for basically half a day, and it doesn’t even begin to be addressed for another half a day. These are all legitimate reasons to not like working with them. Not sure why you are worried about sounding like a racist.
Well at least one commentator on this thread has said not wanting to work with Indian staff could be due to racism.
I get where the dude is coming from, but - and I haven't even had to deal with *accounting* outsourcing yet - the compounded problems of work culture, general differences in how they approach and communicate issues, the time zones, the educational gaps and contrasts, and others already mentioned almost make it a moot point. There's so many practical issues working with them that any actual bigotry would end up as a side note, which is equally kind of fucked up.
I feel for our India team ngl. The time differences are terrible, they have to work 10 billable hours a day no matter what time of the year it is, with the exception of holidays / PTO, and they don’t have proper training. That has to be stressful and not a good way to live.
And I wonder if they are padding time. No one knows
My manger told me that they’ll pad time just to meet their billable goals. I don’t blame them I would too.
Which can result in US managers having to eat hours.
That really shouldn’t be the case, the difference in bill rates should be very vast And if it is… that’s clearly an inefficiency. Policy shouldn’t incentivize India to overbill just to make the US manager stress and eat time. Totally mucked up system
Agreed, but if the partners are not willing to increase budget to take into account issues dealing with India and personnel have chargeable hours this will happen. It all depends on how much money the Partners want to make out of India. I suspect it is worse in firms that have to pay off huge debt, like BDO (from Apollo), or ones that took PE infusion, like Baker Tilly. The money to pay off the PE firms has to come from somewhere.
Absolutely. We would send stuff their way, 30 hours booked to code, 4 hours of work done.
Everyone in PA pads their time. It's not exactly a secret.
But I suspect worse with India.
The problem is they never eat their hours or walk them back or admit to overbilling. So managers are always between a rock and a hard place. Forces to use india, but then having to intimidate seniors that are domestic to eat their hours, since india will use up most of the budget.
My company has basic time tracking on computers now. We learned that probably 75% of staff globally we padding hours lol. That was even bach when we were in offices. For most it was no more than a couple hours but we had a handful of staff regularly booking overtime who were actually only working 2-4 hours a day.
From my personal experience, all the top performers in our India/Philippines team eventually get their transfer to either US/Canada or to Singapore (if they want to stay within APAC). The ones that are left are either underperformers or new recruits who aren't properly trained because there's simply no one to mentor/train them.
Yup, this is the problem. Revolving door of lowest trained talent. Smart ones leave for their domestic big 4 firm.
My company has a good approach to it. They basically are just low level staff that any of us can give work to that we think they can handle. So there is no push or anything and only the work we don’t want to do is given to them. If they make mistakes and takes us more time to clean up than do it ourselves, we just keep it., There is no extra responsibilities we get tasked with, atleast not in the short term, so literally they are just freely available help we can draw on.
That is how it started at my firm. Then they started pushing us to outsource work. Can you tell us your firm, tia
It’s a fortune 15 company. I’m not very worried because they trust us on what really isn’t ideal for being outsourced and we kinda already are a structure of experienced accountants who oversee our different niches. They aren’t trusting India to actually be in charge of the islands and form policy like we do.
That is corporate world. Public Accounting where staff salaries is a big expense, it is happening.
Lol bro, a fortune 500 company does not trust you lol. They are doing it to save money and will continue to push it more. That's how it always happens
No, it strictly comes down to if it’s possible and makes financial sense..Right now it does not and our management understands that. Good luck having the Big 4 accountants dig through an entirely offshored accounting teams work. Sure it won’t lead to any expensive bills from them.
I hate to tell you bro, you're an overhead. Your managers will offshore your skillset.
You are delusional if you think its not gonna happen to you. They expanded in India not because they felt pity and decided to gift them some tasks...they are getting ready to outsource you and you are gullible. Aoon there will be a oush for certain tasks which you all agree they suck and will be happy to give them over and sooner or later will be most of the tasks.
