8 ms·

Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I head

Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering. There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.

shagie 9y ago
Engineering can certainly be done outside. However, there is a real risk in having the core business competency and value be outsourced rather than something built up with employees at the company with an interest in the company's success rather than looking at it as just the next project.
- abakker 9y ago
  The distinction here is between captive development centers vs outsourced IT services. The latter has previously had more jobs and is experienced more layoffs now. The former is likely still a growth industry.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
halbritt 9y ago
I doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that. Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work. I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.
ryen 9y ago
>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
- navinsylvester 9y ago
  > at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore. I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground. > Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. Indian IT industry got shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one. > It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Pay good and you will retain talent. > Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets. Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford. Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers. You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.
krinchan 9y ago
Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.
- grad_ml 9y ago
  I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.
  - shagie 9y ago
    I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.
    - grad_ml 9y ago
      Very fair argument. Let's dissect the argument, engineering firms have improved their soft skills and value proposition. Assuming these firms are US based and all american, then by going popular wisdom here, how can american firms possibly have poor soft skills than Indian firms! I'm sure there were many instances when quality received from Indian firms were abysmal. However, imo, it's sort of online propaganda-ish that Indian firms are terrible choice, compared to american vendors. Pick and choose your best anecdote. I recall, months back, there was some incident at BA(british airways, I suppose) and whole incident was spinned as Indian contractors in India messed up. Later, VP of the company, clarified that mistakes were made locally(read UK). I feel hatred rather than facts, largely dominate HN, Reddit opinion.
      - shagie 9y ago
        There are many bargain basement contracting shops in the US too. Find half a dozen just graduated students who decide they're going to go freelance rather than going corporate - and you've got a contracting shop that is making web pages for the local stores or an access ERP-ish for the local business or someone who thinks that they can do the account management for their doctor's office. And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering. My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...). When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours. Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it). Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks. Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools. Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)). For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time. The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper. The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.
jmspring 9y ago
I've had amazing outside outsourced engineering done both in India and Eastern Europe. In the case of India, it was with a specialty firm. The big job shops, be they in India, Philippines, etc. have a limited life cycle as outsourcing for basically "crud" apps goes by the wayside. There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.
zeta0134 9y ago
Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with international clients, so I get to take calls from customers (often IT teams for large clients) from all over the globe. To use India as the chosen example, I've worked with teams that could out-engineer me on a good day, that clearly knew what they were doing. I've also worked with teams that, possibly due to language barrier issues, could barely comprehend their own code base, much less anything I was attempting to help them troubleshoot. To be quite honest though, I could remove "India" from that equation entirely, because I've worked with many US "technical contacts" that, despite speaking perfect English, lack even the most basic technical skills. The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem. I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.
deepaksurti 9y ago
>> We believe we do some serious engineering. I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot. >> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!! >> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization. Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?
sidlls 9y ago
I've found the quality of the "real engineering" in this scenario is much more variable than when using local talent (of any nationality, including Indian). I've worked with very high quality India-based "real engineering" groups and very low quality ones. It seems to me the latter dominate. I haven't seen the same variance in skill hiring from local talent originally from India.
lawnmover 9y ago
Same old china is a giant bodyshop story. And even now many fail to acknowledge how seriously they are in their R&D.

shagie 9y ago

Engineering can certainly be done outside. However, there is a real risk in having the core business competency and value be outsourced rather than something built up with employees at the company with an interest in the company's success rather than looking at it as just the next project.

abakker 9y ago
The distinction here is between captive development centers vs outsourced IT services. The latter has previously had more jobs and is experienced more layoffs now. The former is likely still a growth industry.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

halbritt 9y ago

I doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that. Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work. I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.

ryen 9y ago

>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted. I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.

navinsylvester 9y ago
> at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore. I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground. > Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. Indian IT industry got shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one. > It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Pay good and you will retain talent. > Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets. Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford. Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers. You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.

krinchan 9y ago

Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.

grad_ml 9y ago
I'm sorry, what kind of engineers "after years of competing with Indian companies have upped their skills"? Just curious.
- shagie 9y ago
  I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.
  - grad_ml 9y ago
    Very fair argument. Let's dissect the argument, engineering firms have improved their soft skills and value proposition. Assuming these firms are US based and all american, then by going popular wisdom here, how can american firms possibly have poor soft skills than Indian firms! I'm sure there were many instances when quality received from Indian firms were abysmal. However, imo, it's sort of online propaganda-ish that Indian firms are terrible choice, compared to american vendors. Pick and choose your best anecdote. I recall, months back, there was some incident at BA(british airways, I suppose) and whole incident was spinned as Indian contractors in India messed up. Later, VP of the company, clarified that mistakes were made locally(read UK). I feel hatred rather than facts, largely dominate HN, Reddit opinion.
    - shagie 9y ago
      There are many bargain basement contracting shops in the US too. Find half a dozen just graduated students who decide they're going to go freelance rather than going corporate - and you've got a contracting shop that is making web pages for the local stores or an access ERP-ish for the local business or someone who thinks that they can do the account management for their doctor's office. And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering. My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...). When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours. Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it). Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks. Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools. Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)). For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time. The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper. The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.

jmspring 9y ago

I've had amazing outside outsourced engineering done both in India and Eastern Europe. In the case of India, it was with a specialty firm. The big job shops, be they in India, Philippines, etc. have a limited life cycle as outsourcing for basically "crud" apps goes by the wayside. There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.

zeta0134 9y ago

Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with international clients, so I get to take calls from customers (often IT teams for large clients) from all over the globe. To use India as the chosen example, I've worked with teams that could out-engineer me on a good day, that clearly knew what they were doing. I've also worked with teams that, possibly due to language barrier issues, could barely comprehend their own code base, much less anything I was attempting to help them troubleshoot. To be quite honest though, I could remove "India" from that equation entirely, because I've worked with many US "technical contacts" that, despite speaking perfect English, lack even the most basic technical skills. The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem. I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.

deepaksurti 9y ago

>> We believe we do some serious engineering. I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot. >> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!! >> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization. Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?

sidlls 9y ago

I've found the quality of the "real engineering" in this scenario is much more variable than when using local talent (of any nationality, including Indian). I've worked with very high quality India-based "real engineering" groups and very low quality ones. It seems to me the latter dominate. I haven't seen the same variance in skill hiring from local talent originally from India.

lawnmover 9y ago

Same old china is a giant bodyshop story. And even now many fail to acknowledge how seriously they are in their R&D.