The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’? | Hacker News Reader

The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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296 pointsfourmii403 comments

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.

Wow, that actually explains a lot of problems I have with the way my Indian team work. Thanks for the heads up!

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.

A business not wanting to invest time hiring, training and integrating an employee who is likely to leave prematurely is not an abstract principle.

> and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead

> It's hard to argue they're wrong.

Except for the fact that in this very thread there seems to be quite a backlash against them. Seems to be very short-term and selfish thinking.

>It's hard to argue they're wrong.

Eugenics. Thalidomide. Radium paint. Lead paint. Leaded gasoline. The list goes on.

It's quite easy to argue against taking shortcuts and eschewing rigor in favor of "results" if you know some history and have some perspective.

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 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.

A candidate who want to get better offer is a red flag ?

> 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.

Were they in India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about Indians.

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.

Indeed. I too am (British) Indian ;)

Thank you for saying this.

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.

i mean this is an obvious statement, if you've only worked with a group, then of course the most competent and least competent is within that group...

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience.

That is because you dont pay them well, the good engineers who are being paid well work in MS, Amazon etc in India.

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.

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'.

The truly good people would expect a significant fraction of the UK salary, not an average Indian IT salary.

35 lacks you mentioned is a good starting salary for a person at Amazon or MS. 10L is not, even in Pune.

Not sure how to respond to your anecdote.

If what you are saying is true then you should have a chat with the person who hired them to see what is going on.

The poor salaries which I am talking about is Rs 2 lakhs for freshers who join IT consultancy services.

They just come over here. Why would they work in india when they can make 4-10x here?

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.

>>Then there is one year of Training.

So more than your average CS engineering grad?

>>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer.

B.S.

Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.

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?

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.

STOP creating racist stereotypes.

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.

>Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software.

I get this with people Accenture and the like too though. . .

" Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software." you get what you pay for to some extent.

E. Europe is considerably more expensive than India.

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.

I absolutely agree, plus asking "How much of task X could you already do?" is perceived as less aggressive than "Did you finish task X already?".

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

Just make an 8 with your nose. :-)

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.

The head bobble just means that they hear you. It does not mean yes or no or anything else really.

There are 3 different movements. One is for acknowledgement, other two are for yes and no.

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!"

every foreigner is always a wierdo, thats wat makes this world so much fun and exciting.

foreigner by nation or state or city or apartment or school.

>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.

Saying "yes" to everything, as has been explained above, has more to do with different cultural definitions of "yes" than lying.

You ask me if it's going to rain, and I say yes, because I know with certainty it will rain tomorrow.

Is it fair for you to call me a liar because you carried around an umbrella today?

> i.e. the fact they lie constantly

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.

Don’t you think imagining 1 billion people following exact same behavior is what you can easily imagine in case of India but cannot do that for USA ?

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?".

If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later! Richard Branson

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.

> ...back during the Java days...

The Java days are in the past for you? Must be nice...

This was both funny and sad

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."

[edit: change "one said" to "one that said"]

Id have a pretty bad opinion about a person who would turn down an opportunity, especially those one's that require skills than can be learned easily.

"yes" this is true. Fear of failure is high and not knowing something is generally considered shameful.

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 ...)

Sounds like "yes" means "I heard ya" or "ACK"

Even in China, and that's the biggest market there.

You have to adjust your questions. Always start the question with a W, and never with a Has or Is.

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?".

I can personally attest to this, having hired a small team of Vietnamese engineers to do some freelance hardware and firmware/OS-level work for me.

>>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.

> Saying 'yes' and failing is a lot more better than saying 'no' and not trying at all.

Not for the person whose money you've spent on the failure.

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.

Not all failures are in the 'WW2 Normandy' Ballpark.

In fact in almost all cases, letting people fail is how let them learn.

Yeah, and the problem with this is if you lie and get found out, you'll not get asked again in many Western companies.

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.

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

I've had a bunch of IT projects (almost) go off the rails because of this cultural "misunderstanding".

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.

Fair enough. What does this have to do with the Original Topic? Are you just looking for a place to rant?

Oh it has a lot to do with the topic in discussion

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?

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

> 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.

Ah even before the internet was widely used you would go to the library and copy stuff out of encyclopedias. It just took longer :)

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.

>>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.

Boeing was the backbone of international and local airlines for decades. It seems to have been worth it.

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..

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.

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.

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.

This doesn't happen because Indian politicians still fight elections based on religion

I think another way to look at it:

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.

But,carry on. This is the internet.

Yeah.

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.

I'll just say YMMV, and leave it at that.

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.

> Indians are fixated on certifications.

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.

Yeah but even in US, this whole college education has become a thing in the current times.

Degrees have been used as a filter for many jobs internationally for a while now.

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).

[0] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/expose/book/cloak-meritocrac...

Essays and interviews are a thing of the past. I believe they are only used when students' applications are near the borderline?

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.

> It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter

Agree, which is why some Indian companies have started using skills based assessment websites now.

<sarcasm intent="juxtaposition with American groups seen as obsessed with pieces of paper"> Sounds like someone didn't get into Harvard

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.