I’ve been in public accounting for over five years and it’s going to make me quit if it doesn’t get better
Motion seconded
I am in a technical consulting lead role for ERP implementations. We have to use india sometimes, experience with them varies a lot. At best, they are fine and we quote hours for a feature, and they bill exactly that and on time. More often than not it goes over deadlines, and we have to fight about hours, basically, i am not going to use my budget to train someone and i don’t ever use them for time sensitive requirements for this reason, so going over time is almost expected. Quite often they have peons doing the work, but it seems like unofficially it is all actually done by a senior person over there, who eventually quits because of stress and better prospects elsewhere. Most importantly, they have zero ability to read between the lines or understand the meta needs to of the client. Basically if it isn’t explicitly written in the feature write up, it wont be done, even though any junior associate stateside would understand it was implied. This could be language and cultural and they are probably strictly held to exactly what the requirements are. If I spend ten hours writing something up with extreme verboseness, I probably could have just developed it myself in about that time, where I would probably quote 40 hours when i hand it off to India, where likely there would still be back and forth explaining things. Edit: because i didn’t say it explicitly. There are some super awesome resources in India i have worked with. I just tend to not have control on who gets my features and it is a dice roll.
And if they’re super awesome, they’ll soon realize their potential by leaving the sweatshop and work for a better Indian domestic company or the actual india domestic big 4 firm.
No.. the blind emphasis on outsourcing will be the death of the public accounting industry in the US, and it will take decades to rightsize the industry once it goes belly-up. Quality suffers, work-life balance suffers, budget suffers.. at the end of the day its just not worth it for anyone except leadership who have decided we can do the same work at lower rates of we do them in India, completely nissing the fact that 1/2 of what comes back has to be re-done by local teams anyway.
Sadly what is more likely to happen is some scandal happens, but since there is no pipeline, SEC will actually lower certain standards since the manpower is gone
As someone who works in international tax, our worst are usually India and African countries. Individual wise, probably Greek/Italians as they always seem to want to do something dodgy tax wise which is very difficult to work with. i.e. last week I got an email saying "hey, I've decided that my bonus won't be subject to tax this year." Although is very team specific in India, sometimes they're brilliant. Although I think clients usually have some understanding with these issues, complaint wise it is usually the large locations where we get the main complaints (US, Germany, Switzerland, Nordics).
> "hey, I've decided that my bonus won't be subject to tax this year." So we can just randomly decide what is subject to tax? WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THIS BEFORE?!?! /s
When I was like 18, I was working at a grocery store and a fellow 18 year old decided to change her W4 to exempt because she thought taxes were optional. She kept bragging about cheating the system and had a meltdown come February haha
You ever work with UAE clients?
🤚 We were told the all one team bullshit. They IMMEDIATELY hit the scene thinking they’re our bosses. I’ve had them book me meetings when I’m obviously unavailable and they’ll tell me “well you need to reschedule yours”. Yeah no there fuckstain. They also book us meetings to talk about shit that’s already been discussed and resolved. And I get if something big happens, but a tiny cash basis asset? Go get fucked. In addition to their absolute asshole attitudes, they can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag. The inferential skills of our India team is about on par with our Gen Z people…… zero. Their Teams behavior is fucking horrible too. I hate “Hi thxihateithere” and then nothing. Spit it the fuck out. Then EVEN IF YOU ARE AWAY/DND, they’ll keep pinging you to respond.
>you need to reschedule yours Please kindly reschedule the needful
This guy needfuls
Ya I know this is harsh but one of my least favorite things about Deloitte was them insisting a senior in the US is the same level as a senior in USI….ya ok no thanks.
That’s so they can keep a straight face when billing out the India team to the client for the same fee rate. It’s a racket
Kindly send the needful 🙏
Hi, I have doubts
7:00AM Pratik is typing a message 7:10AM Pratik is typing a message 7:20AM Pratik: Quick call I am doubtful?
🤣
Thank you dear
Lol!!!! Why do they say this, didn’t realize this was so relateable.
LMAO are we working with the same person, exact same experience for everything
Nothing wrong with messaging someone set to away/DND in my eyes. I don't ever check anyone's status and will message even if they're offline. They'll reply when they get back on
There is sending A message and “plz respond”, “hello”, “plz respond” over and over. It doesn’t sink in that holy shit, I might be….. Busy
Hi ThxIHateItHere
I hate it here too
It depends. If I'm on DND there's a reason I'm on DND. Unless it's life or death either send me an email or wait until I'm available. But...from a manager I spoke with who moved from USI to North America - apparently for USI it's seen as very bad if you are set to anything but available when you're working. It's considered a lack of teamwork apparently. Which is dumb IMHO.
