7 ms·

Is this disagreeing with Blake Irvine. See https://www.google.co.uk/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/09/godaddy-immigration-h-1b-visa/%3Fsource%3Ddam?client

Is this disagreeing with Blake Irvine. See https://www.google.co.uk/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/09/godaddy-immigration-h-1b-visa/%3Fsource%3Ddam?client=safari https://www.google.co.uk/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02... This is the man who refers to H1B visas as genius visas. I have worked with many Indian outsourcing companies and while talented people do exist, calling their employees genius is wholly inaccurate (as would be calling most software devs in the Western world genius). I did laugh when I read irving's original post on LinkedIn and some former employer of GoDaddy expressed just how Mr Irving was using his H1B allocation I.e. to get the same job done for less dollar...

kls 10y ago
The problem is the incentive system. I have never been known for my lack of directness and in given so, I used to work with an Indian developer who was very good at his job. So one day I just flat out asked him, I said Karthick why do a good portion of Indian developers suck, his response floored me. Without missing a beat he responded, look it's a misaligned incentive system. When I go back to India the first question I am asked is how many people do you manage. If I go on a date, it's the first words out of a fathers mouth. He went on to tell me that you see Indian has remains of the cast system still culturally in place and this stems from that way of thinking, but it has morphed into changing your cast by moving up the corporate ladder. The fastest way to managing people is IT given it's over representation in the Indian economy. So what you have is a bunch of would be MBA's getting tech degrees so they can do their time and make it to management. They have no passion for technology and look at it as doing their residency for management. Then he looked at me and said, with a laugh. Put Simply they go into IT to get laid. Whereas I went into IT to become and American, because and Indian guy with citizenship is John Don (he meant Don Juan).
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  That's a fascinating perspective. Thanks for sharing!
- aviraldg 10y ago
  As a current CS student from India, I can completely back this theory. Most in my class are very sure they want to pursue a career in Computer Science, but have little to say if you ask them why. A good fraction of them, every year, end up joining consultancy firms in nontechnical roles, or (what I hate more) in HR - and are perfectly fine with it. Computers in India are not associated with the amazing feeling most of us had the first time we wrote a program that worked correctly. They are associated with a guaranteed (heh) paycheck and a comfortable life, and the quality of the work produced in this fashion is a natural result of that attitude. The outsourcing industry is at the centre of this idea, but it also supports a large number of degree mills and certificate farms producing a mind boggling number of absolutely useless "computer engineers" giving all of us the reputation we do. I, for one, would love to see companies like TCS and Infosys gone.
  - secfirstmd 10y ago
    Sounds like most of the people I know who working banking and finance.
  - kirRoyale 10y ago
    Damn there are some really solid responses in this thread... Thanks for the input
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      Wait till you hear the stories feom inside those three companies and more mentioned in the article! You'll be surprised :-)
  - sanketdasgupta 10y ago
    Can confirm all of the above. I study in an average college in India, and it seems the only motivation for studying computer science is to get a "lucrative" job at an outsourcing company. Getting a job at an top outsourcing company is considered pretty respectful by all of society. The interviews are pretty rough too. The screening is done based on an aptitude quiz (it's an entirely different thing that is hardly related to the CS curriculum) and once you crack that, the "smartness" factor gets involved. I have had people confess to me that they got the job just because their english speaking skills were good. A lot of this is due to the fact, which I think is the primary motivation, that the salaries offered at these companies are actually quite high compared to other markets, all you have to do is shell out four years somehow. This leads to students not even caring about computer science as a subject, but a ticket to the "IT dream", if you will. Also, note that this represents the "average" colleges of India, which is what most of India is filled with. The demand for studying engineering becomes higher every year, and to cope up with that, engineering colleges are built of nowhere with no real regard for education.
- manarth 10y ago
