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IT 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 bo

• 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 ago
    Not 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 ago
      I’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 ago
        Very 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.
    • simonh 8y ago
      There are some really good Indian teams in the Banking sector. You do have to be careful of course, but I've worked with some excellent Indian colleagues over there in Hyderabad and Chennai. I think the thing is the banks and other big corporates hoover up the top talent, and retain it, which then becomes invisible to the wider tech industry. All the problems mentioned here do exist and are real, but they're not the whole story. The management culture over there s a bit different. Managers tend not to want to be involved in anything technical. There is a 'yes' culture of not challenging requests. However there are plenty of exceptions to the 'rule'.
      • osrec 8y ago
        There are definite exceptions. Were those people employed by your bank, or by an outsourcing company? The distinction is important, both in terms of quality and price. Internal hires are much more expensive (training, benefits etc), but generally better and less likely to leave. Outsourced staff basically don't care because they know they're being taken advantage of. So you get what you pay for.
        • simonh 8y ago
          You’re quite right, they were direct hires.
    • devdas 8y ago
      The truly good people would expect a significant fraction of the UK salary, not an average Indian IT salary.
      • kamaal 8y ago
        The sad part about India is most people who come from low income households accept any salary. Because a job and the opportunity that comes with it is more important than anything else. Negotiations are for freshers whose father's have been paying college fees and bills. The remainder can't afford to turn down a job for these reasons.
    • mritun 8y ago
      35 lacks you mentioned is a good starting salary for a person at Amazon or MS. 10L is not, even in Pune.
      • geodel 8y ago
        35L starting sounds like exaggeration. The most common is <15L for 0-5 year of experience.
      • osrec 8y ago
        35L is about 40k GBP - the average cost of a JS developer in many parts of the UK. Are you saying that's a starting salary for a developer in India - because in that case, why outsource?!
        • Alterlife 8y ago
          There are starting developers who get paid that much but it's not common. I hear most consulting firms pay about 1.5-6L, and Amazon pays 12-14L.
        • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
          UK is famous for having poor dev rates. A coworker of mine transferred from Microsoft Beijing to Cambridge and had to take a pay cut because the payscale for the level he was at was actually lower there.
        • hesarenu 8y ago
          I have a decade of experience but get about half of that. Not all companies pay so much.
    • sumedh 8y ago
      Not sure how to respond to your anecdote. If what you are saying is true then you should have a chat with the person who hired them to see what is going on. The poor salaries which I am talking about is Rs 2 lakhs for freshers who join IT consultancy services.
  • samfisher83 8y ago
    They just come over here. Why would they work in india when they can make 4-10x here?
• bhouston 8y ago
  I was dealing with a smart IT engineer from India and then I found out that he has sold me code for peanuts he had created for another client (and was already owned exclusively by that client, which was a major venture backed company), and then I caught him selling the code I paid him well to create exclusively to a third client also for peanuts. Basically no regard at all for IP rights and the contracts he signed, just doing whatever he could to make a quick buck. Not sure if it was just him or a cultural thing. But ended up an IP nightmare.
  • mieseratte 8y ago
    At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.
    • imglorp 8y ago
      In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.
      • musage 8y ago
        > rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete Sounds like "might is right". It's hard to argue that's wrong, you say? Why, then just kill the person who says it's wrong, EZ PZ! After all, only the results matter.
      • code_duck 8y ago
        A business not wanting to invest time hiring, training and integrating an employee who is likely to leave prematurely is not an abstract principle.
• le-mark 8y ago
  I don't think many who've worked with the major body shops would disagree with this. On the other hand, I've worked for companies that have opened offices offshore, and hired their own full time development staffs. I have seen very talented developers and dedicated teams via this arrangement. I work with one such team now, and I'm deeply impressed by them. They're some of best I've seen.
  • osrec 8y ago
    At risk of sounding hypocritical, I have done the same in my firm (https://osrec.co.uk https://osrec.co.uk). I took Indian grads straight out of uni and trained them to western development standards. They basically have to become good, or their pull requests never get merged into our core code bases. They soon understand the level of quality that is required, because, to their credit, they are genuinely keen to contribute. My issue is more with the big firms, where quality is not regarded highly (or at all), and they infuse that attitude across the Indian tech scene.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  My experience with offshoring is that you need to put a lot of due diligence into hiring. I've worked with excellent Indian engineers, but we really had to interview a lot before we found them.
• xienze 8y ago
  > The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. The problem, I think, is that management draws conclusions about the quality of Indian engineers based on interactions with the ones working in the US, who by definition are the absolute best of the best. "Sanjay is one of our best engineers", the bean counter says, "and my God, there's _a billion_ of them back in India!"
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    > by definition are the absolute best of the best. I think that's probably true - the people who can claw their way through the H1B process are probably among the best India has to offer. I don't believe that that's entirely why management loves them, though. The fact that they work 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in crowded, noisy open offices without ever complaining since they're under constant fear of being fired at a moment's notice and being unable to find new work, coupled with the fact that they're capable software engineers, is why management loves them.
    • xienze 8y ago
      Right, but again I think they end up drawing incorrect conclusions about the state of Indian engineers in general based on what they see with their H1-Bs.
• commandlinefan 8y ago
  > The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.
  • tome 8y ago
    Were they in India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about Indians.