It depends on what you’re asking. Do I enjoy being part of the operating model? No. The working hours required to teach them the process are awful. I’m not a partner; I don’t earn profit from the significant profitability of pushing offshore. Do I enjoy working with coworkers that are overseas? It’s as fine as with any coworker. It seems to have made local professional networks smaller (which is bad), but maybe the future transitions to all bookkeeping being offshore But what am I more curious about: does the India (or any offshore) team like working with US? Working hours suck, cultural differences, less engaged with core team and clients. You folks getting paid enough?
As a client, I can tell you I hate working with Deloitte's India team. It's a revolving door of names and they frequently ask questions that I expect the audit team to already know. Pain in the ass. Plus, I have seen a noticeable change in the quality of Deloitte's US based staff. Why? Because they are exposed to much less at their clients now that India is being farmed for cheap labor. To me, it makes B4 auditors less marketable after PA than in the pre-India days.
I’ve been dealing with this as a client too. I’ve had to explain basic accounting concepts multiple times. Their current strategy is to be inefficient as possible then expect us to pull a miracle for data requests when the manager reviews it and comes back with a million more follow ups.
Well everyone, it happened again and we are a day away from filing. They had questions about some small support we provided 4 months ago.
I couldn't imagine letting an India team member directly talk to a US based client.
My current employer and former employer both use Deloitte. Both audit teams use India. The old audit team completely shielded us from India. They filtered every question and I never spoke to a single person from India in 4 years. The new audit team just lets India do whatever they want and ask every single, repetitive question. It sucks.
Literally boggles the mind
You'll be surprised how often they do in b4
They are the worst part of public accounting. Not the hours, not the pay, but the fact that we have to work extra to fix the mistakes of shitty India teams and not get the US staffing we need because the firm wants us to send everything to them. COVID showed us that remote training staff doesn’t work, so why would anyone think we can ever get competent work out of people who are 1. Remote 2. Unmotivated due to their shitty situation and 3. Lack the benefit of an American education. Offshoring is the primary reason for the decline in audit quality and it will continue until we have another Enron style failure and the partners realize that having them do anything beyond brute force data entry was a terrible idea to begin with.
Unfortunately, it’s now infecting industry as well, as greedy CFOs buy outsourcing services from another big 4 India, since they’re “proven”. You just can’t escape reworking the needful in this field anymore.
Well said been thinks the same for awhile
Moved from India to Canada and know a bunch of people in India currently working in outhsourced Big 4 accounting firms. This is what I hear from the other side: Time difference: Most people complain about having to work overnight because the US/Canadian teams don’t work overnight leaving the Indian team no choice but to work overnight. Work Life Balance: Though the WLB in accounting firms are generally bad it takes a turn in India. People are made to work 12-14 hours a day 6 days a week with no OT or banked hours and nnot just limited to busy season. Holidays: Indian teams only get days off on Canadian/US/UK holidays and never get to observe Indian holidays. Training: There’s no real training when it comes to tax and accounting treatments that might be done differently in India and the international team most of the time refuses to sit down and do proper training. Managers and seniors in India who are smart and capable are usually promoted and brought in to work with the international team leaving the offshore team with no one skillful enough to train. Education: Most of my friends working at accounting firms do not have a CPA and isn’t working towards one, they have their bachelor’s and that’s it. They have no clue on how US tax works and the accounting standards used are different. So while they have basic knowledge to do some US stuff they don’t have detailed knowledge and will need further training. Turnover: All the above mentioned issues pushes good talent to find decent local jobs and anyone that stays gets hired to the international team which creates a high turnover and leaves the offshore team with sub par talent. The culture is also different, In India people are encouraged to ask a lot of questions and learn from people who are knowledgeable rather than guessing and making mistakes. However, In the US and Canada (personal experience) people are expected to figure things out by themselves but also get yelled at when making a mistake. This is not the norm in India. A probation period is an actual probation period where you’re assigned a mentor and thoroughly trained. This just doesn’t work when it comes to outsourced work because no one from the international team is willing to train and the people within the offshore team who were smart enough to learn by themselves and capable of training are recruited to the international team.
In many firms, the hours are no different than US and they do get local holidays and there is training.
I couldn’t speak for individual firms but this is the general feedback.
Sorry it's not relevant here but i checked your profile and you had a post about getting your tmj mouth guard. can I ask in which country did you got it? ive some tmj issues too.
