IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy, because you often end up implementing things 4 times before they're fit for purpose. Also, the attrition rate in Indian tech firms is crazy - I've often seen 80% of a team change before the end of a 6 month project, which means continual re-explanation of requirements etc etc. For me, developers in India have always been a bad experience, and I'm genuinely surprised at the success the Indian IT outsourcing companies have enjoyed over the decades.
I was dealing with a smart IT engineer from India and then I found out that he has sold me code for peanuts he had created for another client (and was already owned exclusively by that client, which was a major venture backed company), and then I caught him selling the code I paid him well to create exclusively to a third client also for peanuts. Basically no regard at all for IP rights and the contracts he signed, just doing whatever he could to make a quick buck. Not sure if it was just him or a cultural thing. But ended up an IP nightmare.
I hate to say it (as I am Indian), but it's a cultural thing. Basically, it's all about solving the problem by any means necessary, regardless of cost to the environment, cost to others, future problems etc. This is changing somewhat, but rather slowly.
That basically hits the nail on the head, but it's not the full extent of it. We have ["Jugaad" culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad), where we actually take pride in doing things that would be labeled outright fraud in a lot of places.
I also can't see how its changing, I've become rather cynical from having to deal with it constantly. I sure hope you're right, though.
I was about to mention "Jugaad" in my original comment - my dad talks about the concept proudly all the time. I am sort of proud of it, but also hate the conniving aspect of many jugaads!
It certainly depends on who you are dealing with. It definitely isn't a cultural thing. Ethics and ethical people exist everywhere. Had it not been there wouldn't be these many tech companies or businesses in India.
Consequence of demographics? Competition in India and China are arguably fiercer because of scale. If you’re not pulling out all the stops then you might be handicapping yourself relative to your peers.
At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.
In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.
That depends on expectations, whether in a given industry or culture. In most professional settings showing your hand as essentially a mercenary in terms of allegiance and showing no stickiness, will result in considering an alternative candidate, in the US.
Yes I think there is some deceit required for those implementing this philosphophy but it doesn't change the strategy.
We, also got burned by someone who accepted another offer and quit, a week after beginning work with us. Obviously, that guy--and whoever recommended him--are on our shitlist now. Word does get around hopefully.
Actually it is quite easy, cost of doing business in such cultures is much higher as you can not really trust anything and must guard against a knife in the back at any moment.
There is a huge amount of friction that eliminates if counterparty can be trusted vast majority of the time.
The problem is they have to give three month's notice when quitting a job. When other companies or headhunters learn that you gave notice, they do their best to hire you away from whatever new job you took.
Our HR Department now calls new-hires every couple of days to keep them engaged so they don't take a job elsewhere. It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.
>>It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.
And yet nobody ever agrees to lower the 3 month notice period rule.
I am not sure how you can generalize. I would not consider it as a red flag unless the candidate in question has history of hopping too quickly. I have direct/indirect experience of being both the sides. I once left a company in couple of months because company's culture was totally different than what I expected. I have also seen a friend of mine getting fired in couple of months after joining a company because company felt he was a misfit
It is absolutely a red flag. If you've committed to another company, then you have no business interviewing elsewhere.
If you don't take a job seriously at one company, why would I expect you to take a job seriously at my company?
If I offer you a job, how can I be sure you'll show up for it, and not just take the next offer that comes along? I can't. So you're no longer in consideration as soon as you tell me you're disloyal to your other company.
In some industries in America (especially media companies, but it's also common in high-end retail), if your boss hears that you're looking for another job, you're immediately fired. Sometimes it's even written into the contract, if you have one.
I think the key word is "recently". It might have been many months already for the interviewing guy, but it sounds more like 2-8 weeks ago, and that is really fast (==bad) job hopping.
I would expect most developers to do the same thing if the offer was good enough, but I suspect they would be far less open to mention it. I'm assuming this is just a difference in cultural knowledge of how it looks. They might have been thinking of it as social proof of desirability where as more local developers are aware that culturally you are supposed to pretend to be loyal to the company.
Just curious, commit for how long? I have been in situations before, where I have accepted an offer, started a job and was informed 3 months later that the company mis-calculated the budgets/revenues and have to let go a bunch of people. Guess who gets let go first? The people who started the latest.
Doesn't this go both ways? In this day and age in America, there's no loyalty going in either direction, employer or employee.
As a freelancer I feel I should try to commit for at least a year - and I will try to work a bit longer of possible. I believe this looks better on my resume as well.
I think it's hard for most jobs, at least in my space (mobile software) to do much effective work when staying only for -let's say- 3 months at some company.
But mismanagement happens. The example you mention of being let go after just 3 months should be the exception, not the rule. I certainly never experienced something like that. Then again I like to work for big clients, feels to me more guaranteed they will still be in business tomorrow and me getting paid.
What argument can you possibly make for an ethical burden that amounts to one-sided loyalty? The REASON is would be immoral to have no loyalty to an employer is because it makes the employers loyalty one-sided. If the employer abandons their loyalty towards employees, as all modern employers did throughout the 1980s and have now established as standard business practice, then there is no ethical burden on the employee to remain loyal. In fact, it becomes unethical to be loyal, a betrayal of your family and self for an entity that does not respect you. I am sure there are a great many employers who expect that they should be permitted to acquire dirt cheap labor to build their profits with no consequences. Their desires are irrelevant.
There is no good reason at for any kind of ethic burden.
Some people steal; some might have even stole something from you. Doesn't mean you have to too, and I doubt most people are held back only by law/punishment.
I don't think you can equate me leaving an employer "early", for some definition of early, to theft. As long as the contract is "at will employment", which majority of American job offers are (sorry for my America centric view), then the contract is AT WILL, in both directions. In my mind there is no ethical, moral or legal lapse.
I never quite understood this concept of loyalty or commitment to a business entity. You might interview the candidate and take it to the final stage with lot of effort but at the end of the day, the candidate is offered the job by the business entity and not personally by the interviewer. I don't see why the relationship should go beyond the applicable law of the land.
Of course, once the candidate joins the company, regular interpersonal concepts between employees that involve loyalty and commitment can be pursued.
Agreed, one-sided loyalty is a foolish activity. I never understood that either.
To all the people mentioning ethics - a company can and will fire people without any reason. I know a couple of people personally who can't sleep not knowing why they were fired. In 30 mins, they were walked out. That's incredibly unethical but for some reason, not giving advanced notice to your employer is considered unethical? Hypocrisy!
Any commitment is only until a better offer comes along. Better is a bit loosely defined as there is a cost of burning the bridge with you by jumping (be that a day after accepting or after 5 years of working there), but at the end of the day there this is a business relationship and the extent of our obligations are only spelled out based on any contract we have signed, and our social obligations only extend to the extent that the cost of violating the social obligation outweighs the benefit. Any employee who doesn't see the other side as doing the same is eventually going to get burned by it.
> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best
In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.
I am in India, and I can't help but feel insulted by this comment. Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?
There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
----
edit:
I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.
>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?
Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.
>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.
You are in India, and you exactly know what OP meant. He meant tons of people working in TCS/Infosys/Wipro where majority of them are bad engineers.
There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.
Hey, I don't agree with that either. In my experience, there is a normal distribution of idiots regardless of the country of origin.
A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company).
Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.
I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave.
The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.
>Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.
And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry.
Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates.
Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door.
This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes.
This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.
>(I'm in a product development company).
>The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.
Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base.
In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.
> Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India.
...
> it is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out.
This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.
It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.
There is a massive screening process in both India and China that results in the top fraction of a percentage of students going off to study in the US. Those are the ones who later go on to publish while at US institutions. So yes, there is some signal there.
If you can make it in the West you’ll leave your homeland typically. Tech is a sector that often can is merit based so it’s not difficult for foreign engineers to prove their worth and make the migration (relative to other service sector industries).
Please don't feel insulted. It's merely a general observation relating to culture in certain geographies, not to be applied to you specifically.
For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action).
Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.
I didn't mean to single you or anyone else out. I've seen this sentiment echoed in multiple online forums and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.
> ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.
In your original sentence, you are trying to use "them" as an adjective to modify "incompetent developers," but "them" should only be used as a 3rd person plural pronoun. Using "them" as an adjective is not proper; your examples sound strange to native speakers, and is usually associated with vernacular English in general. Native speakers may assume this usage is due to poor knowledge of proper English, or possibly a regional (improper, but common) usage in the American South.
I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.
> I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.
No, it isn't. Using "them" in the way you did makes you sound like a hillbilly.
Just some advice: it's wise to avoid using any words or usage listed in the dictionary as "dialect" unless you're very familiar with the particular dialect it's from. Likewise, you should be very careful with "informal" terms unless you've actually been introduced to them informally by someone who knows how they're used. There's a lot of cultural context that needs to be mastered with those, and you won't learn that from a book, let alone a dictionary.
I saw the dictionary entry. Still, take it from a native (US)speaker. The only time you would want to use it is either in jest, or to sound like an uneducated hillbilly.
*edit - I will add that the 2 youtube videos are not good examples to be learning english from...
Makes sense. Unfortunately, the use of "them" instead of "those" in this case (actually, in many cases) is grammatically incorrect.
At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education.
Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help
>>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?
Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing.
Please note, everyone protects their own interests.
I think the issue isn’t Indian engineers living in India, but bad management of India-based companies who set the bar low enough for lots of bad “engineers” to join, making the experience unbearable for any good engineers that work there (if any). As a result the good ones leave and make a have career abroad.
I love my Indian brothers and sisters, and think that the real offender in creating bad experiences with Indian devs are Indian businesses, which IMO have exploitative practices and emphasize over specialization. Even worse is the practice of requiring a 3 months notice to quit as a rule. There are 1 billion people in India, and I want the innovative, hard working, and kind among them to be welcomed to the US with open arms. I am deeply proud to have helped two highly talented young men get H1B visas and eventually green cards. They became great friends of mine and my family.
Sincerely, a white American guy who can't wait to travel to Maharashtra one day to visit Pune and Mumbai, and meet my friend's families.
Not sure about that... I worked at an investment bank in London, and had a tech team support our quant desk from India. I signed off on the costs and they were ranging from 10 lakhs to 35 lakhs per person. I think that's comparable, or even better than MS or Amazon for the city they were in (Pune).
I’ve seen developers in the London office of some banks get paid over £150k who were not any good at software either. it would be disingenuous to say that isn’t common.
I also saw some incredibly good devs there but you get both.
Very true. I was not really on the tech side, but often found myself correcting the code of some very expensive developers. Simple things, like not realising when things have been passed by value or by reference etc. Most developers lack the passion to be truly great at their work, because they consider it just a job. It's fair enough, but every so often you see a developer write effortless technical poetry with their code - they are a rare breed with innovation in their blood.
There are some really good Indian teams in the Banking sector. You do have to be careful of course, but I've worked with some excellent Indian colleagues over there in Hyderabad and Chennai. I think the thing is the banks and other big corporates hoover up the top talent, and retain it, which then becomes invisible to the wider tech industry.
All the problems mentioned here do exist and are real, but they're not the whole story. The management culture over there s a bit different. Managers tend not to want to be involved in anything technical. There is a 'yes' culture of not challenging requests. However there are plenty of exceptions to the 'rule'.
There are definite exceptions. Were those people employed by your bank, or by an outsourcing company? The distinction is important, both in terms of quality and price. Internal hires are much more expensive (training, benefits etc), but generally better and less likely to leave. Outsourced staff basically don't care because they know they're being taken advantage of. So you get what you pay for.
The sad part about India is most people who come from low income households accept any salary. Because a job and the opportunity that comes with it is more important than anything else.
Negotiations are for freshers whose father's have been paying college fees and bills. The remainder can't afford to turn down a job for these reasons.
35L is about 40k GBP - the average cost of a JS developer in many parts of the UK. Are you saying that's a starting salary for a developer in India - because in that case, why outsource?!
UK is famous for having poor dev rates. A coworker of mine transferred from Microsoft Beijing to Cambridge and had to take a pay cut because the payscale for the level he was at was actually lower there.
Let me be clear - “Not all Indian Developers are bad”.
