5 ms·

I love the characterization that most if not all of these people are highly skilled and highly prized talents. My experience working with many over the years is

I love the characterization that most if not all of these people are highly skilled and highly prized talents. My experience working with many over the years is quite the opposite. That is not to say that there are not a few good talents here and there, but to say that most of them are good or above average developers would be innacurate. I recently started working on a codebase that was developed by 200 on shore and off shore Indian contractors over the course of a few years. What a disaster. And no engineering disipline whatsoever to mitigate it.

headcanon 10y ago
If you had a codebase that was developed over a few years by 200 different remote contractors, thats a recipe for disaster regardless of their nationality.
- nsgi 10y ago
  Why should it be any more of a disaster than an open source project?
  - devnonymous 10y ago
    I suggest that you (re)read Cathedral and the Bazaar if you really are curious about the difference between a project worked on by 200 odd developers in a company and an open source project. The more we learn the less we know.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    I would wager that open source projects are most likely some of the best run projects in the world.
  - zeroxfe 10y ago
    For one thing, an open source project typically has a stable set of one or more core contributors, who really care about the project.
  - mehwoot 10y ago
    An open source project is primarily composed of people writing some software out of passion with few hard deadlines. A team of 200 developers, some off shore, are developing in order to get paid for a client who likely has strict time and budget constraints. I'm not sure I could come up with many scenarios that I would expect to see a wider gap in code quality, even if the developers were the same level of skill.
    - rak00n 10y ago
      Also it's easier to nope a bad decision for OSS. Office politics makes it way difficult.
nedwin 10y ago
My experience is quite different. Almost every Indian-born engineer I have worked with has been hard working, intelligent, skilled and experienced. This is reflected in not only the volumes of Indian candidates hired in SV but also their seniority with a disproportionate number of South East Asian CTOs at fast growth companies.
- johnnyb9 10y ago
  Maybe that's the case with Google or Facebook or Amazon. For all the other medium or small businesses for which these visas predominate (albeit indirectly), my experience has been quite the opposite.
  - nedwin 10y ago
    Why do you think that is?
    - jimbokun 10y ago
      Just a guess, but maybe because Amazon, Google, Facebook hire better developers in general?
    - bsg75 10y ago
      As with any employee, you get what you pay for. If the program is used to obtain cheap labor, quality will be affected.
ardit33 10y ago
my experience is quiet the opposite. Almost all foreign engineers I worked with, were way above average. But, it was mainly the companies that I worked for: They cared to hire the best they could (independent of ethnicity or country of origin). Their foreign staff was quiet diverse as well (not dominated by one country/ethnicity). The only company that I worked where this was not the case, it was a company that didn't care much about the quality of engineers, and it was friends hiring friends type of things (mostly Indians hiring each other). The quality of engineering become poor, and I left after a bit.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Most companies bring in these guys to save money. When you're paying a body shop $50/hr, you're getting a drone.
aub3bhat 10y ago
I worked at a very well reputed Unicorn. And everyone up the hierarchy including the CTO were recent arrivals. All were indians, except one who is russian. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning-Kruger yourself and vastly overestimating your own skill relative to others. Before you trash everyone from a specific nationality in xenophobic manner, Care to post your own genius qualifications? Maybe we can then determine what you mean when you say average in context of your occupation/employer. Somehow implicit xenophobia and racism is fine on Hacker News as long as its directed against asians and indians.
gorkemyurt 10y ago
a stanford undergrad needs to apply for H1-B as well.. which is ridiculous
- curiouscat321 10y ago
  So where does the line get drawn? Foreigners with Stanford degrees don't need visas but those else where do? What about MIT? Arizona State? If you establish an arbitrary boundary, it won't make sense.
  - gorkemyurt 10y ago
    4 year STEM degree from an american university seems like a good place to start.. its not enough but better than a fake or real engineering degree from somewhere else. Because how the lottery is structured, anyone who went to an american college for undergrad (4 years) plus two years of OPT, has lower chances than someone who just did a masters degree in an american university (1 year), and equal chances with anyone else in the world. Anyone who spent first 6 years of their adult life in the US is much more likely to adjust to the american lifestyle than than anyone else.
    - HarryHirsch 10y ago
      4 year STEM degree from an american university? Good Lord. So someone from Oxford, EMBL Heidelberg or Lomonossov University in Moscow is out, whereas someone from any unranked place in the US that no one sane has ever heard of is in? Half of the students that graduate from my department cannot calculate stoichiometry reliably, and they are a state college, issue a four-year degree and are properly accredited.
      - gorkemyurt 10y ago
        No no they are not out.. just give them priority over literally any college in the world. By no means ideal, if it was up to me I would allow all forms of immigration (maybe in return of a small social safety net fee) just trying to brainstorm easy improvements to the current system.
464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
Completely agree. I've been forced to rescue a number of projects that have gone completely off the rails. Nearly invariably in my experience its because someone decided that their American workers were too expensive so they decided to either hire in foreign workers, or offshore the work to a contractor. In every situation where I've seen that situation happen, projects go completely off the rails. I don't think its because their foreign, but, I think people expect too much of these foreign workers (because they were getting that from local workers). They require far more supervision, both on a technical level (making sure the code they commit is sane) and on a managerial level (making sure they're actually committing code), and by far the worst offender, actually making meaningful progress towards the goal. To explain what I mean by meaningful progress, I was brought in to figure out what was going on with a telephony app project that was off shored to Indian developers (think: twilio but definitely not twilio). The team of about 20 offshore developers had been plugging away for over a year working on the code at that point. Measured by things like code commits, they were amazingly productive. Thing was, there was no actual usable code. Firstly, the technology the team had been working with on both the frontend and the backend had changed multiple times, converting frameworks and methodologies repeatedly. Think: completely dumping a prototype-d Python framework application (with 100000s lines of template-generated MVC code) of and deciding to reimplement in Ruby-on-Rails, then after converting all their MVC concepts to 100000s of lines of MVC in RoR, they then converted to a symphony PHP framework (I wish I was kidding). When I arrived, the team was mulling switching to yet another framework (I want to say converting to nodejs on the backend?). The frontend had gone through many similar revisions as well. The thing is, by many metrics, the team was actually amazingly productive. They had lots of meetings, had tons of commits, had massive numbers of bugs found/reported/fixed. But, they had no idea about how to make the core of their product. They had no ability to answer basic questions, like, "how are you going to interface with the PSTN?" or even, like, "what database server are you planning on running in production?" Everything up to that point was based around running SQLite on their local dev machines. They didn't understand why they couldn't just continue to do so in production and moreover had no idea why (ORMs aside) their choice of database server might be important. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are good and great Indian (and other foreign) developers. I just don't think that they are more common than great local developers and moreover I don't think they are ever cheaper than great local developers.
sremani 10y ago
If it top tier companies generally speaking the talent level is there, but if you are interacting with Offshoring company, it is usually a hit and miss.
maxxxxx 10y ago
From my experience the H-1Bs from bodyshops like Infosys and TCS are often not every good. The H-1Bs directly hired by companies are often way over average. It's pretty much directly correlated with salary.