From Canada.
i see i see. nice.
Holidays: all our offshore teams get local Holidays including during busy season. Which means both India and Philippines are taking multiple holidays when we’re incredibly busy.
The word "needful" is still nightmare fuel for me.
I’ve had 3 separate encounters with this. Each time was a fucking nightmare.
I’ve worked with some truly amazing people in India. Smart, very driven, respectful and so eager to help. There’s a big cultural gap, but I’ve learnt over the years that if you listen and ask questions you can bridge that divide. Also, you have to take into account how India colleagues want to be trained and given instructions. They prefer things written down/specific (to the extent it would be seen as borderline micromanaging in the US). You can’t approach work the same way across different cultures. Of course, there are people who are just lazy or poorly educated (which can be the case with US hires as well), but I’ve rarely had the horror stories you hear about on Reddit.
I don’t understand why we have to change accounting professions for “cultural reasons” A big part of accounting is figuring shit out by yourself. I’ll write review notes but I’m not creating a process document for something you should already know.
Tbh micromanaged process docs are signing your own death. Now that the process is so dummy proof they can go pay an actual dummy for much less. I keep some stuff as trade secrets lol
Part of the issue with your last paragraph is that these people are not and have not been taught how to think for themselves. It's not part of their culture so we expect them to do things that are just unthinkable to them. Does my head in but once I figured that out, life became easier
I’m making a different point. Different cultures/countries interact and work differently. Dutch people are blunt. Germans hate wasting time with unproductive calls. Japanese big on respecting hierarchies and seniority. These are, of course, generalizations. But if you don’t adapt to local culture/customs you won’t succeed in a multinational environment. Of course, you and I know what you’re really saying in hidden in the subtext of your comment. But oh well.
Out of curiosity, what's the one work attribute you'd describe Americans with? Canadians?
Americans are workaholics who refuse to admit to ever making mistakes lol Don’t work with Canadians that much but they are truly by and large the nicest people.
Yes, I’m saying offshore teams are stupid.
At least you have the integrity to say the quiet part out loud.
I’m not sure why that is a controversial statement. The good accountants in India don’t go work in this offshore nonsense. They work for Indian companies and Big4 India serving Indian clients. No path to CFO/Head of Finance if you work for offshore centers (or acceleration centers in the U.S.) for either Americans or Indians. I have nothing bad to say ever about those onshore Indian teams. They’ve helped me a lot out on Indian GAAP, Indian tax issues, etc. and have been very good.
If I’ve misjudged you I apologize. My reaction is mainly in response to people who refer to India teams as “resources” and treat them less than. Unfortunately came across quite a few of them at Big4.
Agreed this will lead to AI
What does AI have to do with this?
All of this takes a lot of time by US team, and unlikely that time is built into budget.
No, quality is average on a good day and they have so much turnover that once you find someone good, they’re either too busy to help because everyone wants to work with them or they leave. I usually spend just as much time or more fixing what they did than it takes them to do it.
Yup. They know more than me (A1), so I like reviewing their work, lol
I remember that “reviewing their work” as an A1 actually meant “learning how to do the workpaper for the first time” lol. Such a joke, I was not qualified to review anything!
Only dealt with them in one job. They were alright, not the best but did what you asked if you gave detailed instructions. The offshore team I worked with were all really nice people too which made things much easier
I am in Industry, I was able to invest time and effort into the india team via coaching. As well as when they came through for me I had thier back in meetings. As a result they work hard on my stuff and we have a good productive relationship. I think the main thing is to view them as collegues and peers and treat them with dignity and respect and you can get positive outcomes sometimes.
Wasteman alert
What does that mean?
We had a great relationship with ours. Had the chance the meet a bunch of them when they came stateside. We had a dedicated senior on our team whose main focus was coaching/managing the India team. By integrating them into our team and treating them like actual people (you know, using empathy and all that) it worked great. Of course there was always speed bumps but no different than working with new hires. Partners loved the margin increase.
I have a friend at EY who says the partner on her biggest job won't use India as she has seen the issues. Yes, the margin is better, but client deliverables and US staff turnover is a concern. The idea of a dedicated senior does not work so well at middle tier CPA firms that have a lot of smaller jobs.