  I think pay is also a factor. IT is listed as the third-best paying job in India [1]. In the USA, it's not even in the top 10 [2]. In the UK, it barely scrapes into the top 10, and that's for IT Directors [3]. In India, the pay is a great incentive for people who aren't necessarily interested in tech. [1] http://www.chakreview.com/Education/Top-10-highest-paying-jobs-in-India http://www.chakreview.com/Education/Top-10-highest-paying-jo... [2] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/29/the-10-highest-paid-jobs-in-america http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/29/the-10-highes... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/dec/02/highest-paid-jobs-2015 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/dec/02/highest-paid-j...
  - koolba 10y ago
    The US News article has eight different medical professions in the top ten. It's rounded out with Psychiatrist as number nine (which I'd argue is medical as well) and "Chief Executive" as number ten. If you consolidate nine of them as "Medical", I bet IT, or some variant of it, would be in the top ten.
    - vinay427 10y ago
      > Psychiatrist as number nine (which I'd argue is medical as well) No argument needed. In the US, psychiatrists are fully-licensed physicians.
    - daviddavis 10y ago
      Scroll down a bit further and they have a list of the top 10 non-medical professions. IT makes it on the list at #7 with "Computer and Information Systems Managers". Still not great I'd argue.
    - sjg007 10y ago
      Yep.... if you are a US citizen, for the money, go to med school, everything else is overrated.
      - Declanomous 10y ago
- humanrebar 10y ago
  For what it's worth, maybe the U.S. would have better employment among young men if the "IT is in demand and steady work" meme found a place here.
  - calvinbhai 10y ago
    Americans have many better options than IT to make a good living. Many of those options though, are slowly getting eaten up by tech (Amazon, Walmart - Jet) In India, IT sector escaped the clutches of red tape, and thrived. So it became a very good option to make a living.
    - X86BSD 10y ago
      Seconded. In fact I am in full agreement with mike row from the tv show "dirty jobs". There are plenty of jobs in the trades that pay damn good money. Americans just aren't doing them. Plumbers, carpenters, hvac, electrician, etc. Somehow Americans have evolved to see these jobs as beneath them or jobs that people don't respect. But the fact is trade skills are in high demand and if you've ever needed trade skill labor you know they make a damn good living. America needs to give up on this nonsense that only white collar STEM jobs are what kids should be training for. America needs to BUILD things again. Boys and girls need trade skills. /soapbox
      - humanrebar 10y ago
        My brother is an electrician and makes worse money than I've seen administrative assistants make in tech shops. Partly, many of those trades have ceilings. Your salary doesn't always scale with skill and ambition like it can in IT.
        X86BSD 10y ago
        I don't see how that is possible unless you work for someone else perhaps. If you are a licensed, bonded electrician and work for yourself (which a sizable portion of trade workers do) your earning potential is only limited by the amount of work you are willing to do. Stay busy and you make a lot, work one day a week and you starve. YMMV.
- supersan 10y ago
  You're absolutely right about this and I can attest. Whenever I tell someone I run my own software business the first question I'm asked is how many employees do I have? Nobody cares about the revenue of the sites, it's just that if I have more than 10 employees then you're successful. So in India a person making 1 mil / month is less successful than someone who has a company of 10+ employees that is drowning in debt.
  - fjdlwlv 10y ago
    I'd rather you pay 10 salaries than just 1 too :-)
- vikascoder 10y ago
  I am sorry but your token Indian is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. First of all regarding your broad hypothesis,(which comes with a good dose of judgment on the side), "why do a good portion of Indian Developers suck". To quote a similar question, I would ask you "Why are great portion (50%) of Americans turned racist in 2017?". But I won't ask that question because as I know, things in life for which you have a high confidence in having a fantastic one line explanation usually turns out that those are crappy theories. Hence I don't believe in one line explanations to complicated questions. Putting that aside, there is a Fundamental Law of Incompetence which says, "In any random sample of a group of people in any country, the amount of incompetents is a constant". We have a lot of so called incompetent people because A) you may probably outsource to the cheapest bidder/contractor B) We have 1.3 billion people, of course a large number are incompetent. I have worked with outsourcing teams in Romania, and the law still holds, I have worked in Germany and the US, and the law still holds. It has yet to happen that I have walked into a country and observed, "Holy shit, so many geniuses are around here, what kind of Cola do you guys drink?". Now you may know that there are other "legit" multinationals who have captive