headcanon 10y ago

If you had a codebase that was developed over a few years by 200 different remote contractors, thats a recipe for disaster regardless of their nationality.

nsgi 10y ago
Why should it be any more of a disaster than an open source project?
- devnonymous 10y ago
  I suggest that you (re)read Cathedral and the Bazaar if you really are curious about the difference between a project worked on by 200 odd developers in a company and an open source project. The more we learn the less we know.
- mistermann 10y ago
  I would wager that open source projects are most likely some of the best run projects in the world.
- zeroxfe 10y ago
  For one thing, an open source project typically has a stable set of one or more core contributors, who really care about the project.
- mehwoot 10y ago
  An open source project is primarily composed of people writing some software out of passion with few hard deadlines. A team of 200 developers, some off shore, are developing in order to get paid for a client who likely has strict time and budget constraints. I'm not sure I could come up with many scenarios that I would expect to see a wider gap in code quality, even if the developers were the same level of skill.
  - rak00n 10y ago
    Also it's easier to nope a bad decision for OSS. Office politics makes it way difficult.

nedwin 10y ago

My experience is quite different. Almost every Indian-born engineer I have worked with has been hard working, intelligent, skilled and experienced. This is reflected in not only the volumes of Indian candidates hired in SV but also their seniority with a disproportionate number of South East Asian CTOs at fast growth companies.

johnnyb9 10y ago
Maybe that's the case with Google or Facebook or Amazon. For all the other medium or small businesses for which these visas predominate (albeit indirectly), my experience has been quite the opposite.
- nedwin 10y ago
  Why do you think that is?
  - jimbokun 10y ago
    Just a guess, but maybe because Amazon, Google, Facebook hire better developers in general?
  - bsg75 10y ago
    As with any employee, you get what you pay for. If the program is used to obtain cheap labor, quality will be affected.

ardit33 10y ago

my experience is quiet the opposite. Almost all foreign engineers I worked with, were way above average. But, it was mainly the companies that I worked for: They cared to hire the best they could (independent of ethnicity or country of origin). Their foreign staff was quiet diverse as well (not dominated by one country/ethnicity). The only company that I worked where this was not the case, it was a company that didn't care much about the quality of engineers, and it was friends hiring friends type of things (mostly Indians hiring each other). The quality of engineering become poor, and I left after a bit.