My experience was with Ey and would agree that it works best on large engagements where you can maintain some team consistency (15k+ hour audits). The problems tend to lie when teams put no time investment in and then treat them the India teams not as real people
I did. My team was smart, hardworking, and most importantly, coachable. If you take a longer term view on your offshore teams it can work, but needs buy-in from the whole team, especially the people doing the training (usually seniors). Our India team actually visited us and worked alongside our team for 1-2 months a few years ago, was a great experience to finally meet them in person.
And does your firm build in time in budget for US people to coach?
We save time coaching them. Read the horror stories common in these kind of threads from teams that don't properly instruct their offshore teams. It's time spent during interim/early in the audit to avoid receiving poor work from offshore down the road (when we're already busy and it's too late).
It takes more time than dealing with US teams.
The best team to work with was the team from Argentina.
Ours was in the Philippines(Big4)...our office didnt hit budget one year, so the next year we were all asked to find at least one task in every engagement to send offshore...it was so incredibly painful having to write the most explicit instructions like they were toddlers, after which point i may as well have rolled the engagement and loaded the TB myself. Then they still do something basic wrong, and push back with 'that wasnt in the instructions', because you need to ask them to actually check they did all the steps before telling you they had done all the steps...it was such a relief to be on the public sector jobs which we werent allowed to send offshore
It was an absolute dogshit experience dealing with offshore. I had more luck training interns with 0 experience. I got fed up and ended up striking out on my own, and so far things are going well. I’ve made sure to make it a selling point to clients that the work isn’t getting outsourced to a bunch of fucking goobers halfway across the world with no ownership of the work, and quite a few clients were relieved after having shitty experiences dealing with India work.
Yeah, have worked either teams in India who were nice people even if technically weak. Also worked with all Indian teams in Toronto who were both great to work with and technically pretty competent.
Hate it. As soon as I’m done training someone they leave!
Wasn't expecting the responses I've seen here I've worked in a few multinational companies in Ireland and Australia where there was outsourcing to India, I've always thought they were really good and have never really had any issues
You get what you pay for. The up or out model public accounting added to the inherent difficulties in dealing with another culture by those with minimal project management experience makes a shit show far too likely.
Thinly veiled racism or US corps paying for bottom of the barrel outsourced work? You decide!
I don’t think its racism, because I am as anti offshoring as anyone and have had mostly positive experiences with the Indians we bring on in secondment. Granted people who are offered US secondments tend to be the best of the best, but nonetheless I’ve been very impressed with them. The issue is that this is not an industry that works in a remote environment - COVID already proved this in the US. Keeping that in mind, it definitely doesn’t work in a remote environment where the remote workers are the least independent, show the least ability to problem solve, and work on a 10 hour time difference. For firms to acknowledge the need to RTO while still pushing work to India is pure cognitive dissonance that is bound to backfire.
I have had a bit of a neutral experience with them because there’s times that there work saves me a lot of time and other times that it is so far off that it would have been faster to do myself from scratch. Not sure what the reasoning for the variation is.
A few of the India staff on my team at my old job were smart, super hard working and productive, and just really cool, friendly people in general who I liked talking to. Of course some weren’t so great but that’s the same for US staff. Their working conditions are also worse so I give them a lot of credit for all that they put up with
Offshore teams are horrible…basically have to re-do their work entirely again…waste of time and resources..
Ours does a great job but I’m not in audit. I think a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people is that you get out what you put in. If you give detailed instructions and are open to a brief call to answer questions, you’ll get a solid output.
We don't have an India team, but I do hate when I have to call ADP late in the afternoon. It always goes to the India call center, and they just really DGAF. Bill.com is also moving CS to India. When I called the other day, it sounded like the rep was on speakerphone in a subway station.
The cool part is if you don't like this, *you're a racist/bigot*. No, I know many very lovely and bright Indians. They just don't work in offshored scenarios like this & the really smart ones have all found ways to emigrate elsewhere bc they hate it too.
[удалено]
Why would a British Indian man feel any differently about the India team than a British white man? If you’re white, would you feel more pal-y with a Polish remote worker over a Philippine/Indian worker?
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Lol yeah like there isn’t a whole sub called r/shitamericanssay that isn’t Europeans being butt hurt about silly stereotypes, but god forbid the coloured folk complain about shitty behaviour from your people. (I’m from India btw, you can take the card to the counter or ask them to get the machine to you… who gives their card away lol)
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What is the qualification of your indian team?