R&D Centers in India which are awesomely working cause hey each country has a thick creamy layer of talent and those companies employ them. Case in point, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Google, Adobe's big campus near Delhi, Amazon etc etc. Plus a whole slew of startups popping up in India. So your token Indian thinks that all of those people are retarded? What irks me about your guy is not that he is spouting what is the common understanding of the lot. But you are possibly talking to a regular uninformed guy with pet peeves about family and caste system. I know quite a few of those. What those kids need is a spinal surgery. Did he mention how crap the infrastructure is in most of the Universities in India? How shoddy the teaching is? Oh it all starts with the School system, which is the base factory of parent/caste/society oppressed individuals who just blame everything else than their own free will to progress and learn in life. That's the reason why so many smart people tend to migrate in order to do a Masters or a Phd program because University Research does not exist in India (even in the top 10 universities). The boom in IT sector in India circa 1995 was a god send for so many impoverished but educated Indians who could now afford to literally have a decent work environment and pay and that brought so many of us out of poverty. The much derided call centers brought employment to a range of blue collared workers who put their balls to the walls and attempted and mastered not only fluent English to some extent but to copy the American Accent. Now all these whiny newly born Indians with their trust funds piss all over that fact. I know you may think outsourcing is bad and call centers sucked, but hey market forces will decide that. No one asked any US multinationals to make your underwear in China, they all did by their own free will. The world economy will shift focus to something else. I by no means want to engage with you harshly, you have a genuine curiosity about the subject but I would implore people on hacker news at least to think about the World in a more refined way.
- sumedh 10y ago
  > I said Karthick why do a good portion of Indian developers suck If you peanuts you get monkeys. The Indian developers who dont suck are not working in your company because they are getting a good salary somewhere else.
- raincom 10y ago
  If 'caste system' is responsible for Indian IT workers, what do you think of Americans who have been 'scheming' from high school to get into HYP, then to consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), IB (GS, JPM), PE (KKR, BS), hedgfuns. Of course, you don't see a caste system in the States. You make it sound like 'every human being is not selfish' or 'most of the human beings are not selfish'. Just work in the service Industry, you see the turnover rate just because people want to make $2 per more elsewhere. The reality is that caste system never exists, nor does it exist in India. Castes exist, however.
rushabh 10y ago
"Outsourcing" covers a wide range of companies based on quality and pricing, so it depends on which end of the spectrum you are. Unfortunately the people who end of migrating to the United States on an H1B do form the cream of developers. Infact Indian outsourcing companies use H1Bs as an incentive. I for one, will be happy if the stakes are increased. This will ensure more smart people stay back in India and fix local problems.
- sumedh 10y ago
  > Unfortunately the people who end of migrating to the United States on an H1B do form the cream of developers. Well that is not necessarily true when it comes to Indian outsourcing companies. If a person has a very good rapport with his manager that person would be preferred over someone who is more technically competent but does not enjoy the same rapport with the manager.
adamc 10y ago
I've only worked with H1B visa folks who came on as contractors... while they were mostly not terrible, I didn't find them to be noticeably better than the folks we hire, with one exception (and he just became a citizen). I'm not bothered by immigrants, but the whole "genius" thing is a lie.
- X86BSD 10y ago
  Plus I'll add if they are geniuses then they should have a min. starting salary of $500,000 attached to their visa. I mean, they are einsteins after all. Right?
Spooky23 10y ago
The "genius" is allowing people like Irving to print money on the backs of kids from India. I recently coordinated a operational outsourcing task where a big vendor took over some specific functions. They sent over these two kids on H1-B visas who are brilliant, but are making something like $25/hr (probably 18% of bill rate) and work 20-30 hours of overtime. Their subcontractor/pimp probably skims more than they make. My grandfathers immigrated here from Ireland as a chauffeur and laborer and retired as a successful pub owner and senior civil servant. That's the story of America. Immigration is great -- we should just do a lottery for green cards and let people move here without the corporate overseer. I don't care where your from... you should be here as a free person.