The reason why quality of engineers at Infy, wipro, tcs etc. is so bad is because of their recruitment process. They recruit engineers from various colleges like herd of sheeps and call it mass recruitment. Irrespective of the his specialisation (Mechanical, Electronics or Chemical etc.) Students practice code for a day and so go for interview and unfortunately many get recruited. Then there is one year of Training. After training these engineers get into software development. Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer. Indian college and companies need to change how they recruit students.
There's a difference between writing something that compiles and being able to write code properly.
The "throw enough cheap coders" at the problem will work really well, until it doesn't, and at that point you have nothing but an expensive mess that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
If you don't have a good foundation, you're screwing the project in the long run, and this is the result of every offshoring programming project I've witnessed.
> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience.
The problem, I think, is that management draws conclusions about the quality of Indian engineers based on interactions with the ones working in the US, who by definition are the absolute best of the best. "Sanjay is one of our best engineers", the bean counter says, "and my God, there's _a billion_ of them back in India!"
> by definition are the absolute best of the best.
I think that's probably true - the people who can claw their way through the H1B process are probably among the best India has to offer. I don't believe that that's entirely why management loves them, though. The fact that they work 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in crowded, noisy open offices without ever complaining since they're under constant fear of being fired at a moment's notice and being unable to find new work, coupled with the fact that they're capable software engineers, is why management loves them.
Right, but again I think they end up drawing incorrect conclusions about the state of Indian engineers in general based on what they see with their H1-Bs.
I don't think many who've worked with the major body shops would disagree with this. On the other hand, I've worked for companies that have opened offices offshore, and hired their own full time development staffs. I have seen very talented developers and dedicated teams via this arrangement. I work with one such team now, and I'm deeply impressed by them. They're some of best I've seen.
At risk of sounding hypocritical, I have done the same in my firm (https://osrec.co.uk). I took Indian grads straight out of uni and trained them to western development standards. They basically have to become good, or their pull requests never get merged into our core code bases. They soon understand the level of quality that is required, because, to their credit, they are genuinely keen to contribute. My issue is more with the big firms, where quality is not regarded highly (or at all), and they infuse that attitude across the Indian tech scene.
My suspicion: you're working with outsourcing consulting teams. The best engineers are locked up in the companies that actually hire there. Google, Microsoft Research, LinkedIn, etc. If you're not doing the actual hiring you're just getting talked into buying a team built for cheap.
Disclaimer: LinkedIn Employee. Our Banglore team isn't noticably different skill wise than our SV team.
Everytime I hear this I fail to see how it makes any sense. Either
(1) All the firms hiring them are idiots and are unable to judge competency and continue falling for the "scam" every year, year after year on every project, with every company.
(2) Your propositions are incorrect. They do have good engineers and they do end up doing good work.
They pick their targets very carefully. They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT. They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.
Basically, it's not (1) or (2), but instead (3): that these guys are master scammers, liars and confidence tricksters. They exaggerate without committing to anything and lull their customers into a false sense of security. They are THE slipperiest eels in the industry.
If you don't believe me, I encourage you to give them a try just once - it will probably convince you.
>They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT.
In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?
I know quite a few "business-focused" people. It is not so easy to fool them even if IT is not their core competency. Businesses typically will include several protection clauses in the contract and set the legal jurisdiction to their own country. I don't believe it is easy to fool businesses for years on end. They would go out of business pretty quickly.
>They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.
Then data would show that those firms have no long term contracts or repeat business from previous clients. Does it?
In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?
If it's a US firm, then there can be financial and legal repercussions. Good luck going after a firm in India.
The usual way businesses deal with that sort of thing is by withholding milestone payments till the contractual obligations are fulfilled. Running such scams doesn't keep you in business for long. There is no one handed clap.
Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.
This isn't just an India thing. This is how government contracts work in the US too. The government contracts out to Lockheed Martin for a big IT project (used to anyway, LM got out of the business on the civilian side at least), LM hires the cheapest 'talent' they can find, loading projects 80/20 management/engineering, drag their feet for a few years, and eventually someone on the government side decides they're going to make their career by being the person who brings this project across the finish line. So they ignore or lie about the requirements being fulfilled and drag the steaming mess in-house, while LM hosts a champagne-drenched celebration. Contracting has fundamentally perverse incentives.
Ah yes, the $200 "military spec" hammer. Well with the government, you'd still have a job if you waste taxpayer money, since the government keeps collecting revenue. With a private firm, I'd expect them to go out of business if they keep wasting money like that. I work in pharma and I've been involved with a few consulting contracts. We chose our vendors very carefully and I can't imagine us ever paying when contractual obligations are not met.
>Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.
Its hard to imagine the owner(s) of the company not being good with numbers here. Surely, such frauds will be found out eventually? In any case if a company has indeed hired such a dishonest person, I would hope they improve their hiring process and do some due diligence on their previous record to weed out such people in the future.
Every large organisation I've been in operates in silos, and these firms hide within these silos. Also, these firms have a bad reputation - everyone in banking knows it, yet they are still employed because they're cheap and let you add bodies to the shop floor when funding is squeezed. That makes managers look powerful with big empires, which helps getting promoted. So it's not all about code quality or productivity - sometimes it's just about looking like you're getting stuff done, before you leave and let someone else inherit the mess.
Okay, lets assume that this is happening. I would hope that the person harming their own business by willfully engaging with an incompetent third party is the one at fault here.
The thing is, it's not their business. They just show that they saved money and get promoted on to another role. The mess, when it becomes apparent, is for someone else to clean up...
Okay then they are a dishonest toxic employee. The way to solve that is by trying to weed out such people in your hiring, and do due diligence on their previous employment record. I fail to see how that changes my conclusion.
This won't work, because those employees don't actually register as toxic for the company - au contraire: They have reached - and quite possibly exceeded - their predefined performance targets! They have done exactly what they were hired for.
You have to realize that things like long-term quality, or even reducing total costs for the company (only the silo is important!) is not a performance target in this scenario, and that's the root of the problem.
It's a systemic problem, a problem of corporate structure and incentives, and exactly the ecosystem where these kinds of contractors thrive.
You are talking as if the firms that have outsourced are just some poor innocent sheep. Most of the firms that have outsourced only care about money. Again it is all about money and nothing else. Nobody cares about tech, or the product or anything. It is just finding a good deal to make money. I have seen enough people from management outsource the work and then jump ship and let the lowly tech handle the mess. It is the same in India. You get the hike and then jump to another company which pays better.
If most of the firms that have outsourced have got really bad work from these big firms then why are they not suing for bad quality work? Why do they give bigger and bigger contracts? That shows the type of people in your management which you should take a hard look at before complaining about the quality of work of these big service companies.
Source: I have been on both sides. I have seen the internals of them doing business and it is a freaking mess.
My experience with offshoring is that you need to put a lot of due diligence into hiring. I've worked with excellent Indian engineers, but we really had to interview a lot before we found them.
About this particular comment and elsewhere in this thread, the sense of moral superiority westerners still have after trump, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica is just mind boggling. One would assume that by now one would realize one’s short comings. It also proves that there nothing intellectually or morally superior except for speaking English better then your average rickshaw driver in India. Is some parts of the USA even that’s doubtable.
A key insight is less that all Indian devs are bad, and more that they tend to be called in by companies who are incapable of knowing whether they are doing good or bad. So when a competent team comes in and sees an Indian team that has operated incompetently, things get pretty nasty pretty fast.
You do realise I'm Indian myself?! Not only that, I had to break away from the sham dev culture in order to become a good developer. Hence why I can see through the facade rather clearly.
Seems like mismatched expectations largely on your part. You get what you pay. If you ask for the cheapest workforce, you get shoddy work. I am not arguing the validity of your experience but I think it shows lack of depth.
On the other end of the market, there is a very talented workforce that commands a premium price that delivers world class products. You just need to know where to look. Most western tech decisions to use Offshoring/Outsourcing are based on the key belief that costs can be lowered. In a truly capitalist market, workers are also looking to extract their maximum worth (and upward mobility) and If you pay less, your workforce will bail at the first opportunity.
Additionally, no one wants to work for a project that is driven by a spec document that you authored and requires no design input from the local team
It's not a scam, you just have to know what you are buying.
For internal Enterprise apps, for testing, for some other things - you need just basic developers who can understand problems and solve them.
Also - there's a lot of basic IT work and basic dev-ops-ish stuff that can be done.
So yes, if you try to build a hot new thing, for your hot new startup using Infosys, you're going to fail.
But if you have large company, and need some well-defined system for reviewing customer service inquiries ... well, if you manage the project correctly, Infosys might be a good choice. In fact, it may be your only choice because hiring devs in North America is very expensive.
I'm not convinced. I've seen some terrible test cases written by Infosys engineers. Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software. Remember that India is not the "only choice"; Eastern Europe is waiting in the wings at a similar price point, better quality, and better timezone overlap.
Not really, when you consider that tasks need to be repeated multiple times in India before they're done to an acceptable standard. A few years ago, things were still cheap enough to accept this problem, but now development costs in India have gone up significantly and makes them non viable in my opinion.
I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal.
I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he answered yes, and we just drove around for some time until I found out he has no idea. From what I heard that sometimes remains a problem, also in IT service.
That said, we all have our cultural qirks, and in most cases knowing them solves half the problem.
This is ABC of travelling in India. Never ask "is this the train to Pune"? Ask where the train is going instead. The answer to Y/N question is always yes in India, and that can mean anything between "I don't speak English" and "NO".
Asking open questions is a very good communication tactic in any country. In "yes" countries like India, Japan, China it's necessary. In other countries you often find out about whether your communication partner actually understood your question.
Don't ask "Did you finish task X". Ask "what did you do on task X?". What you see as finished and what the other person sees as finished might be separate things. Maybe you see 100% unit tested, reviewed and documented as finished, and the other person means feature complete, but untested, undocumented, not reviewed.
Open questions allow you to see what the other person understands. In some cases they might misunderstand your question entirely.
it's part of the culture to be nice (to strangers) and NO is considered rude. brings a lot of funky and frustrating moments not only when travelling.
another is that strange indian head-shake that is so hard to reproduce - never figured it out completely, but it felt like when I eventually ask yes/no question and they say yes with that shake, it's actually more like no/don't know/maybe
The old bobble head :) I was there for a month, the whole country, and it's their form of agreement/understanding. Particularly when you're trying to teach them something.
I have heard so many people say "I am not sure" and i have heard so many people say "No" and i have also heard some people say No and this is how you have to get to your destination or get to your answer.
So you are 100% wrong when you say "The answer to Y/N question is always yes in India".
Which makes me doubt/ blindly ignore any of your opinion ever.
When I first became a manager, I had this really amazing mentor that explained to me a lot of the quirks of multiculturalism. I consider myself at least somewhat versed in other cultures, but I quickly learned there was a lot I didn't know about the mannerisms of people from India, China, Russia, etc.
What I find sad, is that there are a lot of people in positions of power that either have no idea (or don't care) that people from different parts of the world see things and respond differently than you'd expect and then get frustrated when the outcome is different than expected. I'd explain to them that it's a cultural thing, and they need to learn how to approach their questions/explanations differently. Most of the time I get this blank look like, "Why? Can't they just change?" and then go back to trying the same approach and calling their staff down, because they can't seem to understand why they are ineffective.
In my travels, I learned very quickly not to let that bother me, or else I would have gone nuts. I mean, the number of times somebody acted like I was an insane person because I started to eat X food with my hands instead of silverware, or silverware instead of hands. ("But in the last country I was in...!")
Fact is, you're the one choosing to be aware of and experience different cultures and travel, but they're not making that choice. And I had to conclude that they shouldn't need to make that choice if they don't want to. So I just sucked it up and would go along with the joke, "yeah us foreigners are such weirdos, ha!"
>people from different parts of the world see things and respond differently than you'd expect and then get frustrated when the outcome is different than expected
I get your point, but the fact that Indians say "yes" to everything (i.e. the fact they lie constantly) is not something that managers should get used to, it's something Indians have to correct.
Indian here. We don't lie. If you ask me if I am a female, I'd obviously won't answer yes to that.
