9 ms·

Oooh, offshore standards of excellence at American developer prices! EDIT: India's a huge place, and there must therefore be some exceptionally strong develope

Oooh, offshore standards of excellence at American developer prices! EDIT: India's a huge place, and there must therefore be some exceptionally strong developers there. My experience of dealing with Wipro, TCS, etc, tells me that these companies are very effective at either filtering out any engineering talent, or alternatively simply crushing the talent of those who they employ.

thiri 10y ago
So why are they a 150 Billion dollar industry? They must be doing something right.
- peteretep 10y ago
  What they're doing right is providing minimum viable technical ability at bargain basement prices. One wonders how that's going to work in a situation where their costs are dramatically higher because they're hiring Americans.
  - thiri 10y ago
    Maybe the cost of an American has come down. Maybe Americans are willing to work at the rates Indians have been quietly working at. As Jack Ma would say if the damn phone costs 50 bucks to make why should an American business think it can forever keep selling it for 600 bucks. Things rebalance all the time.
    - peteretep 10y ago
      > Maybe the cost of an American has > come down. Maybe Americans are willing > to work at the rates Indians have been > quietly working at. They haven't, and they're not.
      - thiri 10y ago
        I beg to differ. We are seeing a rebalancing. American's don't need to be paid their 100k a year to live a middle class life style if a Chinese and Indian worker is able to live a middle class life style cheaper.
        peteretep 10y ago
        You appear to be confusing what you would like to be true today with what's actually true today.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - british_india 10y ago
      On the contrary. Even in Indiana, domestic developer salaries are skyrocketing. Also, nobody--no American, especially--has any desire to work for Infosys.
- ccozan 10y ago
  it seems that in this case, two wrongs show as right: 1. The CIO/CTOs are too easily pushing the responsibility to such Indian IT companies. You know, easy to blame someone else and save money in the same time. And get some shares up too. 2. The Indian companies use very deceptive means to capture this market. Simply, they lie about their competencies. It happened in multiple occasions when we got send from the indian 'partner' two 'best' person they had. They were suppose to be 10+ Linux experienced. Believe me, when I showed them the command line and I gave them a random, but real, task they just simply stared and didn't know where to start. After 10 minutes ( had to attend something else), I found them heavily browsing SO. Case closed!
  - thiri 10y ago
    I know what you are talking about but I have also seen the other side of this story. I have seen the kinds of clients Indian IT handles and quality of the software they have produced. You can be more or less guaranteed your bank, insurance company, hospital, airline/transportation systems, phone/internet utility, entertainment/sports IT is all totally built and run by Indian IT. The process is chaotic. The first iteration is a disaster almost always. But western management persist through that first and second and sometimes third iteration of garbage because the cost benefit is just impossible to ignore. And guess what by the 4th or 5th iteration things actually work. What most people don't realize is there is no big difference between this story and the Facebook or Google story. In one case its a bunch of kids who don't know what the command line is thrown into a bank or insurance or manufacturing companies IT system and its a trial by fire. Not knowing what the command line is has nothing to do with how smart/adaptable the kid is who gets thrown into the deep end. Please note this is exactly what investors are betting on when they dump a bunch of cash on a bunch of kids at a future Facebook or Google. The kid might know what the command line is but that's not what investors are betting on. They are betting on the kid being smart and adaptable when thrown into the fire. They are willing to put up with the first couple iterations being disasters and sooner or later if you bet on the right kid things work. Are there unintended consequences when things get built this way? Of course yes Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a solution to fake news, celeb worship, hate speech, cyber bullying on his platform. But (most)people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Same rules should apply to the indian kid running your bank servers that just got breached.
giis 10y ago
>alternatively simply crushing the talent of those who they employ. That's spot on. India does have strong developers, after few years in work, their talent is intentionally crushed by management. They don't need talented,highly-confident people who can question the management decision. All they need is some average or below-average who knows how to copy/paste from Google. These people are ideal candidates because they will find it hard to get jobs in other companies and they will do everything(regardless of how the stupid work might be) asked by manager.

thiri 10y ago

So why are they a 150 Billion dollar industry? They must be doing something right.

peteretep 10y ago
What they're doing right is providing minimum viable technical ability at bargain basement prices. One wonders how that's going to work in a situation where their costs are dramatically higher because they're hiring Americans.
- thiri 10y ago
  Maybe the cost of an American has come down. Maybe Americans are willing to work at the rates Indians have been quietly working at. As Jack Ma would say if the damn phone costs 50 bucks to make why should an American business think it can forever keep selling it for 600 bucks. Things rebalance all the time.
  - peteretep 10y ago
    > Maybe the cost of an American has > come down. Maybe Americans are willing > to work at the rates Indians have been > quietly working at. They haven't, and they're not.
    - thiri 10y ago
      I beg to differ. We are seeing a rebalancing. American's don't need to be paid their 100k a year to live a middle class life style if a Chinese and Indian worker is able to live a middle class life style cheaper.
      - peteretep 10y ago
        You appear to be confusing what you would like to be true today with what's actually true today.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - british_india 10y ago
    On the contrary. Even in Indiana, domestic developer salaries are skyrocketing. Also, nobody--no American, especially--has any desire to work for Infosys.
ccozan 10y ago
it seems that in this case, two wrongs show as right: 1. The CIO/CTOs are too easily pushing the responsibility to such Indian IT companies. You know, easy to blame someone else and save money in the same time. And get some shares up too. 2. The Indian companies use very deceptive means to capture this market. Simply, they lie about their competencies. It happened in multiple occasions when we got send from the indian 'partner' two 'best' person they had. They were suppose to be 10+ Linux experienced. Believe me, when I showed them the command line and I gave them a random, but real, task they just simply stared and didn't know where to start. After 10 minutes ( had to attend something else), I found them heavily browsing SO. Case closed!
- thiri 10y ago
  I know what you are talking about but I have also seen the other side of this story. I have seen the kinds of clients Indian IT handles and quality of the software they have produced. You can be more or less guaranteed your bank, insurance company, hospital, airline/transportation systems, phone/internet utility, entertainment/sports IT is all totally built and run by Indian IT. The process is chaotic. The first iteration is a disaster almost always. But western management persist through that first and second and sometimes third iteration of garbage because the cost benefit is just impossible to ignore. And guess what by the 4th or 5th iteration things actually work. What most people don't realize is there is no big difference between this story and the Facebook or Google story. In one case its a bunch of kids who don't know what the command line is thrown into a bank or insurance or manufacturing companies IT system and its a trial by fire. Not knowing what the command line is has nothing to do with how smart/adaptable the kid is who gets thrown into the deep end. Please note this is exactly what investors are betting on when they dump a bunch of cash on a bunch of kids at a future Facebook or Google. The kid might know what the command line is but that's not what investors are betting on. They are betting on the kid being smart and adaptable when thrown into the fire. They are willing to put up with the first couple iterations being disasters and sooner or later if you bet on the right kid things work. Are there unintended consequences when things get built this way? Of course yes Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a solution to fake news, celeb worship, hate speech, cyber bullying on his platform. But (most)people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Same rules should apply to the indian kid running your bank servers that just got breached.

giis 10y ago

>alternatively simply crushing the talent of those who they employ. That's spot on. India does have strong developers, after few years in work, their talent is intentionally crushed by management. They don't need talented,highly-confident people who can question the management decision. All they need is some average or below-average who knows how to copy/paste from Google. These people are ideal candidates because they will find it hard to get jobs in other companies and they will do everything(regardless of how the stupid work might be) asked by manager.