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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
- reacharavindh 8y agoIf 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 .....
- ramblerman 8y ago> 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.
- reacharavindh 8y agoYeah. 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"?
- ramblerman 8y agoI 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.
- stillwatersr 8y agoI've found quite the opposite to be the truth. On average, my Indian friends are the most arrogant, rude people I know.
- jdietrich 8y agoThere's a bit of a culture clash. Hindi has no direct equivalent of the English word "please" and the closest equivalent of "thank you" has very different connotations that can be perceived as rude. Politeness in the Hindi language is subtle and complex. The verb forms used to express intimacy and formality in Hindi don't translate into English, so Indian speakers often seem a bit blunt and direct to native speakers. To grossly generalise, Indians tend to be less private and more personally inquisitive than Americans, which can sometimes seem intrusive or overly familiar. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/thank-you-culture-india-america/395069/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/th...
- pjmlp 8y agoThe 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.
- jacobush 8y agoI 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.
- reacharavindh 8y agoYou 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dasil003 8y agoI 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.
- techsin101 8y agoWhat are the naive about
- jcbrand 8y ago> 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.
- reacharavindh 8y agoTo 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.
- collyw 8y agoOk generalization again, but I see a lot more Indian names asking questions rather than answering them.
- icebraining 8y agoI'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.
- superflyguy 8y agoYes but the ratio is different. Americans produce most of the most popular services even if most Americans consume rather than create them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- collyw 8y agoStack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.
- oblio 8y ago
- Dawny33 8y ago</ blatant generalization >
- godelmachine 8y agoMay I ask which technologies have you worked on?
- reacharavindh 8y agoNot sure why it'd help the discussion :-) Here is my public CV : https://aravindh.net/cv_2018.pdf https://aravindh.net/cv_2018.pdf
- godelmachine 8y agoYours is one awesome CV. I was just curious to know.
- reacharavindh 8y agoThanks!
- ShinTakuya 8y agoI 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.
- Karishma1234 8y agoI 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.
- MagnitudeFC 8y ago"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.
- godelmachine 8y agoHi karishma1234, May I ask in which organization and in which domain do you work? Asking out of curiosity. Thanks.
- Karishma1234 8y agoI am a coder. I work in machine learning space.
- thisisit 8y ago> 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.
- Apocryphon 8y agoWhat came first, that conference or this scene? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM1YWl9-ZG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM1YWl9-ZG0
- thisisit 8y agoThe conference was back in April. And the conclusion of the conference is different from the video.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoI 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.
- kamaal 8y ago
- Apocryphon 8y agoRegardless 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-populous-country/ http://time.com/3978175/india-population-worlds-most-populou...
- adventured 8y agoIt'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).
- tchalla 8y ago> 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.
- megaman22 8y agoI 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
- singingfish 8y agoTCS: Total Catastrophe Services
- sidcool 8y agoThey 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.
- chris_wot 8y agoSomeone needs to help reduce that market cap. They really are the pits.
- singingfish 8y agoWorst bit is I feel really sorry for some of the people they employ.
- sumedh 8y agoYou can always start your own company and compete with TCS :)
- badpun 8y agoThe business model of such companies is to bullshit and sometimes bribe the execs into a multimillion contract and then deliver crap (they often have threaten going to court to get paid for their non-services). Not everyone is willing to do that.
- kamaal 8y agoMultinational 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.
- megaman22 8y agoAlmost 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.
- whatyoucantsay 8y agoIt 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.
- dingo_bat 8y agoDo you have a source for those numbers?
- whatyoucantsay 8y agoAh the joys of HN. Here is a source for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s
- dingo_bat 8y agoWell, it's surprising. Don't know what it means but it does mean something.
- whatyoucantsay 8y agoI don't begrudge losing the karma to share facts that violate our shared expectations. The view I have on it is that in China, there is a large and growing interest in large, long-term investment in new technologies and new ideas. Obviously there's a continuum and China is also still implementing and scaling technologies built in the west, but there's a definite commitment towards breaking new ground as well.
- gaius 8y agoA 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.
- frozenport 8y agoThey did a lot of publishing stuff that was billed by the page.
- wnsire 8y ago> 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.
- dx034 8y ago> 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.
- WhiteSource1 8y agoAbsolutely. 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.
- digitalzombie 8y agoIt'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 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.
- ilarum 8y agoI 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.
- sus_007 8y agoWhen you say settled status wait time is about 15 years , is it just for Indians or other nationalities too ?
- sumanthvepa 8y agoWhile 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-26-bn-of-pe-vc-investments-in-india-the-highest-in-a-decade-118020800090_1.html 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.
- kumarvvr 8y agoTech 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.
- sho 8y ago> 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.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoThe problem is that only the top 10% of Indian programmers are in the top ten percent.
- carlmr 8y agoMy 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.
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- erikb 8y agoHasn't there been an article like 12 months ago that described how it's already moving into a downswing?
- chvid 8y agoIn 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.
- throwawayqdhd 8y agoIndians 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.
- StudentStuff 8y agoWow, 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.
- kamaal 8y agoYeah 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.
- sumedh 8y ago> 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.
- 8y ago
- niklasd 8y agoI 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.
- vijaybritto 8y ago"yes" this is true. Fear of failure is high and not knowing something is generally considered shameful.