The problem is that it's considered rude to say no when asked to complete a task by a senior. So when you'd ask an Indian developer if he can complete a project in a week, he might say yes even though he's not sure if he can do it. What he would do is say yes, and then give his best try to complete it in a week. Only when he has failed to do so, he'd report his failure.
Basically, saying no is considered as insubordination/cowardice.
There's no 100% accuracy in weather forecasts so a mistake is understandable. Asking you if you finished your task and getting a "yes" when you haven't finished it is outright lying.
You know how in a healthy, well-led team, if your boss suggests a course of action that's wrong at a meeting and asks for feedback, you and I would pipe up and point out the issues with their approach?
In Asian cultures, my understanding is that would never happen. Instead, everyone would agree at the meeting, then feedback would be given privately to the boss if it were a major issue, and decision changed.
Which one's right? Eh, if they both result in an eventual good choice, does it matter?
If you feel strongly about "yes" being a lie, then bully to you and run with that. But that's kind of like boxing a glacier and expecting to win...
Its funny how you comment as if you know 100 % about Asian culture. Does one persons behavior define an entire continents culture for you?
Some people have worked in 16 diff teams in last 10 years and they have friends who have broader experience and they have super close conversation with managers, they don't go to agile rooms and draw something on the white board all the time and come out with no insights or progress after a hour or only have a skilled person come and give a direction in 5 minutes and nullify the whole one hour white board drawing.
I can tell for sure since i have been part of many such teams where we precisely point out any steps in the negative directions and offer tons of suggestions to improvize on the approach and most of the time come up with a way to gently impart some sense into the overseas managers who have no idea how to get what they want.
Your reasoning is so flawed because u didn't know when to use the word never, that doesn't mean your continents reasoning is flawed but i wish in hacker news there is a option to filter out certain people's comment globally forever.
I'm yet to discover a culture that doesn't do this, and the people from that culture are so inured to it they don't call it lying but "being polite".
As an example that would be widely understood by HN, Americans lie constantly when they ask "How are you doing?" - they really don't want to know how you are doing, and worse, you're expected to lie back with enthusiasm "I'm great!", even when you're not.
There certainly are many cultures (e.g. Eastern or Northern Europe) where the expected response to "How are you doing?" would be either a truthful description of the important problems in their life that they are currently concerned about or becoming creeped out because you're asking a rather private question and you aren't close enough so that it would be reasonable for them to tell you how they're actually doing, nor it would be reasonable for them to lie with "I'm great!" - i.e. where the question isn't appropriate to be used randomly by near-strangers.
This. There are mannerisms, and there's outright lying. I'm sure those people know they're potentially wasting your time or even hurting you with false answers but they still go ahead.
It's reasonable to drop some phrases/mannerisms when you know some phrases are going to be taken literally or misinterpreted (while they shouldn't be). I can't remember of any examples about western norms right now, but I think asking "How are you?" as a greeting is not acceptable in some places, as it implies actually caring on how the person is doing or knowing them well.
I once heard from a US based colleague that he said “do X but don’t burn any bridges” to a teammate in China. That apparently once translated means the opposite of its Western meaning! An expensive mistake that was.
I've worked with people from Cognizant and sometimes I would get a plain "yes", other times a more helpful "Yes, I understood. Can you explain it again?".
This is great advice but is contingent on learning how to do it. The rickshaw drivers in OP’s example didn’t complete that part.
I’ll add that this isn’t unique to India and there are lots of bullshitters in the world and in tech. I think the difference I’ve witnessed is that with more Indians than non-Indians I’ve worked with is that the acceptance is not deceptive or manipulative, it’s just neutral. Hard to describe, but I had one programmer who claimed to be great back during the Java days, not sure his cultural background, but he looked like a white guy from somewhere in America. He was lying to get the job and had fabulouser and fabulouser reasons for not being able to do it, until the lie crashed and we fired him.
This is very different from “Can you do tensorflow?” “Yes” ...check in for a week of “Yes” during daily huddles and then at the end nothing and still a “Yes, I can do it” with a perplexity of why I’m confused. Or also common the “I’ll check it in and say it works even though all tests fail and it doesn’t meet spec.”
The former is deception, the latter is sort of a disconnect with reality.
Years ago, a woman, a medic in one of the airborne divisions, told me that people in the military don't want to say that they don't know how to do something. I think this was in reference to two near-debacles, one scuba diving, one rock climbing, in one of which she had been the one that said "Sure, I know how to."
I didn't realize this behavior was so common but I have noticed it in a few Indian tech people I have worked with state-side. Extremely frustrating when the answer to "Do you understand what you need to do now?" is "yes" then a few hours later you find them standing around looking confused. I had assumed it was a language barrier thing.
I believe it is similar in Vietnamese culture. When we work with them they often say yes only for us to find out later that they had no clue what to do.
I wonder if a service like UpWork could take this cultural knowledge into consideration and change their design? I often see jobs posted that are straight up impossible... and they get bids. Someone will post "I want everyone who sees my AdWords ad to automatically Like my Facebook page" and they'll get bids from offshore IT shops claiming they will deliver exactly that. Those posting the jobs are completely unaware that what they're asking for is impossible and borders on the nonsensical. I've always figured somehow educating those people might be the solution, but perhaps instead just presenting potential work situations differently to cultures who say 'yes' to everything including the ludicrous might help?
Seems common in Asia. I had the same experience in cambodia.
One example:
- I was very, very sick (Traveler's diarrhea) and we were about to embark for a 5 hours minivan trip with a guy without a driving license.
- 5 minutes before departure, I ask the organizer "do you have a vomit bag?"
- "Yes"
- I wait around a bit, but he carries on with his work and just ignore me
- "Sorry, did you have a bag, any bag? maybe a plastic bag, as I'm sick"
- "Yes"
- Now it's 30s before departure and I get pretty stressed as I have nothing should I need to throw up. So I ask him again, and he actually get pretty mad (with that asian "must not lose face" style though) and ignore me because I insisted and didn't just drop the issue (I didn't know what was going on at the time ...)
It's because asking for clarification is considered bad here, either you are an idiot or you are bothering others. So their best choice is to say 'yes' and try to figure things out later. That's why I always ask my colleagues how would they complete some tasks instead of "Can you do this?".
>>Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal.
In a country like India where opportunities are scarce, saying no in many cases can mean permanently losing the opportunity to do something big.
Saying 'yes' and failing is a lot more better than saying 'no' and not trying at all.
If I'm not wrong this isn't just limited to India. I think it was Richard Branson who said something to the order of never saying no to an opportunity. Always learn and do it.
It only indicates the person's failure and inability on not able to validate whether the yes the other person said is true or not and hence he deserves to loose money.
We're not talking about hiring some interns and giving them room to fail here.
If I hire your firm and you tell me you can achieve an objective, then I spend money and come to find out you can't and you knew you couldn't, you've defrauded me. If I ask if you can perform a task and you tell me you know how, then I find out you have no idea, you've lied to me.
I'll take a "No, but I can figure it out" any day of the week, but lying is a cardinal sin in any relationship.
We are not talking about those sort of failures here. But almost everyone who has every written code, has failed or written buggy code at some point in time.
In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"
> We are not talking about those sort of failures here.
The thread is about working with Indian contractors who frequently lie, pretending they know what is going on. We are very much talking about this kind of problem.
> In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"
What I'm talking about is orthogonal to this. You can move fast and break things, but be straight forward to your manager about the risk involved.
> Some people assume it is a yes when some one says no, but i can figure it out. Whose to blame here?
The point is that pretending to know does not open up the conversation of risk and reward, whereas "No, but I can figure it out" can and typically will. If, at that point, the manager drops the ball by not making sure the risk / reward profile is correct then it is no longer on the engineer.
I only realized when I started traveling internationally how much we (perhaps over-) value reliability in the US. We really pay a lot in terms of work hours and stress to gain what is sometimes marginally more predictability and reliability.
In Mexico, Belize, southeast Asia, and southern Europe, I found everything to be much less reliable than I was used to. Everyone spent a lot time more waiting around. But I felt happier and more relaxed, and the people around me seemed to as well.
I think it might be more cultural than you seem to think.
It might be an artifact of the system-centric nature of our culture. We seek to reduce everything to predictable absolute rulesets, to make things regular and reliable and tractable. I'm not sure if this comes primarily from the Industrial era and mass-manufacturing which has a tremendous conformity component, or whether it comes mostly from the more recent advent of computers.
We so easily accede to someone who says "its policy" without considering that the person involved clearly outranks whatever policy is being dealt with. Perhaps we've not been burned by strict adherence to policy and expecting the world to be regular and predictable as recently as those other cultures. It might just be a temporary thing, but I don't know. We've got things like "personal space" which were a very American concept for a long time, but which has since spread, almost certainly with many negative consequences, widely. So maybe this desire for people to accommodate systems rather than for systems to accommodate people will spread too. We're screwed if that's the case.
How so? Southern Europe is very relaxed in this sense culturally, and it's the most religiously Christian part of Europe at the same time. While atheist northern and central Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland) place a lot of emphasis on reliability.
Sure you could argue that these nations are culturally Christian, but Christian culture still doesn't imply an emphasis on reliability.
At most I might agree with this being a case of the protestant work ethic, which seems to have a high correlation here (northern and central Europe as well as America is very much protestant, southern Europe is more catholic and orthodox).
However first of all most historians agree it's false, and second you get places like Germany, where the economic powerhouse is the catholic south (Baden-Württemberg has Porsche, Daimler (Mercedes), Audi and Bosch, Bayern (Bavaria) has BMW, the protestant North and East are more poor).
Lying is specifically spoken against in the New Testament [paraphrasing: "let your yes be yes"; and "be beyond reproach"]. AIUI lying is allowed in Hinduism [the means justify the end] and in Islam [if it furthers Islam, it can't be wrong].
However, just because it's lauded in Christian writings and by Christians doesn't mean that Christians are any better in this respect than others, "we are all sinners and fall short of God's glory" afterall.
I imagine Buddhism to have a similar focus on truth?
Based on how politicians and how many second chances CEOs and other rich people get in the US I think its the same in US too.
Its just that if you are working minimum wage, or you are a spoke in the gig economy it's different for you.
Based on my experience working in the US, my American friends weren't very different. Its just that when you have sufficient you tend to worry less about over optimizing for the rainy days.
US is a different country in so many ways. US citizens are lucky to be born in such a great country, which supports its citizens through social security. And later with food stamps should the need arise. There is also awesome infrastructure like freeways and cheap air fare to move around based on opportunities. The cities are so full of opportunity. You also get free public education(Something like that is quite expensive in India.). Every city I saw where I stayed or visited(Who Bay Area, Philadelphia and NY) had parks, playgrounds. Every city had a swimming pool. Roads were sparkling clean and people were so welcoming. Plus food in the US is cheaper than chicken feed. If you can cook, rice, veggies and lentils are just like walk in the park. Meat too, you can afford to eat twice or thrice in a week. In my 3 years stay, I only have good things to say about the US. The full story is impossible to write. But I just can't imagine how anyone born in US can ever complain about lack of opportunities or ability to make a good life.
When you live in heaven, you tend to worry a little less about putting food on the table.
India is different. You have none of this. And its on your shoulders. Ensure your hands work till you die, or you will die.
Saying no to opportunities is very very expensive in India.
> India is different. You have none of this. And its on your shoulders. Ensure your hands work till you die, or you will die.
It was same in any country of the world just century ago. I.e. Indians are doing that not because of economic situation (which is much better than century ago), but because of culture. And culture is result of moral principles, which are moderated through punishments and support.
Well, if what he's saying is true.. then you'd lose the chance by saying no anyways. So getting caught lying is the same result as not lying.
It'd only be useful to be honest if you do have a skillset, and the company has a reasonable chance of reaching out to you fot the skillset in the (near?) future
"Well, if what he's saying is true.. then you'd lose the chance by saying no anyways. So getting caught lying is the same result as not lying."
That's only true locally. Globally, you've got a variety of reputations, for yourself, for your firm, and whether or not you like it or consider it fair, for your country. You're burning all of those things. This will eventually catch up to you, your firm, and your country if withdrawals exceed deposits. This is, of course, a global truth, not an India-specific truth.
One thing I observed when interviewing candidates for offshore positions was that people wanting more senior technical roles wasn't as strong as here in US.