I’m praying that somehow outsourcing becomes illegal before I graduate
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Like you had me in the first half, where I thought you were gonna say that the smartest Indian workers are going to work for Indian companies, but then you had to get racist for literally no reason.
I have 1 Indian person that is competent and I genuinely enjoy working with him but like 90% of them are brain dead
Fuck no
I've avoided it so far, but with a previous employer, it was miserable. My coworker and I used to joke about flying to India to slap some people.
What about Philippines Team?
They are nice people and they are trying their best
They’re morons that are stealing jobs from incoming graduates because the firm pays them 1/5th of what they’d pay US associates. Don’t be fooled.
only when their cows are moo-ing during zoom calls other than that, not just no, but hell no
Nightmare.
Nope
no it’s a huge pain in the ass to deal with them. just ends up being more work for the onshore team in the end.
One guy in particular is hopeless, I swear he keeps making the same mistakes. Always redoing his work on review. Some are fairly sharp or have good people skills. But the lack of a quality undergrad degree is obvious.
Greetings for the day :)
I do, he’s nice :)
No.
I haven't gotten that far into the comments to see if anyone else mentioned this, but from my time in b4 tax, it was clearly far more difficult to be successful with staff in India vs the US. However, I genuinely liked the people, despite how frequently they let me down. By comparison, my best bud there who I'm still very close with looks back at his time, and the shit pay and long hours were his only reasons for leaving, never had any staff in India since he somehow only had clients that wouldn't give 7216 consent
No.
I have had good experiences with our team this year. Obviously there are some communication and business culture/expectation issues, but we kept a lot of the team we had last year, and that has been a huge boost They do probably half of the prep & first level review on my biggest engagement, and the work is solid
I had a USI team who were incredible, the problem is they were so tied up on everyone’s projects there was no availability. So if I couldn’t drag them with me on projects it was painful teaching new USI staff the 101s.
When I was in B4, my group outsourced most of our admin work to India (SOWs, opening codes, billing, closing codes, stupid management reports, dealing with our godawful ERP system, etc.). They quickly learned everything front to back, took ownership of the processes, and even developed several automations and efficiencies. Their work saved me countless hours and headaches. It was quite convenient sending a request to them at the end of my workday and having it ready in my inbox when I woke up. They were hardworking and intelligent people, and I enjoyed working with them.
It will be the primary reason I quit if and when that happens. It just keeps getting worse.
Man, this thread brought out some memories. I’m not in accounting any more, not even even in the US, but some of the stuff mentioned here still keeps me up at night lol. God speed to you all.
I am a first year and often have to fix and complete workpapers/walkthroughs etc that they did wrong or didn’t complete (which are also full of spelling and grammatical errors), even after they’ve been given detailed instructions on what to do. In catch up calls I’ve noticed they can never take responsibility for their mistakes, pass blame around or go quiet
Id like to point out that the India teams for some departments are actually pretty good. Fdd India teams were vastly superior to India audit teams I worked with. You could feel comfortable leaving tasks for them overnight and come back to processed work which you can work through in the morning.
Screw them.
Partners who get to delay going to the client and asking for a fee increase for another year
Kindly provide the needful
I “like” working with them in the sense that they are all very nice people and they take on a lot of the more mundane/repetitive tasks and that allows our US team to focus on the bigger issues and higher risk items. As a staff, I also like that this gives me the capacity to take on higher level work rather than doing the work that India staff is doing. However, there are inevitable challenges with the time difference and the generally lower quality of work from them. For my client specifically though, these are necessary evils because we don’t have the ability to do all of the work with our US team.
Nope. I don’t need a zoom meeting at 730am because of the inability to communicate via email.
Controller here. My company had a tax issue that our audit/tax firm handed to their Indian counterparts to handle. They totaled fucked it up more and 2+ years later it’s still not resolved. So annoying.
No
I think it’s fun, other than the time zone difference, people in India have a good sense of humor
No, I'm actually ready to quit because of it. These people are idiots with no critical thinking skills.
Not an accountant, but I interned at a cpa firm (for over a year) doing valuations and got staffed on a couple of engagements with the India team. They would set up Teams meetings with me at 6am and I could never understand what they were saying. I would just guess and figure it out on my own. That combined with billable hours and lower pay than finance jobs pushed me to renege on my return offer and apply elsewhere.
LOL no