kls 10y ago

The problem is the incentive system. I have never been known for my lack of directness and in given so, I used to work with an Indian developer who was very good at his job. So one day I just flat out asked him, I said Karthick why do a good portion of Indian developers suck, his response floored me. Without missing a beat he responded, look it's a misaligned incentive system. When I go back to India the first question I am asked is how many people do you manage. If I go on a date, it's the first words out of a fathers mouth. He went on to tell me that you see Indian has remains of the cast system still culturally in place and this stems from that way of thinking, but it has morphed into changing your cast by moving up the corporate ladder. The fastest way to managing people is IT given it's over representation in the Indian economy. So what you have is a bunch of would be MBA's getting tech degrees so they can do their time and make it to management. They have no passion for technology and look at it as doing their residency for management. Then he looked at me and said, with a laugh. Put Simply they go into IT to get laid. Whereas I went into IT to become and American, because and Indian guy with citizenship is John Don (he meant Don Juan).

unityByFreedom 10y ago
That's a fascinating perspective. Thanks for sharing!
aviraldg 10y ago
As a current CS student from India, I can completely back this theory. Most in my class are very sure they want to pursue a career in Computer Science, but have little to say if you ask them why. A good fraction of them, every year, end up joining consultancy firms in nontechnical roles, or (what I hate more) in HR - and are perfectly fine with it. Computers in India are not associated with the amazing feeling most of us had the first time we wrote a program that worked correctly. They are associated with a guaranteed (heh) paycheck and a comfortable life, and the quality of the work produced in this fashion is a natural result of that attitude. The outsourcing industry is at the centre of this idea, but it also supports a large number of degree mills and certificate farms producing a mind boggling number of absolutely useless "computer engineers" giving all of us the reputation we do. I, for one, would love to see companies like TCS and Infosys gone.
- secfirstmd 10y ago
  Sounds like most of the people I know who working banking and finance.
- kirRoyale 10y ago
  Damn there are some really solid responses in this thread... Thanks for the input
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Wait till you hear the stories feom inside those three companies and more mentioned in the article! You'll be surprised :-)
- sanketdasgupta 10y ago
  Can confirm all of the above. I study in an average college in India, and it seems the only motivation for studying computer science is to get a "lucrative" job at an outsourcing company. Getting a job at an top outsourcing company is considered pretty respectful by all of society. The interviews are pretty rough too. The screening is done based on an aptitude quiz (it's an entirely different thing that is hardly related to the CS curriculum) and once you crack that, the "smartness" factor gets involved. I have had people confess to me that they got the job just because their english speaking skills were good. A lot of this is due to the fact, which I think is the primary motivation, that the salaries offered at these companies are actually quite high compared to other markets, all you have to do is shell out four years somehow. This leads to students not even caring about computer science as a subject, but a ticket to the "IT dream", if you will. Also, note that this represents the "average" colleges of India, which is what most of India is filled with. The demand for studying engineering becomes higher every year, and to cope up with that, engineering colleges are built of nowhere with no real regard for education.
manarth 10y ago
I think pay is also a factor. IT is listed as the third-best paying job in India [1]. In the USA, it's not even in the top 10 [2]. In the UK, it barely scrapes into the top 10, and that's for IT Directors [3]. In India, the pay is a great incentive for people who aren't necessarily interested in tech. [1] http://www.chakreview.com/Education/Top-10-highest-paying-jobs-in-India http://www.chakreview.com/Education/Top-10-highest-paying-jo... [2] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/29/the-10-highest-paid-jobs-in-america http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/29/the-10-highes... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/dec/02/highest-paid-jobs-2015 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/dec/02/highest-paid-j...
- koolba 10y ago
  The US News article has eight different medical professions in the top ten. It's rounded out with Psychiatrist as number nine (which I'd argue is medical as well) and "Chief Executive" as number ten. If you consolidate nine of them as "Medical", I bet IT, or some variant of it, would be in the top ten.
  - vinay427 10y ago
    > Psychiatrist as number nine (which I'd argue is medical as well) No argument needed. In the US, psychiatrists are fully-licensed physicians.
  - daviddavis 10y ago
    Scroll down a bit further and they have a list of the top 10 non-medical professions. IT makes it on the list at #7 with "Computer and Information Systems Managers". Still not great I'd argue.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Yep.... if you are a US citizen, for the money, go to med school, everything else is overrated.
    - Declanomous 10y ago
humanrebar 10y ago
For what it's worth, maybe the U.S. would have better employment among young men if the "IT is in demand and steady work" meme found a place here.
- calvinbhai 10y ago
  Americans have many better options than IT to make a good living. Many of those options though, are slowly getting eaten up by tech (Amazon, Walmart - Jet) In India, IT sector escaped the clutches of red tape, and thrived. So it became a very good option to make a living.
  - X86BSD 10y ago