Granted this is anecdotal from interviewing maybe a couple dozen people out of whatever giant number of IT people in India.
Just wondering if there is a cultural/societal push towards the management/boss level that diminishes value towards senior technical roles?
Do you really find this to be just an Indian / non-US thing? From the time I was twenty (twenty years ago) it was pretty apparent that there was a lot more money over on the management side of things. At forty, the number of 20 and 30-somethings all snorting and fighting for promotions makes it pretty clear to me this is not a generational or cultural thing. Everybody wants more money, responsibility, title, power, etc. In a country of a billion people where a tech job represents a path out of poverty, it isn't surprising to me that you'd see the same behaviors.
Money and power. Technical tracks don't really have much of a growth path in India, and especially in service firms, where the work itself doesn't really add much to your technical skillsets.
Often the challenging/interesting bits in those scenarios are done by the US/European/Australian office, and only the implementation details are left to the Indian workers. That isn't conducive to being valued as an engineer.
Management tracks also have higher salaries. If you want to continue in engineering and still make good money, you get a H1B or equivalent and move.
Things have changed significantly and management purges are very common. And once you lose your job, finding a new one is hard, because to be frank you have no real skills apart from Microsoft Excel.
In many cases there have been people who lost jobs and didn't get a new job in over an year and had to move tech roles eventually. Some people had to change career tracks(get into marketing etc) permanently. So there is now a dedicated incentive to stay in the technical track.
Also in the current age, moving to a non-tech job is the long term equivalent of choosing a non-STEM career.
>Just wondering if there is a cultural/societal push towards the management/boss level that diminishes value towards senior technical roles?
To an extent I felt similar working for average tech shops in Montreal, Canada. I moved to California to live and work in a culture where the IC track is real and highly valued (which is fantastic).
Yes totally true. Would be hard to impossible to find a someone with solid 10 years of technical experience who is still in a technical role by choice. You would be expected to ‘lead’ teams instead of craft great products
If someone asks me, "Do you know how to do X?" I tell them yes only if I know.
If someone asks me, "Can you do X?" I tend to say yes, even if I don't, because, really, I can learn almost anything related to what someone might be asking me to do.
I have never seen any rickshaw driver say yes to some place that he doesn't know. Either he will say he is not sure and he will stop at a place and inquire for u with people nearby and then take you to the place or most of them have google maps and can look it up if you cant by urself. Since they are pretty hyperlocal even without maps they can simply by talking to couple folks here and there figure out the right destination or by looking around a little as they may have seen the same place a while back.
You seem to have internet access, so clearly without asking him to choose the route you could have seen the maps and given the route yourself which many smart people do these days to save time and if you are not able to identify a route and are at the mercy of the rickshaw guy then may be you should have some patience and be thankful to the driver for figuring out the route and taking you to the destination.
Or may be they can be smart and ask for fees if they have to find the route and if u set the route then separate fees for that.
I guess one needs to learn the art of comparison since comparing random stuff will yield pointless opinions of no value.
I have personally seen a rickshaw driver in India say yes to some place that he doesn't know - resulting in him going to a wrong place, stopping there and inquiring for me with people nearby and then having someone look it up on google maps, and afterwards going in the opposite direction to clarify the proper place once more there.
And I'm certainly not thankful for the driver to have taken all this effort of solving the difficult problem of going somewhere that he doesn't know the road; I'm angry about the large unnecessary delay caused by them saying "yes" and then being unable to properly fulfil the promise they made, i.e. go to the goal as if they had known where it is, which they said (thus, promised) they do, and didn't. I wasn't asking "are you willing to take extra effort to deliver me to place X in some way" (which is a reasonable question that I might have asked in some circumstances, but I didn't in that particular case), I was asking "do you know the route to place X". I would be thankful if they had just said "no", as I would have had the chance to find someone who does know the proper answer themselves.
This is a significant cultural difference - in my country, answering yes when if you're not sure (and demonstrating the lie by being unable to fulfil the promise on their own) would result in that person's words not being respected anymore because that person isn't honest, and that person being shunned, not being trusted with anything serious ever again until they prove that they have changed significantly; a single incident being considered sufficient to mark the person as untrustworthy. Breaking a promise or telling a falsehood - even an implied one to a stranger - is considered a very serious issue. The problem with this when working with people in Asia is that within a few months a majority of Asian coworkers generally have had at least one incident similar to this (saying, i.e. promising something that wasn't so) marking them as untrustworthy. Of course, as with any difference, it's an open question which one of the cultures should adapt to the other, or meet in the middle, but that's a quite fundamental difference.
You are using an experience with a driver to someone with an office job. That is not a fair comparison. The president of the US lies constantly. What does that say about US?
It was just an anecdotic example of a more general habit that also affects office jobs. I heard that directly from people who have an IT team in India, and the answers here at HN also seem to imply that this is a wider shared experience.
Most people including me are not experts in culture. I am not defending bad behavior. I am yet to find one single defining culture in the US and I have lived here 20 yrs. May be the rickshaw driver was being helpful. Hey you seem to not know where you are going... I don't know either so let's figure this out together... There is room for that interpretation too. I have been scammed by hospitals and HVAC guys in the US.
Overall, I see a pattern of degrading, second classing of non-whites by whites. This needs to stop.
Well, I agree with you about the point that what we perceive as "culture of a country" is often a made up construct which doesn't account for the variety of backgrounds and behavior of the citizens. It really is very hard to definitly say x is part of "the" culture of the country y.
However, what is here being discussed is not a second classing of non-whites by whites. First, how do you know that I or the persons from whom I heard about the problems with their Indian IT teams are white? You just assume that. Second, it seems that there really are issues working with some IT teams in India. Why is it wrong to attribute this to a certain work ethic? Or more prescisely: Why do I second class non-white people when I describe the work ethic I'm experiencing? Man, I lived in Germany, US and India (for a short time at least), and let me tell you, there are different work ethics in these countries. And there have nothing to do with the color of your skin. But true, mostly generalisations are unjust. But people here are describing what they experienced. And it doesn't feel for me like it is linked to skin color.
Thank you for agreeing on some parts of my comment.
The parent comment that I reacted to did not sound as sincere as yours. I am not assuming you or the previous commenter as white. It's not about the individual but rather my point is about the larger society, it's cultural institutions that have historically "whitewashed" the whole world. All of our experiences are colored in that sense. This needs to change. In fact, it's vital when worlds are coming together.
While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a massive domestic market demand and an ability to reach global markets easily. There is a new breed of product startups out of Bangalore and other places that are born global (e.g. Zoho). They build products (not services) for the world, and not just India. Inward investment into the Indian tech sector was the highest it ever was (though still dwarfed by investment into the US tech sector and China's tech sector) https://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/2017-saw-... So the doom and gloom are not quite accurate. Yes IT services may have plateaued after two decades of torrid growth, but tech is doing fine thank you.
Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups.
The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.
Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.
There are very few schools that actually teach creativity, problem solving skills, etc.
A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.
Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers.
Those Indians who are famous or are talented, are that way because they fought against the system or ignored it completely or have had good mentors.
> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards
You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and they seem to be doing OK.
I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.
I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP.
Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.
As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011.
The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship.
Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and hookers?
Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.
Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it.
Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling of Bolshevik Engineers versus American Engineers, the former had a much reduced curriculum that helped the USSR catch up in engineering talent on paper, meanwhile those engineers were missing key concepts that you need to understand to build planes, bridges and similar that won't spontaneously degrade.
Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Americans I meet remember what they learned and know who to put it to use. Meanwhile I don't remember jack shit :D
It's still the same logic even today. Worst thing, updates programmes double down on pushing even more facts. While PISA scores are getting worse and worse. I guess it will take few generations to forget about glorious soviet schooling :(
> A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.
That's not really unique, many American school children do the same for their homework. It's a time-honored tradition (at least since the internet has existed).
Sometimes I wonder if the whole point of school isn't just to teach children how to game systems, which will be a useful skill in corporate jobs.
You can design homework in a way that it's easier to solve yourself than copy the answer. Unfortunately, that's a lot of work so that few teachers do it. But I had several where copy-pasting never worked.
I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read.
It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.
No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.
The exam and grading workload is unserviceable.
This is the crux of it.
And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day!
Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in test checking?
Online communication ? How do I know this information is correct? Who can provide proof of work for this comment?
Testing is onerous- And when incentives and resources are inverted/out of Sync, it’s not possible to test effectively.
This is the hidden factor.
If all Indian/Chinese teachers could turn around tomorrow and complete assessments accurately, rote learning would drop dramatically.
Failing that you must resort to large scale standardized testing. Which humans optimize for by just learning the test.
The standard testing in India, at-least for engineering, medicine, civil services and CA is unforgivingly fierce. Kids sacrifice everything, like everything to qualify for a seat at engineering colleges. Even in so called tier-2/3 colleges seats for Electronics/Electrical/CS go like hot cakes. I remember in my batch all students were the top most Math students in their individual pre-university colleges.
In many ways these exams are a giant filter to select people into STEM careers. The effects last way after. Even the most successful non-STEM desk job guy will tell you the immense difference STEM and non-STEM salaries, overall job perks and career quality in general. And kids watch their uncles and elder cousins in these situations all the time. And are forced to work hard.
Every year these tests get harder, and kids train even more harder.
I have younger cousins in US, and I jokingly tell them they won't last a few months in the fierce competition here in India.
But like everything, continuity is required. Once people arrive at jobs. They sort of lose all the momentum, coast around and eventually to settle to mediocrity. Or worse resort to politics and things like that.
>No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.
Growing up in a poor Seattle suburb in the '80s, that was very close to the (public school) student-teacher ratio we had as well. The school my youngest two attend now is significantly improved in this regard, but I suspect 30+ to one is still not uncommon around the country.
Well, you always had to rephrase it. Being that the number of possible sources were pretty limited it would be easy for the teacher to catch you plagiarizing heh.
>>Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups.
The opposite in fact. The whole ecosystem is overflowing engineers. But what start ups want is people who can work for quite literally free, take no equity and work and make great sacrifices to make other people win(See Redbus, Foodpanda etc).
>>The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.
So just like everywhere in the world?
Also the many start ups won't touch your resume if you don't have IIT education. So much for not caring about 'report cards'. Report cards have value because the same start ups care about these things. You can't flip flop on certain values based on what ever is your urgent need.
>>There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.
When you go interview at Google, the white board questions are literally your ability to become a question-answer bank of algorithm question.
If you want to value pure ingenuity you need pay for it. You can't ask for one and complain you wanted the other.
>>A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.
That is because there is a level how much of original creativity one can generate.
>>Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers.
The revolution has been there for long. But companies interview for one set of skills and expect candidates to demonstrate a totally different set of skills at work.
"...these projects devolved into internet searches..."
This is the 3rd millennium. Learning how to ask questions and find answers is a core competency. Along side critical thinking and problem solving, of course.
I now keenly remember a 4th grade teacher who would drill the entire class with random trivia style questions. "Where is the capital of Botswana?" "What is the root word for 'homage'?" And us teams of kids would race to find the answers. Great fun.
If home work assignments are easily fulfilled by quick searches and copypasta, the teacher is being lazy, not the students.
> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.
In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.)
I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't.
There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying.
I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.
> India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups
That may be true, but I've always just assumed the talent leaves. It's a big-ass place, with smart people, and lots of people in IT -- I've always assumed that anyone I speak to at an outsourced firm is someone who wasn't smart enough to get a tech job abroad.
I believe this is third world countries problem not only India. In indonesia, my homeland, it also become problem, we focus to much on memorization while doesnt really care about problem solving
The problem is that we manufacture very little, and a disproportionate part of our GDP is services. If you take away services, there's not a lot of money coming into our economy. The size of our economy is tiny in comparison (smaller than UK's) and per-capita income is one of the lowest - there's not a lot of headroom to grow for companies targeting the domestic market.
The point I'm making is, until manufacturing and industry take off, we won't offset exported IT Services with domestically focused tech of the "software" kind.
