Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I'll just suggest that it's probably a great time for tech companies to open a Bangalore or Gurgaon office. Bangalore in particular is a good choice - the people are smart, the infrastructure is good, and it's a very pleasant place to visit. Perfect weather all year and the best breakfast in India. Also a very strong tech culture; second in the world to SF, in my view, and without many of the social pathologies [1] that seem to be threatening SF.

Rather than fighting with the legal system to replace one or two of your overpaid employees, you can replace entire divisions. It's certainly an investment of effort but it's well worth it.

Plus if you need foreign talent, as long as you pay $25k/year the visa is more or less guaranteed.

If the US wants to be uncompetitive, leave the US.

[1] Meritocracy is still considered a core value and a great thing. There's a lot less xenophobia - while many in US tech harbor negative feelings about immigrants "who took our jorbs", I've literally never seen the same negativity in the Indian tech scene.

We outsourced most jobs to Bangalore and productivity dropped to around about 10% while costs increased. We have experienced death by committee and hierarchy in all of our outsourced projects so far and are now starting to solve this by in-housing everything again.

I didn't say "outsource", I said "open an office". There's a world of difference between having a team in a different office and outsourcing.

Our biggest problem wasn't the outsourcing, it was the number of candidates who had false references and qualifications from diploma mills. And the was just the start of the problems. People also seemed unable to work without installing a hierarchical leadership structure and cascading very specific instructions down that structure which were then misunderstood due to Chinese whispers. Every person I speak to, who works at a company who has tried to open up a development shop in India, seems to have war stories about this.

That's completely contrary to my experience. I've managed at least 3 Indian teams, worked with several more, and never had these issues. I admit, I might have a problem with people who had fake degrees. I never bothered to check degrees, why do I care if they can pass the code interview? (The same one I give to US devs.) My teams are generally pretty flat, more or less the same as any team I've worked on in the US.

I have heard of people having your experiences though; every single one was some clueless firangi who stayed at a fancy 5 star hotel for 2 weeks before jetting off, visited the Taj Mahal and was too scared to eat pani puri.

Opening an office in any country is an investment. You need to integrate the teams, you can't just drop by, rent an office and hope your local handlers run things perfectly. When my company opened our Pune office (a 2 hour flight from the mothership in Delhi) we shipped a relatively large leadership team down. When we hired new people they were joining an existing company, they weren't just left to fend for themselves. That would be a disaster even if it was just a NY company opening a PA office.

I respectfully disagree about Bangalore / Gurgaon office. The time difference between west coast and Bangalore is 13.5hrs now (or 12.5hrs for ~8 months). That makes it very hard to have even meetings, let alone meaningful collaboration. Even 7am in SF means its 8:30pm in Bangalore (or 7:30am in Bangalore means its 6pm in SF). With east coast, time difference is still 9.5hrs vs 10.5 hrs - only slightly better.

Source: first hand experience working with Indian colleagues while in SF; working with US colleagues while in India; observing hundreds of colleagues over the years, vast majority of whom arrive at work ~8:30-9:30 and leave ~5:30-6:30; frustrations of those having to attend late night / early morning meetings and how that affects personal lives.

As a remote worker based in Thailand had worked with guys in CA (14 hrs difference) for almost 2 years. It is true that life style and physical body got seriously affected.

My regular meeting time is 1-2am, paring with designers at 5-6am sometimes. Always not sure when to sleep during daylight, eating time messed up. Biological cells never get used to it. Anyway, I love my team.

| Meritocracy is still considered a core value and a great thing.

No it isn't. There is something called "Reservation" which is affirmative action designed to lift up exploited lower castes. It was also setup to reduce the domination of upper castes in white collar (and other) professions.

The results are far from ideal, though things get better each passing day in the younger generations. Upper castes believe merit based college and thus jobs have been stolen from them. All castes are able to circumvent merit with bribes & money.

| There's a lot less xenophobia

Yea, no ..Apart from the religion & caste issues, native Bangaloreans & Kannada are well known for despising & discriminating against "outsiders" from other parts of India for "ruining their city". If it were that legions of Chinese/Koreans/Arabs/Europeans etc were arriving in Bangalore for tech jobs, like they do in SF, there would be riots. Every major Indian city has seen some form of violence, protests against folks from other parts of India.

You must be joking about the infrastructure. Moving even a few kilometers can take hours due to all the traffic and lack of public transportation.

>can take hours

Bunch of my friends suffer from a chronic cough and throat irritation from being exposed to traffic everyday. Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.

There is no way to escape constant air and sound pollution.

>>Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.

I doubt this is because of pollution, noise or dust. Most people are stressed for the same reasons why any millennial traveling between Mountain View and SF is stressed- Rents, High home prices, Home expenses etc etc.

I was mainly referring to the internet. Io've never commuted in Bangalore, and most of my friends live/work in Indira Nagar or Koramangala. so I've got no real firsthand or even secondhand knowledge of traffic.

So we need to reject the best and brightest so they can build their companies in Bangalore?

In fairness, "expats giving us jobs" is hardly the same thing.

Bangalore Valley!

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