    • osrec 8y ago
      Indeed. I too am (British) Indian ;)
    • Alterlife 8y ago
      I am in India, and I can't help but feel insulted by this comment. Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India? There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America. ---- edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.
      • kamaal 8y ago
        >>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India? Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing. Please note, everyone protects their own interests.
      • parthdesai 8y ago
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  It's not a scam, you just have to know what you are buying. For internal Enterprise apps, for testing, for some other things - you need just basic developers who can understand problems and solve them. Also - there's a lot of basic IT work and basic dev-ops-ish stuff that can be done. So yes, if you try to build a hot new thing, for your hot new startup using Infosys, you're going to fail. But if you have large company, and need some well-defined system for reviewing customer service inquiries ... well, if you manage the project correctly, Infosys might be a good choice. In fact, it may be your only choice because hiring devs in North America is very expensive.
  • osrec 8y ago
    I'm not convinced. I've seen some terrible test cases written by Infosys engineers. Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software. Remember that India is not the "only choice"; Eastern Europe is waiting in the wings at a similar price point, better quality, and better timezone overlap.
    • sonnyblarney 8y ago
      " Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software." you get what you pay for to some extent. E. Europe is considerably more expensive than India.
      • osrec 8y ago
        Not really, when you consider that tasks need to be repeated multiple times in India before they're done to an acceptable standard. A few years ago, things were still cheap enough to accept this problem, but now development costs in India have gone up significantly and makes them non viable in my opinion.
    • naravara 8y ago
      >Just a complete lack of imagination with respect to the failure modes of a piece of software. I get this with people Accenture and the like too though. . .
• Fellshard 8y ago
  A key insight is less that all Indian devs are bad, and more that they tend to be called in by companies who are incapable of knowing whether they are doing good or bad. So when a competent team comes in and sees an Indian team that has operated incompetently, things get pretty nasty pretty fast.
• ksk 8y ago
  Everytime I hear this I fail to see how it makes any sense. Either (1) All the firms hiring them are idiots and are unable to judge competency and continue falling for the "scam" every year, year after year on every project, with every company. (2) Your propositions are incorrect. They do have good engineers and they do end up doing good work.
  • osrec 8y ago
    They pick their targets very carefully. They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT. They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team. Basically, it's not (1) or (2), but instead (3): that these guys are master scammers, liars and confidence tricksters. They exaggerate without committing to anything and lull their customers into a false sense of security. They are THE slipperiest eels in the industry. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to give them a try just once - it will probably convince you.
    • ksk 8y ago
      >They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT. In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit? I know quite a few "business-focused" people. It is not so easy to fool them even if IT is not their core competency. Businesses typically will include several protection clauses in the contract and set the legal jurisdiction to their own country. I don't believe it is easy to fool businesses for years on end. They would go out of business pretty quickly. >They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team. Then data would show that those firms have no long term contracts or repeat business from previous clients. Does it?
• KeepTalking 8y ago
  Seems like mismatched expectations largely on your part. You get what you pay. If you ask for the cheapest workforce, you get shoddy work. I am not arguing the validity of your experience but I think it shows lack of depth. On the other end of the market, there is a very talented workforce that commands a premium price that delivers world class products. You just need to know where to look. Most western tech decisions to use Offshoring/Outsourcing are based on the key belief that costs can be lowered. In a truly capitalist market, workers are also looking to extract their maximum worth (and upward mobility) and If you pay less, your workforce will bail at the first opportunity. Additionally, no one wants to work for a project that is driven by a spec document that you authored and requires no design input from the local team
• thatssosid 8y ago
  Let me be clear - “Not all Indian Developers are bad”. The reason why quality of engineers at Infy, wipro, tcs etc. is so bad is because of their recruitment process. They recruit engineers from various colleges like herd of sheeps and call it mass recruitment. Irrespective of the his specialisation (Mechanical, Electronics or Chemical etc.) Students practice code for a day and so go for interview and unfortunately many get recruited. Then there is one year of Training. After training these engineers get into software development. Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer. Indian college and companies need to change how they recruit students.
  • kamaal 8y ago
    >>Then there is one year of Training. So more than your average CS engineering grad? >>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer. B.S. Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.
    • rando444 8y ago
      There's a difference between writing something that compiles and being able to write code properly. The "throw enough cheap coders" at the problem will work really well, until it doesn't, and at that point you have nothing but an expensive mess that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. If you don't have a good foundation, you're screwing the project in the long run, and this is the result of every offshoring programming project I've witnessed.
• kjeetgill 8y ago
  My suspicion: you're working with outsourcing consulting teams. The best engineers are locked up in the companies that actually hire there. Google, Microsoft Research, LinkedIn, etc. If you're not doing the actual hiring you're just getting talked into buying a team built for cheap. Disclaimer: LinkedIn Employee. Our Banglore team isn't noticably different skill wise than our SV team.
• onyva 8y ago
  About this particular comment and elsewhere in this thread, the sense of moral superiority westerners still have after trump, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica is just mind boggling. One would assume that by now one would realize one’s short comings. It also proves that there nothing intellectually or morally superior except for speaking English better then your average rickshaw driver in India. Is some parts of the USA even that’s doubtable.
• techresearch 8y ago
  STOP creating racist stereotypes.
  • osrec 8y ago
    You do realise I'm Indian myself?! Not only that, I had to break away from the sham dev culture in order to become a good developer. Hence why I can see through the facade rather clearly.