- avip 8y agoThis 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".
- saiya-jin 8y agoit'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
- onecooldev24 8y agoDo 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.
- xor1 8y ago>Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000 I imagine a big enough job would easily clear $100k...
- chris_wot 8y agoYeah, they do.
- onecooldev24 8y agoIf you don't understand the point I am making, then you don't deserve anything, let alone a 'job'.
- chris_wot 8y agoYour point was that plumbers don't get paid $100k for any jobs, but in fact many plumbers do in fact get paid $100k+ for sufficiently large jobs. It's your analogy, not mine!
- onecooldev24 8y agoIf you don't understand the broad idea of my statement, then sorry to say this my friend, you are a fool.
- sctb 8y agoWould you please stop this, read the guidelines, and post only civilly and substantively? We ban accounts that won't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- stealthmodeclan 8y agoWhat 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.
- ThePawnBreak 8y agoThe N in FANG stands for Netflix.
- ivarojha 8y agoBelieve 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.
- kamaal 8y ago>>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.
- stealthmodeclan 8y agoMost 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.
- buvanshak 8y agoaround 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...
- OliverJones 8y agoIn 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.
- osrec 8y agoIT 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.
- sumedh 8y ago> 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.
- osrec 8y agoNot 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).
- swedish_mafia 8y agoI’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.
- osrec 8y agoVery true. I was not really on the tech side, but often found myself correcting the code of some very expensive developers. Simple things, like not realising when things have been passed by value or by reference etc. Most developers lack the passion to be truly great at their work, because they consider it just a job. It's fair enough, but every so often you see a developer write effortless technical poetry with their code - they are a rare breed with innovation in their blood.
- senthil_rajasek 8y ago"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.
- koolhead17 8y agoWe 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. :)
- cc-d 8y ago>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?
- RandomCSGeek 8y agoI have heard of another proverb, which translates to "If you throw peanuts, only monkeys will gather".
- Clubber 8y agoYes, 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.
- code4tee 8y agoIf 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.
- ksec 8y agoIt 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.
- thewhitetulip 8y agoThis doesn't happen because Indian politicians still fight elections based on religion
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- debarshri 8y agoThere 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/TCS-fined-940m-in-US-for-stealing-healthcare-software/articleshow/51853815.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/... [2]http://sites.tcs.com/tcsbancs/ http://sites.tcs.com/tcsbancs/
- crb002 8y agoRemote work in the US and great talent from the same time zones in South and Central Americas has a lot to do with it.
- bane 8y agoI 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.
- abakker 8y agoThis 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.
- enlightenedfool 8y agoA 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.
- throwawaydesi 8y agoI am really surprised at the vitriol and bias against India and Indians in this group. If similar blanket statements were made about any other sub groups in USA it would be met with quite emphatic censure. E.g. if you were to say that all/most of the people of a particular race/community were lazy or criminals based on anecdotal experiences. Based on my experience India provides similar spectrum of capabilities in software development as found in US, UK, Germany, Singapore, China (I have worked in all these countries besides India in the software development field). I have encountered poor quality, mediocre and brilliant software developers in all these countries. I have found people who can deliver on commitment, who freeze in analysis paralysis, who can talk a big game but there is no substance as well as people who go way above and beyond and just knock the ball out of the park. Finally I think it ends up with what kind of leadership you can provide in terms of assessing the provider of service/capability, defining the expectation, tracking the progress and quality and pivoting based on the incremental progress, reacting to new discoveries etc. Of course similar to other comments this is anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt.
- mwarcholinski 8y agoI'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 http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A
- pipio21 8y agoIf 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.
- calif 8y agowow, 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"...
- jmartrican 8y agoI 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.
- aphextron 8y agoTurns out paying people low wages is not really miraculous.
- emm386 8y agoIt is more of a nightmare than a miracle. Not developing software is better than dveloping software by indian "engineers". I worked with teams in India, and found that they're basically time wasters. They probably cost more than they save, by producingg poor quality work. I myself work in a firm that deployed an army of teams in India, what I've notice that these guys are obstucle, especially when my work depends on them.
- emm386 8y agopoor quality, probably costs more than they save
- mkovji 8y ago>>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.
- mkovji 8y agoDoesn't making things where it costs the least and guarantees best quality contribute to the overall efficiency and economy of the world.
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- starpilot 8y agoIs 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.
- RandomCSGeek 8y agoNever heard of any bias towards phone. If anything, people prefer email as it leaves a trail.
- theyinwhy 8y agoImho both US-americans and Indians tend to oversell themselves to a degree of perversion.
- intrasight 8y agoI 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.
- EmilyHealth 8y agoold but good ! http://everydayhappy7.com/2016/11/25/amazing-discovered-2-lines-ronaldos-head-mean/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2016/11/25/amazing-discovered-2-li...
- amriksohata 8y agoIndian 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.
- RandomCSGeek 8y agoTLDR: 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.
- known 8y agoIndia 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-good-argument-against-them-h-1b-visas-do-mainly-go-indian-outsourcing http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21716630-not-goo...
- aws_ls 8y agoI 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.)
- techresearch 8y agoYeah 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!!!
- techresearch 8y agoI 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.
- eric24234 8y agoI 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.