    Seconded. In fact I am in full agreement with mike row from the tv show "dirty jobs". There are plenty of jobs in the trades that pay damn good money. Americans just aren't doing them. Plumbers, carpenters, hvac, electrician, etc. Somehow Americans have evolved to see these jobs as beneath them or jobs that people don't respect. But the fact is trade skills are in high demand and if you've ever needed trade skill labor you know they make a damn good living. America needs to give up on this nonsense that only white collar STEM jobs are what kids should be training for. America needs to BUILD things again. Boys and girls need trade skills. /soapbox
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      My brother is an electrician and makes worse money than I've seen administrative assistants make in tech shops. Partly, many of those trades have ceilings. Your salary doesn't always scale with skill and ambition like it can in IT.
      - X86BSD 10y ago
        I don't see how that is possible unless you work for someone else perhaps. If you are a licensed, bonded electrician and work for yourself (which a sizable portion of trade workers do) your earning potential is only limited by the amount of work you are willing to do. Stay busy and you make a lot, work one day a week and you starve. YMMV.
supersan 10y ago
You're absolutely right about this and I can attest. Whenever I tell someone I run my own software business the first question I'm asked is how many employees do I have? Nobody cares about the revenue of the sites, it's just that if I have more than 10 employees then you're successful. So in India a person making 1 mil / month is less successful than someone who has a company of 10+ employees that is drowning in debt.
- fjdlwlv 10y ago
  I'd rather you pay 10 salaries than just 1 too :-)
vikascoder 10y ago
I am sorry but your token Indian is not entirely wrong but also not entirely correct. First of all regarding your broad hypothesis,(which comes with a good dose of judgment on the side), "why do a good portion of Indian Developers suck". To quote a similar question, I would ask you "Why are great portion (50%) of Americans turned racist in 2017?". But I won't ask that question because as I know, things in life for which you have a high confidence in having a fantastic one line explanation usually turns out that those are crappy theories. Hence I don't believe in one line explanations to complicated questions. Putting that aside, there is a Fundamental Law of Incompetence which says, "In any random sample of a group of people in any country, the amount of incompetents is a constant". We have a lot of so called incompetent people because A) you may probably outsource to the cheapest bidder/contractor B) We have 1.3 billion people, of course a large number are incompetent. I have worked with outsourcing teams in Romania, and the law still holds, I have worked in Germany and the US, and the law still holds. It has yet to happen that I have walked into a country and observed, "Holy shit, so many geniuses are around here, what kind of Cola do you guys drink?". Now you may know that there are other "legit" multinationals who have captive R&D Centers in India which are awesomely working cause hey each country has a thick creamy layer of talent and those companies employ them. Case in point, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Google, Adobe's big campus near Delhi, Amazon etc etc. Plus a whole slew of startups popping up in India. So your token Indian thinks that all of those people are retarded? What irks me about your guy is not that he is spouting what is the common understanding of the lot. But you are possibly talking to a regular uninformed guy with pet peeves about family and caste system. I know quite a few of those. What those kids need is a spinal surgery. Did he mention how crap the infrastructure is in most of the Universities in India? How shoddy the teaching is? Oh it all starts with the School system, which is the base factory of parent/caste/society oppressed individuals who just blame everything else than their own free will to progress and learn in life. That's the reason why so many smart people tend to migrate in order to do a Masters or a Phd program because University Research does not exist in India (even in the top 10 universities). The boom in IT sector in India circa 1995 was a god send for so many impoverished but educated Indians who could now afford to literally have a decent work environment and pay and that brought so many of us out of poverty. The much derided call centers brought employment to a range of blue collared workers who put their balls to the walls and attempted and mastered not only fluent English to some extent but to copy the American Accent. Now all these whiny newly born Indians with their trust funds piss all over that fact. I know you may think outsourcing is bad and call centers sucked, but hey market forces will decide that. No one asked any US multinationals to make your underwear in China, they all did by their own free will. The world economy will shift focus to something else. I by no means want to engage with you harshly, you have a genuine curiosity about the subject but I would implore people on hacker news at least to think about the World in a more refined way.
sumedh 10y ago
> I said Karthick why do a good portion of Indian developers suck If you peanuts you get monkeys. The Indian developers who dont suck are not working in your company because they are getting a good salary somewhere else.
raincom 10y ago
If 'caste system' is responsible for Indian IT workers, what do you think of Americans who have been 'scheming' from high school to get into HYP, then to consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), IB (GS, JPM), PE (KKR, BS), hedgfuns. Of course, you don't see a caste system in the States. You make it sound like 'every human being is not selfish' or 'most of the human beings are not selfish'. Just work in the service Industry, you see the turnover rate just because people want to make $2 per more elsewhere. The reality is that caste system never exists, nor does it exist in India. Castes exist, however.