Does India actually want to grow manufacturing and industry though? Its notably more environmentally destructive, here in Seattle we're still cleaning up cadmium and other hazardous pollutants in the soil from Boeing's manufacturing partners from decades ago. Overall, considering the amount of remediation we've had to do, there are some industries that cost us more than they ever earned.
Yes. India is a poor country. Indeed a very poor one. But that does not necessarily constrain the growth of its tech sector.
First, tech growth is not primarily about domestic per capita income or demand for software in the country. It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand. i.e. use domestic demand to find product market fit and then expand globally. So global demand is more relevant than domestic per-capita income.
More importantly manufacturing itself is changing in ways that are lowering capital costs and the barriers to entry into manufacturing. The trend in IoT is an example of that. A lot of new products will primarily be driven by a combination of hardware and software capabilities. Skills that are reasonably widely available in India. (Although China has vastly more talent there.) That positions India in a reasonably good place. So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs. It will mostly come from many small companies that make niche-products serving and possibly dominating a narrow global market, with high margins. That's were the employment will come from. An example of this is a company that makes automation kits to convert traditional backhoes into remotely operated machines. The technology requires a combination of software, electronics and mechanical components. And Indian companies (or for that matter companies anywhere) that integrate well into global supply chains for these will do well.
> Yes. India is a poor country. Indeed a very poor one. But that does not necessarily constrain the growth of its tech sector.
That is simply not true. You could grow anywhere, it's different shades of difficulty though.
> It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand.
The revenue from exported domestically made software/tech products, compared to the size of the IT Services industry is miniscule. Almost nothing.
> So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs.
As an economy, we should strive for depth - rather than just mate hardware imported from China with some software. Such work is easy to replicate, and is not very different from IT Services in how challenging it can be. Semiconductor fabs however is the kind of thing we should get into.
Basically, an industrial base which manufactures hardware (and other real physical things) is harder to grow than software.
>>The revenue from exported domestically made software/tech products, compared to the size of the IT Services industry is miniscule. Almost nothing.
This is a very interesting point. Only recently I had a discussion about this with a colleague.
The painful fact about big salaries in India is either US pays it or a VC pays it. Or you go the services way where some one does the work over the years and has build a company for you, then they pay you services salary(But that is again from the US.).
So its just US or VCs. If you build a company in India and pay you can't pay much.
But in todays world, is not manufacturing anything an issue? Does UK manufacture even a safety pin, and they seem to be doing ok, by and by, focusing on services, financial businesses, licencing and IP etc..
UK does not have 1.2 billion human population which is not particularly skilled, educated, wealthy.
Concentrating on only one aspect can give answers which we like. Different societies e.g. America, Japan, Russia, UK or China have developed in different ways. I think of 3 basic factors: sophisticated population, lot of land, powerful political system. At least one or combination of more than one is required for rapid development.
India has none of these so it will be painful, long and slow path to development.
The UK has a fair amount of high-tech manufacturing (In terms of value, the manufacturing industry in the UK is bigger than it's ever been). Things like MRI machines, jet engines, etc are all manufactured here.
Yep. I'm 4 years exp software engineer in the Bangalore/Indian startup ecosystem. I don't doubt that the services sector is declining but there's a decent talent pool. At the same time, a good number of American Product companies/High-Valued startups have opened up their Indian counterparts to produce software that's super costly to build in the US.
But, I do hope that we shift our focus inward rather than towards US or somewhere. There must be enough demand as it is in India.
I've tried Zoho and it's the most unreliable, "ghetto" thing I've ever tried (for lack of better words). UX/UI-wise, it looks like it was slapped together by a bunch of amateur programmers.
If you’ve ever been to India you see that clearly the general approach to things is just throw people at the problem. Why have one person inspecting your ticket when you can have four?
The problem with the Indian outsourcers is that they’ve broadly failed to move up the technology value chain. These firms were quite good at the “just throw a bunch of people at it” solutions to brute force get work done but the tech sector has moved on.
Need a company to give you 1000 mechanical turks to perform some tasks you haven’t been able to automate yet? Go to an Indian outsourcing firm. Need some people to design technology to make the mechanical turks no longer required? That talent is generally not found within these Indian firms.
In that sense what McKinsey said in the article is probably true. Advances (largely built elsewhere) will probably make 80% of what these firms do irrelevant in the next few years.
It seems to me, time and time again, India, ( actually pretty much all the other BRIC ) are trying to copy China without actually understanding how and why China got there in the first place.
10 to 15 years ago one would have thought India to be better in programming, largely due to English for Chinese are not as common. Turns out with a whole Ecosystem, China has been able to adopt and produce some very decent engineers.
There is nothing wrong with throwing people at the problem. You create jobs and employment, there are still industries and area in China continue to do this. But you must also acknowledge how this is a temporary solution and what needs to be done afterwards.
Many Indians who were legitimately good ended up in high paying jobs where they then used that money and skill to emigrate to countries with more comfortable standards of living. In my area, the Indian immigrant community has exploded, and almost entirely within the technology sector to start with, but now rapidly expanding to other areas as family members sponsor other family members and so on.
The wonderful halo effect is of course that family members who immigrated with the technical household head, but don't work in tech, are now employed at, opening and running all manner of businesses as well.
As a result I have a vast community of new, highly skilled and educated neighbors who are also ambitious and motivated.
This exactly. Someone in another thread mentioned worker turnover. Turnover is a result not just management challenges, but incredible job mobility that comes with the demonstration of skill.
In my own observation the use of outsourcing to India (in terms of market share) has been declining for years. Either being replaced by work done here in Copenhagen or in countries nearer by - Poland in particular.
As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working and you as a country become more focused on internal demand.
"I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working"
These generalizations make as much sense as me telling a random American HN user "I really hope that you guys stop indulging your blood lust by invading other countries and killing millions of innocents to make profits for your munitions industry and you as a country become less bloodthirsty"
Most Americans are not killers, though the subset someone from an invaded country has encountered maybe. All Indians don't have a "bureaucratic and heirarchical" way of working, though the subset encountered by someone seeking cheap outsourcing may be.
If you try outsourcing dev to China you'll encounter the same 'bureaucratic and hierarchical' ways of working, but they have massive product companies that are on par with anything in America. So the reason why India doesn't yet have dominant software product companies lie elsewhere.
Meanwhile these 'hopes' that "you guys learn to be less bureaucratic" are just sneers and stereotyping in disguise.
As a stereotype "bureaucratic ways of working" can be applied to Germany (for example) or Japan, or Korea, and while I'm sure there are bureaucratic Germans, they seem to doing fine economically.
We should be careful with generalizations; and it is easy to go overboard in a short general sentence (like I did).
However there is such a thing as differences in work culture. And it is very reasonable to talk about differences amongst countries. And on the mentioned scales (bureaucracies and hierarchies) Denmark and India sit on each their extremes.
That India's IT-industry has been driven by external demand is just a fact as far as I know.
Well, India's industry has been driven by _market demand_.The market for large scale app dev work has been more profitable and better outside of India because there was more money chasing those projects outside of India. If you want to be a successful business, sell what people are buying.
>I really hope that you guys stop indulging your blood lust by invading other countries and killing millions of innocents to make profits for your munitions industry and you as a country become less bloodthirsty
That's a sentiment a lot of us share about America though. You seem to think Americans are the only people criticizing other countries?
Stereotypes aren't born in a vacuum. Americans keep putting worse people in power, the latest of which being Trump. Indian outsourcing is troublesome to work with. And my country, France, has a problematic economy and we have a hard time keeping talent here instead of fleeing for better paying countries.
All places have their issues. You don't make issues disappear by acting like they don't exist or focusing on the minority that behaves differently.
Anytime someone criticize India, people always come to defend it. As an Indian I disagree with you completely. It gives me anxiety when I think about dealing with employee of another office. I only do that if there is no other option. We should learn to accept criticism when it's valid instead of coming up with excuses. Also your whole comment is whataboutism.
I am not 'defending India'. I could care less about what people think of India. I am not a nationalist or 'patriot'/desh bhakt and have no problems with criticisms of any country or institution. FSM knows India and Indian institutions need plenty of criticism.
I'm just pointing out lazy forms of argumentation, essentially generalizing from narrow experiences, or media propagated stereotypes about millions of people, which is why I explicitly created a sentence of the same form substituting a stereotype about the USA.
My constructed 'criticism' is just as much out of whack as the original, and has no 'truth' in it, when made as a general statement about all of "Americans" / or more condescendingly "you guys".
There doesn't seem much of a link between 'bureaucratic work cultures' and size of the economy (Germany, China, Korea, Japan)
If you didn't understand that point, I don't know what to say.
Indians are fixated on certifications. My friends still can't believe that I make the kind of money I make without a CS degree (I studied literature). And when I tried to hire someone when I tried building an agency, the only thing candidates kept emphasizing was their degree and certificates, not their skills.
It acts a filter, when you have couple of hundred people for a job application, you cannot read each and every CV but you can easily narrow down your search by saying candidates having XYZ certification will be shortlisted.
Wow, that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them, and not by what they can accomplish with the skills they have gained. A degree does not make a competent employee from what I've experienced.
The problem is this: how do you entrust that the right people are getting into any institution (college, jobs, etc). There are two broad approaches: standardized testing vs. application/interviewing. The Western mindset predominantly favours approach #2 in most contexts, with standardized testing being a factor only in college admissions (in my knowledge). Interviews and essays (to continue the college admissions theme) are good ways to get an insight into the mind of the prospective student, but the crux is that they are interpreted subjectively and not objectively. This keeps a window for bias to creep in. Harvard University had instituted standardized entrance exam; they later scrapped it because of those who passed the exam, a large portion were Jews[0]. Standardized testing is an approach to selection that avoids this kind of direct bias, which is why it was selected as a way to ensure that all communities receive the same opportunities to educate their children (not that this worked out in practice).
It's incredibly hard from a recruitment point of view. A degree in the US, even from a mediocre university, at least means that the student is capable of some amount of hard work and application.
But in India, colleges simply don't fail kids. Some others inflate their grades just for bragging rights ("our students had an average score of 80%).
So every time I see an application from a college that I haven't heard of (which is pretty much every college apart from the top ones), I would be skeptical: can this kid actually work hard or am I just wasting my time?
> that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them
That sounds sad to you because you are looking at it from a Western perspective, when you have couple of hundred people interested for a job you can use a certification to filter lot of the candidates.
And like any metric that is easier to "game" you end up in the situation where a bunch of people go for the easy route of taking certifications because they act as a filter and that same filter doesn't work as intended because people are gaming the system.
It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter, to game this you become a cheater.
Of course that it's also harder to scale but if India has such a huge problem in filtering candidates there must exist some companies doing good skill-based assessments and that should be the way forward.
Or just keep the status quo of needing to take certifications and competing with unqualified people that have the same papers you have, for me it's a race to the bottom.
We have a saying here in India: "You pay peanuts, you hire donkeys".
So a lot many comments in the thread is either generalization or a confirmation bias.
The India I know and software developers I know of are no less either in dream or dedication from peers in Silicon Valley or any other part of developed world. :)
Yes, this is essentially what I've witnessed. I went to a very exclusive private high school in the US and the students from India there were top notch. Same in college. This was in the 90s. In the 2000s, our 2nd DBA at a very well known company was from India and he was top notch as well.
I think what happened is some not so ethical business people in India decided to make money off the good reputations of the Indians already working for US companies and built their companies off that. Instead of finding good Indian developers, they hired whomever they could find to take the job and presented them as top talent. US MBA's not knowing any better (what's new) couldn't resist the low cost and jumped all over it. Of course not being able or willing to admit a mistake, this ruse went on for two decades.
The aftermath is the good Indian talent now has a tarnished (severely) reputation, and businesses now have no strong internal systems development teams; nor have no idea how to recreate one.
Greedy capitalism is a global phenomenon. The greedy US companies got duped by the greedy Indian companies, and everyone lost. Good US teams lost by getting severely thinned out. Good Indian developers lost their reputation. US businesses lost their ability to develop even basic quality internal software. Indian companies seem to be losing out on the market as well.
Yep. I'm astonished that otherwise capable engineers accept the reasoning that since so many of the $4/hour lowest bid Indian devs they've worked with are subpar, it must be that Indian devs are just generally bad.