Indeed. With a bias and FUD, it is too easy to generalize anything.

>We have a saying here in India: "You pay peanuts, you hire donkeys".

That is amazingly similar to the common english proverb: "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys."

Did you translate the Indian (not sure which language) proverb using the english proverb as a base, or does it directly translate?

I have heard of another proverb, which translates to "If you throw peanuts, only monkeys will gather".

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 .....

> Indian engineers are street smart

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.

Yeah. My generalization is of no use in a discussion. I only meant to say a lot of them(that I know) are. I can't vouch for billions of us :-)

Could you elaborate "sheltered by western standards"?

The culture of always say yes, and never contradict what the western project manager says, regardless how ridiculous it might be?

Until it explodes and escalates all the way to the top.

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.

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".

I can also only speak for the friends I know :)

But I mean overly protected to a late age, and very strongly influenced by their parents.

The flip side is that on average my Indian friends are also the politest people that I know, which makes me realize it's really a lost quality.

I've found quite the opposite to be the truth. On average, my Indian friends are the most arrogant, rude people I know.

What are the naive about

> pick up new tech and tools very quickly

And then they go on StackOverflow and Github issue trackers, begging anyone and everyone to help them and appearing completely out of their depth.

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.

Ok generalization again, but I see a lot more Indian names asking questions rather than answering them.

I'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.

Yes but the ratio is different. Americans produce most of the most popular services even if most Americans consume rather than create them.

Stack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.

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.

Nothing wrong with asking questions and seeking to learn.

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.

May I ask which technologies have you worked on?

Not sure why it'd help the discussion :-)

Here is my public CV : https://aravindh.net/cv_2018.pdf

Yours is one awesome CV. I was just curious to know.

Thanks!

</ blatant generalization >

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.

That is not necessarily the case though. That just shows they don't know how to hire.

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.

> he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.

Inflation in India is pretty high as well compared to developed countries.

That was a cost of living adjustment, really.

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.

[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

[2]http://sites.tcs.com/tcsbancs/

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.

>>There were 350 posters in all, bought for $80,000 by an organization called Progressives for Immigration Reform.

Why did 350 posters cost $80000, i am sure it would have cost lot less if they have been made outside US.

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?

* http://time.com/3978175/india-population-worlds-most-populou...

> surely a large free market, unhemmed by a giant firewall, would be a great incentive for innovation and enterprise?

A critical component of free markets is "contract enforcements". India has poor law enforcement.

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.

When you say settled status wait time is about 15 years , is it just for Indians or other nationalities too ?

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.

India is producing Low cost - Low quality services and China is producing Low cost - High quality goods http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716630-not-goo...

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.

Never heard of any bias towards phone. If anything, people prefer email as it leaves a trail.

> 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.

What came first, that conference or this scene?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM1YWl9-ZG0

The conference was back in April. And the conclusion of the conference is different from the video.

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.

Turns out paying people low wages is not really miraculous.

Doesn't making things where it costs the least and guarantees best quality contribute to the overall efficiency and economy of the world.

Remote work in the US and great talent from the same time zones in South and Central Americas has a lot to do with it.

Hasn't there been an article like 12 months ago that described how it's already moving into a downswing?

Imho both US-americans and Indians tend to oversell themselves to a degree of perversion.

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!!!

"Just make an 8 with your nose. :-)" I have lived in the states for 20 yrs. The comments in this thread are unbelievably culturally insensitive.

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.

Source: I have worked in NetApp too for 3 years.

> 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'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.

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.

Utter FUD. There are at least 3 major payment processors on the level of Stripe or Braintree. These have existed for the better part of a decade now.

India is a very domestic market - most tech products don't leave our shores at all.

Utter FUD. There are at least 3 major payment processors on the level of Stripe or Braintree. These have existed for the better part of a decade now.

Those payment processors not able to collect payment from international customers. Most SaaS companies need global acceptance.

The N in FANG stands for Netflix.

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

TCS: Total Catastrophe Services

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.

They are the biggest IT services company with $100 billion market cap. They are bad at many things, but making money is not one of them.

Someone needs to help reduce that market cap. They really are the pits.

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.

It's more like abuse of Visa.

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.

This only applies to US Visas most countries have very simple visa option for tech workers.

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.

> they are disincentivised to automate repetitive tasks

That's definitely the issue here.

As an engineer , you are usually trained to automate as much as your work as possible , and we create framework for that.

Outsourcer won't , or will not tell you about it because they need to charge you money for it.

At some point , it's very likely that India will suffer the same crisis as China labour from automation.

> 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.

Hi karishma1234,

May I ask in which organization and in which domain do you work? Asking out of curiosity.

Thanks.

I am a coder. I work in machine learning space.

The problem is that only the top 10% of Indian programmers are in the top ten percent.

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.

>Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000

I imagine a big enough job would easily clear $100k...

Yeah, they do.

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.

Do you have a source for those numbers?

Ah the joys of HN. Here is a source for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s

Well, it's surprising. Don't know what it means but it does mean something.

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