rushabh 10y ago

"Outsourcing" covers a wide range of companies based on quality and pricing, so it depends on which end of the spectrum you are. Unfortunately the people who end of migrating to the United States on an H1B do form the cream of developers. Infact Indian outsourcing companies use H1Bs as an incentive. I for one, will be happy if the stakes are increased. This will ensure more smart people stay back in India and fix local problems.

sumedh 10y ago
> Unfortunately the people who end of migrating to the United States on an H1B do form the cream of developers. Well that is not necessarily true when it comes to Indian outsourcing companies. If a person has a very good rapport with his manager that person would be preferred over someone who is more technically competent but does not enjoy the same rapport with the manager.

adamc 10y ago

I've only worked with H1B visa folks who came on as contractors... while they were mostly not terrible, I didn't find them to be noticeably better than the folks we hire, with one exception (and he just became a citizen). I'm not bothered by immigrants, but the whole "genius" thing is a lie.

X86BSD 10y ago
Plus I'll add if they are geniuses then they should have a min. starting salary of $500,000 attached to their visa. I mean, they are einsteins after all. Right?

Spooky23 10y ago

The "genius" is allowing people like Irving to print money on the backs of kids from India. I recently coordinated a operational outsourcing task where a big vendor took over some specific functions. They sent over these two kids on H1-B visas who are brilliant, but are making something like $25/hr (probably 18% of bill rate) and work 20-30 hours of overtime. Their subcontractor/pimp probably skims more than they make. My grandfathers immigrated here from Ireland as a chauffeur and laborer and retired as a successful pub owner and senior civil servant. That's the story of America. Immigration is great -- we should just do a lottery for green cards and let people move here without the corporate overseer. I don't care where your from... you should be here as a free person.