If anything, Indian engineers are street smart, and pick up new tech and tools very quickly. Of course, everybody can, I mean to say that there is a cultural attitude to quick adaptation to changing conditions.
Source: myself, Indian CS engineer, now living in Europe.
Sure, the simple laborious IT tasks are going away with automation for good. But the labor force will pick the next best thing. As long as labor is cheaper than the west, Indian outsourcing companies will only thrive. In 10 years, the dynamics will slowly evolve such that outsourcing will slow down, and more original startups will rise up.
UPDATE: I over generalized my comment for my own good. I meant to say, many engineers that I know are .....
If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.
I think both can simultaneously be true in a typical outsourcing scenario. The incentive for an outsourcing agency is billable hours and not rocking the boat. Couple that with the different management cultures in the US and India, and it makes perfect sense that the American company would see the quiet and overly optimistic compliant attitude as not being street smart, while the Indian company sees that they are keeping the gravy train rolling and making bank off fat and somewhat stupid American companies.
I feel like a horrible person for this - but in an outsourcing scenario: listening a LOT to direction and not explore solutions very much themselves. This is probably amplified by their management giving them hell if they spend too much on exploring instead of ticking off the boxes that they can bill for.
I.e. not only "you get what you pay for" in the sense that cheap labour might not be the most skilled labour, but in the deeper sense in that if the outsourcing scenario is such that the western company orders a bunch of stuff from a checklist done, well, that's what's going to get done.
This is the same problem a large organization has locally too, but it gets amplified when you try to outsource things and increase turn-around time.
You hit a vein of deep true thought. I can share my personal experience that can help exemplify your point.
Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.
My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong the maintenance work as much as they could.
Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative. This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.
Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.
Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.
>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.
Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser.
>>On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity.
For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?
>>I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more.
These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.
>>I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.
I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response.
>> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.
Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world. You just explained my words :-)
>> For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?
I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity." Somehow you connect it to saying NO?
>> These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.
Although I could have explicitly said it was not a requirements doc, I hoped that you'd give me the benefit of doubt that I wouldn't ramble about a basic software engineering artefact. In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."
>> Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.
So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? I sure am very happy that I'm not as close-minded to think like that. I pursued what I wanted to study, and what I wanted to do with my career.
For the record, I still proudly hold my Indian passport.
Living outside your home country, and exploring other cultures opens one's mind like no other. Please give it some thought.
>> Bad mouthing former employers...
Seriously? I was contextually explaining my personal case about what I didn't like, to provide an example of things that happen at an outsourcing setup. So, you think one should never speak of what happens at work and be "loyal" to companies? Welcome to the open world of discussions and improving for the better.
>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity."
How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a product company and magically becomes passionate and creative.
>>In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."
This is how CMM levels worked. You'd also be interested in looking at the engineering practices at NASA.
>>So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? ....
None of this wrong. But you wrote you served notice and moved as soon as you saw the requirements doc, and how that killed your creativity.
You need to work for a good product company to understand that. From your other comments, clearly you work for a non-FANG, perhaps for a services company or another non-services company that do not seem to have the kind of work and expertise Google or Amazon has. You are also too biased to be completely blind to the possibility that must be some factors other than money because of which so many people want to work for the big product companies even though they are not the highest payers anymore. No amount of answering your questions is going to convince you how services companies and product companies are world apart unless you have seen both sides. And by product companies I don't mean companies like Cisco or Juniper (although they are technically) but they are now like dinosaurs moving slowly and are only marginally better than the services company. I mean the types of Amazon or Facebook or Google or LinkedIn in their India offices or the types of Directi or Flipkart (now Walmart Labs -- another great workplace) or Ola.
Any responses to you in this thread seems futile because you come with a very negative outlook about other companies and you are not ready to look back and question your assumptions.
Sorry, not everyone shares this pessimistic view and try to understand many of us have enjoy very productive and happy careers in these big product companies that you seem to believe are no better than the services company.
"I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response."
Yes, I am amazed too at this kind of comments.
Your parent commenter seems to be exhibiting a strange mix of ignorance and arrogance. Likely works for an unhappy place in Bangalore where people are always bickering about their work which has made this commenter believe that the whole of industry in Bangalore must be like that.
I think it's worth contemplating the legacy of colonialism. The British Raj didn't exactly encourage initiative, which has undoubtedly left some scars. My ancestors did some unspeakably ugly things to the people of the Indian subcontinent in the name of "management".
There's a bit of a culture clash. Hindi has no direct equivalent of the English word "please" and the closest equivalent of "thank you" has very different connotations that can be perceived as rude. Politeness in the Hindi language is subtle and complex. The verb forms used to express intimacy and formality in Hindi don't translate into English, so Indian speakers often seem a bit blunt and direct to native speakers. To grossly generalise, Indians tend to be less private and more personally inquisitive than Americans, which can sometimes seem intrusive or overly familiar.
To be fair, silly questions are fair game from everybody on SO and GH. There are just so many of us Indians, which makes us more visible. I browse SO just for curiosity, I have seen plenty of silly questions with all sorts of usernames.
(Let me preface by saying that of course there are world-class Indian devs, and ones who contribute to FOSS and who answer questions on all kinds of forums. What follows is obviously a generalization based on my limited and flawed perceptions. I've never been to India, so might lack some cultural insight here.)
For better or worse, Indian developers in general have positioned themselves in the bottom of the market by working for rates lower than anything devs from developed countries can accept.
By doing so, they're under a lot of pressure to implement things as quickly and cheaply as possible and to cut corners where-ever they can.
On top of this, they are happy to accept jobs which require expertise in tech stacks that they simply don't have.
Due to this, I sense a level of desperation that other devs usually don't have, hence the annoying spamming of SO and Github and the begging for help.
This combination of pressures to be cheap and quick, and not being able to know all the tech stacks but still taking on jobs for those stacks, contribute to shoddy quality and workmanship.
Probably this is a development phase, and as India becomes wealthier and more developed, this trend will reverse, which will be a good thing for all of us.
What I really notice is many of the GPL projects I've trialled that were developed by Indian devs have 90% of the features one would expect, but often the way these features have been implemented ignore how whatever their building atop was designed to support these features.
For example, in one project that needed multi-tenancy, what was being built on supported subdomains per customer, with a strong permission system, all that was needed was a simple webui plastered on front. Instead, this frontend slammed all the customers into one domain, and generated random user IDs that customers will never remember. Worse yet, you were now either a user, or super-admin.
Problems like this are fixable, but I'd rather move on then work on rewriting poorly implemented frontends.
You're looking at popular questions, that have a ton of answers. But the long tail is huge and most of those questions have 0/1 answers, most likely 0.
I encounter answers now and then by Indian names, and unfortunately my first thought is "can probably skip this one and look at the next answer".
The reason is that the answerers _very_ often didn't read the question properly (or misunderstood it) and consequently are giving a completely irrelevant answer.
Yes but where are the ones who have already learned and are answering other people's questions? And why so many silly questions? That was the question. There's a similar situation on Quora. You can look up just about any question and find multiple low quality answers from Indians. On both stress I there seems to be no attempt to do the hard work of diagnosing/debugging the problem to produce the minimal example scenario required by the site; instead it's just "fix my problem here's the code". It's just a different way of handling development which only works if other Stack Exchange users are prepared to spoon feed lazy developers. It's easy to see why many of the original Stack Exchange users have given up.
I don't think it has anything to do with Indian and rather everything to do with the nature of the outsourcing business model. Outsourced engineers (from India and from several other countries I've encountered) in my experience tend to have low standards of code and terrible engineering practices. I'd outsource for repetitive tasks but never for anything I expect to be rock solid and future proof or handling sensitive data.
Multinational companies took the wind out of the sails for most IT companies's ability to hire talent.
Around 2008, there was a peak boom in offshore centers set up by most companies. These companies could afford to pay well because most of their revenue is either ad revenue or from companies like Microsoft which had a great sales pipeline going. These companies around 2014 - 2015 started to cut down heavily on offshore hiring, the reason was salaries were bonkers and most managers overpaid certain employees by several factors higher than others(Thanks to insane stock packages). The salary levels for many employees were on par with US salaries. Once you reach that point, it makes sense to hire people in US than in Bangalore. This plateau effected product based multinational companies more than services companies.
Another factor that has played into this whole thing is the number of H1B's and Green cards currently staying in US. The L1 A and EB-1 program was abused by most companies(ironically product companies) to award GCs in wholesale. As of now the peak services company head count around 2008 is now entirely working in the US. Of course if you have all the cheap labor you want in your home country, you don't outsource much to India.
The actual services company industry is going at the same pace as before. They are quite fiscally responsible companies so don't pay 4x higher as product companies do, they are perennially profitable though. Infosys is one of the most successful tech companies in the history of India ever. In fact the product company salaries are the biggest reason many fresher in the past few years have opted to be SREs/DBAs/PEs/QEs(non-dev roles) etc in product companies than be programmers in service companies. The irony today is people from small time colleges get to work a lot of good dev projects in service companies than people from top colleges who work on non-dev projects.
The third factor of course is homegrown start up ecosystem. Start ups in India payed quite well around 2014 when VC money was free and plenty. I guess they don't pay that well now. And they are also quite stingy with equity. Plus I hear they are bad with tech work too. Most of it is Spring + Java + Postgres stitching.
I remember in the peak of service companies I did far more quality work than any start up kid does today.
May be the next US recession will change things again. But like I said before, people are now used to MNC salaries and suffer through any bad project for just the salary.
Almost univesally, during that period the response I received from our customers was that outsourcing was cheaper, but quality was so bad they hired stateside as soon as the contracts were up.
In 2004, I heard a sales pitch from a VP of a big outsourcing outfit in Bengaluru (fka Bangalore).
In response to a question about turnover and preventing it, he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.
That was crazy. That was Sili-Valley crazy. There are limits to growth. It's too bad they're hitting good people.
But the business model of Infosys and other outsource IT services giants has always been arbitrage: buying something where and when it's cheap and selling it where and when it's expensive. Arbitrage is a risky game in the long run. And when the commodity being traded is people, people are bound to get hurt. It's just reality.
If someone works for me 18 hours instead of 8 consistently I will fire him immediately.
We do not want overworked and burn out slaves, thank you very much.
Making more than 6 hours of real deep work every day is extremely challenging. Someone who tells me he is working 18...
We have some Indians that work for us, on similar terms than Europeans or Americans, living in Europe. Good workers and have earned their place, like the rest.
I've worked before with my two startups with teams from India, and this was a disaster, but I think the reasons why were:
#1 Lack of my experience in dev area - how to work with dev teams (mainly external)
#2 Pricing - I was price sensitive, and in the long term, it caused that the code was not usable while scaling the business.
I hated it so much that after those two startups I've built my own software dev company focused on one technology and a quite small team of tech-savvy colleagues.
Below my checklist that I'm using to evaluate the outsourcing companies with who I would like to work -> http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A
There are few hidden aspects that are in my opinion affecting the Indian IT eco system. Everybody talks about automation making the jobs redundant, I think there are more factors affecting it.
I remember back when I graduated, only options I had was to work for these outsourcing companies. That is no longer true. India has a rich ecosystem of startups that definitely pay better than the outsourcing companies. I often compare the indian IT eco system to multi-level marketing, where older generation of employees would recruit newer generation to keep the costs low. Now, with rich startup ecosystem, talented younger generation have become expensive and scarce for these outsourcing companies.
Secondly, most of these outsourcing company's ethics and principle were derived from IBM, which led to creation of long chain of hierarchical management. I remember when I worked in one of these companies, an approval of procuring a server (not the server itself) would take months. There would be unwarranted politics. Lot of these manager are essentially skill-less. This has led to a problem where attracting talent to these organisation is very difficult. Furthermore, to keep the costs low, these outsourcing companies would go to third tier colleges and cities. Talent from colleges and universities are basically unemployable, resulting in a poor client experience.
Thirdly, major clients have started realizing the cost of outsourcing and benefits of owning your own technology. In my opinion, these outsourcing companies were basically sweatshops masqueraded as technology companies. Attrition rate in outsourcing companies are really high. If these outsourcing companies would have controlled the attrition rates and built technology products, these companies would have been relevant. Before the financial crisis, these companies did have resources and talent to do so. Companies like TCS did try to build their products and did get sued [1]. However, you would be suprised how many banks use their banking product [2].