Spooky23 10y ago
Most companies bring in these guys to save money. When you're paying a body shop $50/hr, you're getting a drone.

aub3bhat 10y ago

I worked at a very well reputed Unicorn. And everyone up the hierarchy including the CTO were recent arrivals. All were indians, except one who is russian. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning-Kruger yourself and vastly overestimating your own skill relative to others. Before you trash everyone from a specific nationality in xenophobic manner, Care to post your own genius qualifications? Maybe we can then determine what you mean when you say average in context of your occupation/employer. Somehow implicit xenophobia and racism is fine on Hacker News as long as its directed against asians and indians.

gorkemyurt 10y ago

a stanford undergrad needs to apply for H1-B as well.. which is ridiculous

curiouscat321 10y ago
So where does the line get drawn? Foreigners with Stanford degrees don't need visas but those else where do? What about MIT? Arizona State? If you establish an arbitrary boundary, it won't make sense.
- gorkemyurt 10y ago
  4 year STEM degree from an american university seems like a good place to start.. its not enough but better than a fake or real engineering degree from somewhere else. Because how the lottery is structured, anyone who went to an american college for undergrad (4 years) plus two years of OPT, has lower chances than someone who just did a masters degree in an american university (1 year), and equal chances with anyone else in the world. Anyone who spent first 6 years of their adult life in the US is much more likely to adjust to the american lifestyle than than anyone else.
  - HarryHirsch 10y ago
    4 year STEM degree from an american university? Good Lord. So someone from Oxford, EMBL Heidelberg or Lomonossov University in Moscow is out, whereas someone from any unranked place in the US that no one sane has ever heard of is in? Half of the students that graduate from my department cannot calculate stoichiometry reliably, and they are a state college, issue a four-year degree and are properly accredited.
    - gorkemyurt 10y ago
      No no they are not out.. just give them priority over literally any college in the world. By no means ideal, if it was up to me I would allow all forms of immigration (maybe in return of a small social safety net fee) just trying to brainstorm easy improvements to the current system.

464192002d7fe1c 10y ago

Completely agree. I've been forced to rescue a number of projects that have gone completely off the rails. Nearly invariably in my experience its because someone decided that their American workers were too expensive so they decided to either hire in foreign workers, or offshore the work to a contractor. In every situation where I've seen that situation happen, projects go completely off the rails. I don't think its because their foreign, but, I think people expect too much of these foreign workers (because they were getting that from local workers). They require far more supervision, both on a technical level (making sure the code they commit is sane) and on a managerial level (making sure they're actually committing code), and by far the worst offender, actually making meaningful progress towards the goal. To explain what I mean by meaningful progress, I was brought in to figure out what was going on with a telephony app project that was off shored to Indian developers (think: twilio but definitely not twilio). The team of about 20 offshore developers had been plugging away for over a year working on the code at that point. Measured by things like code commits, they were amazingly productive. Thing was, there was no actual usable code. Firstly, the technology the team had been working with on both the frontend and the backend had changed multiple times, converting frameworks and methodologies repeatedly. Think: completely dumping a prototype-d Python framework application (with 100000s lines of template-generated MVC code) of and deciding to reimplement in Ruby-on-Rails, then after converting all their MVC concepts to 100000s of lines of MVC in RoR, they then converted to a symphony PHP framework (I wish I was kidding). When I arrived, the team was mulling switching to yet another framework (I want to say converting to nodejs on the backend?). The frontend had gone through many similar revisions as well. The thing is, by many metrics, the team was actually amazingly productive. They had lots of meetings, had tons of commits, had massive numbers of bugs found/reported/fixed. But, they had no idea about how to make the core of their product. They had no ability to answer basic questions, like, "how are you going to interface with the PSTN?" or even, like, "what database server are you planning on running in production?" Everything up to that point was based around running SQLite on their local dev machines. They didn't understand why they couldn't just continue to do so in production and moreover had no idea why (ORMs aside) their choice of database server might be important. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are good and great Indian (and other foreign) developers. I just don't think that they are more common than great local developers and moreover I don't think they are ever cheaper than great local developers.

sremani 10y ago

If it top tier companies generally speaking the talent level is there, but if you are interacting with Offshoring company, it is usually a hit and miss.

maxxxxx 10y ago

From my experience the H-1Bs from bodyshops like Infosys and TCS are often not every good. The H-1Bs directly hired by companies are often way over average. It's pretty much directly correlated with salary.