Having said that, most of the outsourcing companies have very cash rich. I wouldn't be surprise if they start acquire smaller product companies to stay relevant.
A bunch of crappy generalizations here driven by emotions - "quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best". I can say the same about the American engineers around me right now. There are good and bad engineers everywhere. Same about culture. And companies like Google, Amazon won't hire sketchy people to save money. Think before you talk. The system is driven by basic economics and what's allowed by law. Companies take advantage of that. USA is now turning protective and hire its citizens. Good for them. The world will chug on either way.
Indian origin here working in the UK. I have met good and bad developers from India and the UK. I agree the attitude in India is to get the job done but thats because they are contracting for companies here. Its the same attitude I get from UK contracting companies, they write terrible code and just get the job done. However I found the best developers working in smaller private companies. I've found various contracting companies in the UK just as bad as Indian companies, poor coding standards, lies and fob offs.
Regardless of some of the pessimistic takes in this thread of the quality of engineering or institutions in India, the nation is still poised to be the world's most populous nation within five years* - surely a large free market, unhemmed by a giant firewall, would be a great incentive for innovation and enterprise?
It's certainly a lot more complicated than that, and India doesn't have a free market. That's precisely one of the biggest problems they need to resolve, their economy is hamstrung by backward, legacy regulations. Assuming they can reform their economy over time to make it more competitive, there's no question they'll have the world's third largest economy in 15 years.
If they don't reform it properly, the population alone guarantees very little. Just ask Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh or Indonesia. The outlook was supposed to be bright for Brazil, they were going to be a new economic juggernaut. They've spent the last five years rolling from one disaster to another, with their economy not net expanding for over a decade now. If the proper steps aren't taken along the way, it's easy enough to fall into that sort of trap as a developing nation trying to overcome an endless supply of challenges. The persistent diligence required to not fall backwards, is rather incredible (especially when you're competing with the first world, China, developing Asian economies like Vietnam, all of Latin America which similarly wants to keep progressing, and so on).
I personally know someone really smart who was on an H1B visa in the US with his family. Recently, when hit with an RFE (request for evidence) during a routine renewal of his visa, he decided that it just wasn't worth the trouble of living in perpetual fear (settled status wait time is about 15 years) and shifted his entire family to Canada.
I bring this up because while Trump may attempt to target visa abusers, some smart people are also trapped in the crossfire which I feel affects the country negatively.
I am against indiscriminately awarding H1B visas and shipping American jobs overseas or using cheap foreign tech labor to undercut American workers. American workers need jobs, to pay bills, to live, fair enough! Then force your American companies to stop hiring foreign workers, stop undercutting and outsourcing. But don't use racism, supposed Indian incompetence in tech work, stereotyping brown people as somehow stupid and not good workers and so on to create your fight.
I have a theory that a certain percentage of any given population can do good engineering or IT in general. The US and India are pushing up against those limits. This leads to recruiting people without the lust or mental capabilities to do said work. This leads to shoddy output for the customers hiring the tail end of the bunch... a very long tail because the demand is so high.
I have worked as a backend developer in product company for about 8 years. I honestly never came across an US/foreign developer who is > 1.1X my ability. I guess except the big four companies all developers (US/indian) have same level of programming competence on average. The only variation is the cultural comfort.
Is it just me or do Indians greatly prefer to communicate and delegate tasks over phone versus email? I'm working with subcontractors right now, and it makes it a pain when it means doing daily calls late at night or early in the morning to talk to them in India.
> The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that new tech could make two-thirds of the Indian IT workforce “irrelevant” by 2020. Indian newspaper headlines warned of an IT jobs “bloodbath,”
There was an amazing answer to this "bloodbath" fallacy during an AI/ML conference in Bangalore.
One of the panelists talked about "Manure" - During the Victorian era there used to be lot of horse carriages. More horses meant more manure. So when automobiles were introduced there was a fear that lot of people relying on manure related jobs. But that never happened as automobile related jobs took over. Same is expected to happen during the so-called "bloodbath".
> The level of offshoring of IT services has taken a massive dip since Trump got in
If this is true then the headline about "plateauing" doesn't make sense. It is more of a blip. Next elections when there is a non-Trump President things might get better.
That said, the article reads more like a history of Infosys than actual headline content. Major points are simply - Trump and AI.
I wouldn't characterize it as a fallacy. Whether or not it is a "bloodbath" depends on whether or not the rate at which people can re-tool is matched with the rate at which their existing jobs are destroyed.
The horse manure and automobile jobs could very well have completely different Dynamics allowing for a steady flow from one to the other, not to mention different population characteristics. It doesn't make sense to use it as some sort of proof that people in existing jobs/careers/skill sets will not suffer as there will always be something they can do.
That would be reassuring provided existing IT workers can be re-skilled to handle AI/ML stuff and that's a very long shot.
AI/ML stuff is extremely hard and requires a lot of creative and problem solving skills. You can't just split an AI/ML system into neatly delegate-able steps that can be outsourced.
>>Next elections when there is a non-Trump President things might get better.
They will, a little though.
But Indians abused through a lot of processes. I know plenty of people who climb the ladder through very bad workplace politics, sycophancy and nepotism. No system can work well for a long time under these sort of inefficient circumstances. Eventually a clean up is inevitable.
wow, most of the photos in the article are so bad. certainly stressing the point that "oh, this is bad, low quality, cheap and poor, and so are the Indians we talk about in this article"...
I read that article expecting it to say something about "the end" but found nothing. Poor article and a waste of 5 minutes of my life. Seemed to be an ad for Infosys.
TLDR: The best go to US, the next best to MNCs and startups, the rest are the ones you get when you pay peanuts.
Here's how Indian engineers get jobs.
The very top(maybe 0.01%) get directly hired by US MNCs. This gives some people the "Indians are smart" stereotype.
The next top(0.01% - 1%) work for US MNCs in India, or the few top homebred companies. Foreigners will rarely deal with them, as they are working on products, not services.
The next few go into startups and some good service companies. These service companies are costly, after all, they have to pay much higher than what Infosys or TCS would do, to maintain these people. I don't know how many american tech workers come across these people, but a few must be. These people are probably the source of few comments saying that "some Indian workers I worked with were good".
Now, the lower ones, will get into likes of TCS, Infosys and hundreds of small service companies that work on basis of "hire enmasse, at cheap, and sell at little higher cost". Now if you are paying peanuts, it is very foolish to expect people like Linus Torvalds. This gives people the, "Indian engineers are shit" stereotype.
Yeah man! Indian software work is pretty shoddy. That's why 80 percent of American software and IT outsourcing goes to India. And this has been going on for last 2 decades. Maybe you Americans don't care about quality as long as its done cheaply!!!
I worked for Infosys for over 10 years. This article gets all the key facts right, but doesn't capture the soul of Infosys or the Indian IT Industry.
I can offer so much on the topic, that it gets overwhelming as I type. So I am just writing my thoughts, some of them on the article and some based on the comments on this page.
- Not all engineers are of low quality. In my experience about 10% of them are as good as SV engineers.
- Infosys founder NRN is a socialist at heart. He pioneered sharing of wealth via stocks (ESOPs). And he did it so well, that all employees got it - drivers to janitors to sys admins to coders. So very unlike the shocking Amazon shop floor stories we hear.
- It has resulted in an ecosystem of Startups in India. Many of the ex-employees who benefitted from the Infosys shares, are doing their own startups (many of them product startups, as a result of getting bored with IT services). So it has acted like a YCombinator of sorts. There even was a ex-Infoscion startup group. And the best part is they can do their own angel funding. So no running for VCs atleast in the early stages.
- For the above reason, I revere him as much as may be a Gandhi or a MLK. The other two I read, only in a book. Very rarely do you get a chance to interact with truly great people IRL.
- Jugaad. This a word I hate with a vengeance. That's what gives a bad impression to Indians. And admittedly it happens a lot. Although Infosys founders, in how they ran their company, serve largely as a counter example. Minus of course some things like H1B visa issue. Just as a contrast read the story of Satyam (another IT company) whose founder Raju did wholesale jugaad and landed in jail in 2009, because the real estate leverage built on fake salaries of fictitous employees, his jugaad, failed.
- Product engineer skills. This is an area, where Infosys/others lack. And thats not only for aptitude or potential, but the culture. Because the Industry grew so fast - 100% YOY in early decades and 50% YOY in the last one - people were pushed to being managers & leads, after just two years of coding experience. And as such bulk of the work is very low quality coding.
- But the numbers in India are so big. Whether its the population of a billion+ or no. of engineers. That there is both quality and quantity. Just look at any coding site (HackerRank, TopCoder et al) and you will see Indian programmers dominating in numbers as well as few performing at a world class quality level.
- Regarding the bad experience, with Indian IT engineers. I wonder how many of them were with a company like Infosys and how many of them were with sites like UpWork/etc? Please note because of the overwhelming quantity of Indian engineers. Its not easy to find the quality engineers, which are also significant in number, but you have to be lucky or have to work hard. (Heck, may be there is a scope to do a TopTal like site, but just for India.)
What people don't realize is that there are tons of American companies which have offices in Banglore and one in texas or california and nearly all employees are Indian except a few.
Those companies are massively profitable but they come across as American. Indian CEOs (somtimes even CEO is American but not having complete control over the corporation) of those companies send American employees for delivering keynotes. There is lots of this perception of being an American firm. But you'll be amazed there are many Russian,Chinese,Indian etc... As an American LLC.
There is no stripe or Braintree in India.
The day these are launched in India, you'll see boom in product companies operating entirely out of India till then....
Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG.
And they do not like putting their lives on stake for startups. So if you'll not find them begging for jobs at small companies.
Believe me when I say, the scenario is shifting and it's faster than ever. There are counterparts of American product companies (strip -> razorpay, for instance), they may be a total ripoff when it comes to product but they serve a different demographic and there are entirely different challenges in this next billion market.
>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG.
Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart.
Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool.
Product companies pay well, but the average quality of work isn't necessarily better than services firms.
> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area.
Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading.
Let us take FANG one by one.
Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area.
Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay are executed in Bangalore. The Bangalore office of Amazon developed many critical services for Amazon Prime from scratch.
Netflix: Can't talk much about Netflix because most of the work that does Netflix does in India is in the business, legal and marketing area.
Google: Are you kidding me again? A significant portion of some Google infrastructure services and some Google public services are developed in Bangalore.
Source: I have worked in two of the FANGs in Bangalore and I have friends in the others.
And I don't know where you are getting your heavily biased data point about NetApp from. If you take one data point and say the whole company works on internal PHP tool, well then here is a surprise for you. All companies work on internal PHP tools or something to that effect. They have their enterprisey systems to run. Every company does that.
Whoever has told you this very naive view of NetApp has forgotten to tell you that NetApp also works on data storage systems, cloud analytics, performance analytics, OpenStack based private cloud orchestration (whole distributed software systems developed from scratch in Bangalore). Before you keep spreading this kind of false data about the top-tier software companies in Bangalore, please lookup NetApp ONTAP and enlighten yourself.
> Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay
I'm sorry, but those are not "high-profile projects of Amazon". Some things in the AWS roster are.
Prime Video and Prime Music are shoddy technical work. The former refuses to play movies on HD on Linux, and their technical support has no idea why, instead spouting bullshit like "Oh, Adobe Flash does not support Linux". The latter launched in India exclusively on Flash, and that was this year. Their current HTML5 music player locks up one of my CPUs even when nothing's playing, by making the browser constantly refresh the whole layout.
If your objective was to claim Amazon's Bangalore office put out good work, Prime Video and Prime Music are poor examples.
It's amazing to see how some people seem to be sitting on a high horse here and thinking that a HTML5 music player issue is somehow indicative of the work going on behind the scenes.
Granted there are issues in Prime (Which software does not? Either people bitch about a software product or nobody uses it) but the context of the discussion here was comparison between the likes of Amazon and the likes of Cognizant. Tell me which Cognizant or Wipro can execute something like Prime Video in Bangalore and take it to market like Amazon has with even half as much quality?
What is the alternative you are hinting at? That someone should not work for Amazon and work on developing and improving their Prime product just because it has got issues and instead go develop a AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?
Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees? Because developing something like Amazon Prime at the scale Amazon works at is hard. There are people who enjoy working on such hard problems even if the solution is not perfect.
I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else. My only comment was on how Prime is not a "high-profile" project at Amazon.
You brush aside the issues I mention as "all software has issues". My point was to show the quality of the product, unlike the actually good technical products that Amazon has, not that the product has issues.
You seem to be emphasizing the distinction between the backend service and the frontend players. Given that Amazon owns AWS, I'd go out on a limb here and say building the backend they already have is not a challenge. I'd also like to point out that a poor technical product built by the Amazon Bangalore doesn't reflect well on Amazon Bangalore, and the frontends are indeed poor technical products.
> AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?
I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole.
> Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees?
Making no claims about the relative skill-levels of Amazon and Cognizant employees, I must argue, from first-hand experience with clients' tech teams, the notion of 'higher pay must mean higher skill' is wrong, especially in the Indian IT sector.
"I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else."
You are missing an important context of the discussion then.
No matter what complex software working at large scale one comes up for an example, one can find problems with it. Every software has at least one problem that makes it a deal-breaker for at least one person. Even Linux, which is so popular in the tech world. These problems more often occur due to priorities than due to dearth of engineering competence.
But these issues are orthogonal to the context of discussion. What you said about Prime's quality may be correct but irrelevant in the context of this discussion.
"I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole"
I've worked in FANG companies too. In fact most people who left Google I know did it because they were largely in QA and their friends who were so called working in crappy services companies, often from colleges considered bad, did more code work then them. They were largely forced to leave and join start ups because the difference in experience was catching up with them.
Fb was purely a 'hire and send' unit in Hyd, and even now most of their core work is either Menlo Park or London. In fact London is where most of the folks go should H1B fail. The dev work Fb does in Hyd is an acquired company.
Amazon is a different case as dev teams do all the work, and there are no separate production engineering teams. So you do all that work, under a 'Software engineer' title. You would also be curious to see the attrition numbers in Amazon. They rival Infosys. :-)
Yup, NetApp if you don't work on core teams. Same with Cisco and Juniper networks. If you are not with core teams, internal tools is what you do.
This whole trope Services companies being crap, Mythical opportunities in product companies or 'Promised land' land immigration opportunities have forced hordes of talented people to get into SRE and other non-dev work, and then later end up realizing that immigration et al is largely political lottery which most of them lose. And yes once you go down these non dev paths for a few years, the guy from tier-2/tier-3 college whom you laughed at, for joining Wipro, will be having the last laugh.
Looks like the people who left Google you know were not hired into Google proper. What you describe sounds like they were working for a vendor providing QA services to Google. Sure your friends were probably walking into Google office with a Google ID card but being on Google payroll is a completely different thing from being on a vendor payroll.
Every company has core teams and non-core teams. Why do you present the non-core teams' work as representative of the company as a whole and not the core team's work as representative of the company as a whole?
Your comparison of Amazon with Infosys is ridiculous. The high attrition rate of Amazon has nothing to do with the quality of work. It is due to the culture - long working hours and the demanding work culture. But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys.
Which FANG companies have you worked for? You might throw one of the names from FANG at me but I cannot believe you. I know I am a stranger on internet and so are you, so it is just going to be my word against yours and a lot of anecdata from both sides. But per the anecdata I have, I see that your comments here are so misinformed that I do not believe you have worked for any FANG company.
You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision? If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG. This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.
I began my career in the services industry. Later I have worked for two FANGs for two years each. I quit them not because the work was bad. The work was damn good. I quit because I got a better job with a better salary and easier working hours.
And what's with this silly comparison of SREs at Google with programmers of Cognizant? Why compare SREs with programmers? That's comparing apples to oranges!
Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be far more skilled than a programmer at Cognizant. Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.
If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.
And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of work has to be better than another. One is not better than another. They are just different. They require different skill sets. A lot of very smart people I know are SREs. They enjoy the thrill of cutting through the complexity of network topology, load balancers, DNS, container orchestration, system performance, hardware and software issues to resolve puzzling issues when services go down.
>>You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision?
If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just committed career suicide.
>>If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG.
That is because most of the work in FANG's is not OS kernel programming or writing some earth shattering code. Most people are fetching stuff from HTTP end points, parsing XMLs/JSONs and posting to another HTTP end point. Or the same with a data base.
The peak hype I have seen is using Pig/Hadoop to deal with files of size a few KBs and call it 'Big data' programming.
>>This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.
Lol. I'm going to say again. Companies mean nothing. Show me your projects.
>>Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant.
Thanks for bringing this up, there are units at Infosys who design chips. None of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.
>>Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.
I've had friends at Infosys who worked on Airbus 380's software's validation team. To listen here that people like you think that's lower quality work than how HTML pages look on IE7 is one epic thing I've heard in a while.
>>If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.
As of now chances of landing into an SRE job is very high in FANG companies in India. Because that is the kind of work they want to be done from here.
>>And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of work has to be better than another.
It has to be. Some work is bad. I give it to you that people move for money. But they also end up committing career suicide.
Yes I do believe being an SRE worse than being programmer at Cognizant. This is not 'service company' mentality. These are facts.
"If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just committed career suicide."
With such a narrow and demeaning view I doubt anything can change your mind. But I have many colleagues who have switched roles between SREs and full time development many times in career. They are some of the most competent developers at my workplace. They have seen so many systems crash and burn at high loads that they instinctively design and develop systems with multiple points of redundancies to fail gracefully and recover automatically in distributed environments.
So choosing SRE was far from suicide. Instead it enriched their careers. Don't underestimate the kind of experience a SRE work at Google or Amazon can give you. An average SRE at Google works at a scale and complexity that an average Cognizant employee can't even begin to imagine.
> there are units at Infosys who design chips. None of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.
The arrogance displayed in this statement is unbelievable.
I know the specific chip design projects in Infosys you are talking of. It is an abuse of the word "design". They implement the HDL for the chip, sure, but "design"?
And who decides designing chips is a superior quality work compared to image to alt-text translation (yes, happens in Facebook Hyderabad)? You?
I guess it depends on which team you are in. I have worked for some of the well know MNCs(not FANG) in Bangalore, some of the teams I was part of did really hard core development work. Some of my team members in Bangalore were more competent than our US counterpart.
Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart.
Good engineers are moved to headquarter in the US.
Product companies pay well, but the average quality of work isn't necessarily better than services firms.
I work in a product company, so I've no idea what's happening in the service industry.
>>Good engineers are moved to headquarter in the US.
Not all though. Crazy politics for such things. You tend to get shafted instantly if you don't have leverage with your manager. And in India deep linguistic and state affiliations play into all these things.
I was lucky that I was offered during a situation where a whole center was being shutdown and they had to relocate a bunch of folks to maintain continuity. When the center was actually running, you had to be in the good books of the inner management cartel. Many equations decided who would get what, and job performance was the least of it.
Also you tend to suffer on the longer run if you are not in dev work, even in the US. One hears whole QA units or SRE units shutdown during lay offs, and that's understandable. After a while devs tend to do all work instead of having to deal with other teams to do only one extra step after their work.
But that part of relocation to US. I have many friends(Most people are in this category) who got shafted in office politics and never made it. Even if you do go, you go in L1B, where you can't change jobs and will likely be in EB-2(May be never see GC). These days they don't extend L1B(Thanks to Trump). So its again more or less the service company deal, you return in 3 - 4 years and now you are with non-dev skills.
I can only hope so, after near on a decade of dealing with TCS, HCL, Cap Gemini, Cognizant, and others.
I tend to get drawn in because I'm working for an ISV that makes a product. The Indian third-parties get drawn in because the real customwr has outsourced a function to them. I now have to deal with the incompetent pm on the $outsourced side, instead of the competent, reasonable pm on the real customer. And eight layers of red tape aroind simple config changes arise
It's staggering, sometimes. It's just a whirlwind of people churning around, and they kind of expect that anyone they work with has umpteen people to toss at a problem at the drop of a hat.
I have encountered some highly effective, competent people at TCS, but the overall level of skill and understanding seems very low.
The business model of such companies is to bullshit and sometimes bribe the execs into a multimillion contract and then deliver crap (they often have threaten going to court to get paid for their non-services). Not everyone is willing to do that.
Do you sell to local government or defense contractors? How has your experience been with them?
Also, if your customer is smart and still outsource to incompetent folks, they aren't too smart - are they? Either that or they are too smart to deal with you, and have handed over the relationship with similarly capable folks.
A company will outsource because it’s cheaper, in the short term at least. But an outsourcer runs on billable hours, so they are disincentivised to automate repetitive tasks.
So here’s the new competition: outsourcer who can do the job for 1/10th the cost, or In-house engineers with advanced automation who can do 100x the work at the same cost.
It’s not about West vs India, it’s about business models.
These Indians cannot compete or shop around for a better salary which make native programmer's salary cheaper.
If you don't like the cheaper salary then go back home and reapply for visa that's the choice they have and it's a disincentive to go through the whole process.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
> If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status, find another employer (subject to application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the United States. Effective January 17, 2017, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services modified the rules to allow a grace period of up to 60 days but in practice as long as a green card application is pending they are allowed to stay.
That's not really a new competition. It's just a cheat/loop hole that companies use to pay nonnative IT people dirt.
I think a better solution is let non native workers shop around for better salary (or make it easier) and add a foreign tax on top of their salary.
The foreign tax is similar to out of state tuition when you attend university out of state, the people who are native who have paid taxes for the infrastructure vs people that aren't native that are using infrastructure and may leave the state/country with no loyalty but for better opportunities should pay a tax. The tax is also to incentivize visa holder to become citizen in the future.
I also like a hiring cap for non native people base on if there are actual skill lacking in current work force. The cap is to be revise every few years base on market.
Absolutely. BTW, that's one of the key issues why the Panaya acquisition was a failure for Infosys. The business strategy was right: automate for the corporate entity to increase quality and reduce costs. The problem was the outsourcers on the ground had no incentive to bring Panaya into the picture.
> At some point , it's very likely that India will suffer the same crisis as China labour from automation.
Is China really suffering that crisis? I have the impression that they focused early enough on high-tech industries and that the increasing wealth (leading to higher cost) drives more manual labour away than automation.
around 10 years before, an IT professional was the hottest thing in the Indian marriage market (if I may use that term, which is common use around here.). There was no problem for one to find a bride if they are anywhere near IT. When you here that some girl is getting married, and ask what the groom is doing, 9 out of 10 times, it would be "Software Engineer in US". Now it is bank employees. No one needs IT professionals now...
That should tell you something in lines of answering this question...
I spend 6 months working from Sunnyvale and 6 months working from India. I have seen a remarkable improvement in quality of engineers. I think IT industry as such pretty much doomed because of automation, saturation and US immigration restrictions. The fresh graduates now I meet want to work on products. Products that are meant for Indian markets and other markets.
India can take a big lead in AI and other things if it managed to reform its higher education and get rid of government controls in that space. If India opens up higher education sector much higher quality talent can be bred there.
"India can take a big lead in AI and other things if it managed to reform its higher education and get rid of government controls in that space. If India opens up higher education sector much higher quality talent can be bred there."
Sadly its going to take the Indian government decades to reform even if they want to.
My experience with our programmers in India is that only the top 1% of them are at or above mediocre. Most Indian universities are garbage degree printers. The top institutes are super competitive, but those people rarely stay in India.
Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000. No they don't, cause they don't deserve (intelligence required for the work they do) and the supply is abundant. Why can't western developers accept basic economics and move on to greener pastures.
It is telling that the defining book of the decade on tech startups—Zero to One was a runaway best-seller in China but didn't even sell 50,000 copies in India.
India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.
I don't begrudge losing the karma to share facts that violate our shared expectations.
The view I have on it is that in China, there is a large and growing interest in large, long-term investment in new technologies and new ideas. Obviously there's a continuum and China is also still implementing and scaling technologies built in the west, but there's a definite commitment towards breaking new ground as well.
