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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? The

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
You are in India, and you exactly know what OP meant. He meant tons of people working in TCS/Infosys/Wipro where majority of them are bad engineers. There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.
- Alterlife 8y ago
  Hey, I don't agree with that either. In my experience, there is a normal distribution of idiots regardless of the country of origin. A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company). Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave. The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.
  - mindentropy 8y ago
    >(I'm in a product development company). >The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base. In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.
    - Alterlife 8y ago
      > Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. ... > it is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.
  - nstart 8y ago
    >Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry. Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates. Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door. This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes. This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.
varjag 8y ago
It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.
- bhtru 8y ago
  If you can make it in the West you’ll leave your homeland typically. Tech is a sector that often can is merit based so it’s not difficult for foreign engineers to prove their worth and make the migration (relative to other service sector industries).
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    > merit based Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  There is a massive screening process in both India and China that results in the top fraction of a percentage of students going off to study in the US. Those are the ones who later go on to publish while at US institutions. So yes, there is some signal there.
Rjevski 8y ago
I think the issue isn’t Indian engineers living in India, but bad management of India-based companies who set the bar low enough for lots of bad “engineers” to join, making the experience unbearable for any good engineers that work there (if any). As a result the good ones leave and make a have career abroad.
osrec 8y ago
Please don't feel insulted. It's merely a general observation relating to culture in certain geographies, not to be applied to you specifically. For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action). Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.
- Alterlife 8y ago
  I didn't mean to single you or anyone else out. I've seen this sentiment echoed in multiple online forums and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.
  - loco5niner 8y ago
    > ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself. Is there a typo (or 2) in here somewhere?
    - Alterlife 8y ago
      I substituted 'them' for 'those'. According to the interweb, it's grammatically acceptable in informal English. Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually". ref: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them
      - loco5niner 8y ago
        Makes sense. Unfortunately, the use of "them" instead of "those" in this case (actually, in many cases) is grammatically incorrect. At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education. Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India? Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave. >And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America. I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Brain drain.
JPKab 8y ago
See my other comment. We don't all think this way, and I'm sorry you feel insulted.

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

You are in India, and you exactly know what OP meant. He meant tons of people working in TCS/Infosys/Wipro where majority of them are bad engineers. There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.

Alterlife 8y ago
Hey, I don't agree with that either. In my experience, there is a normal distribution of idiots regardless of the country of origin. A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company). Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave. The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.
- mindentropy 8y ago
  >(I'm in a product development company). >The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base. In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.
  - Alterlife 8y ago
    > Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. ... > it is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.
- nstart 8y ago
  >Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours. And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry. Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates. Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door. This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes. This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.

varjag 8y ago

It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.

bhtru 8y ago
If you can make it in the West you’ll leave your homeland typically. Tech is a sector that often can is merit based so it’s not difficult for foreign engineers to prove their worth and make the migration (relative to other service sector industries).
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > merit based Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...
hyperbovine 8y ago
There is a massive screening process in both India and China that results in the top fraction of a percentage of students going off to study in the US. Those are the ones who later go on to publish while at US institutions. So yes, there is some signal there.

Rjevski 8y ago

I think the issue isn’t Indian engineers living in India, but bad management of India-based companies who set the bar low enough for lots of bad “engineers” to join, making the experience unbearable for any good engineers that work there (if any). As a result the good ones leave and make a have career abroad.

osrec 8y ago

Please don't feel insulted. It's merely a general observation relating to culture in certain geographies, not to be applied to you specifically. For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action). Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.

Alterlife 8y ago
I didn't mean to single you or anyone else out. I've seen this sentiment echoed in multiple online forums and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  > ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself. Is there a typo (or 2) in here somewhere?
  - Alterlife 8y ago
    I substituted 'them' for 'those'. According to the interweb, it's grammatically acceptable in informal English. Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually". ref: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them
    - loco5niner 8y ago
      Makes sense. Unfortunately, the use of "them" instead of "those" in this case (actually, in many cases) is grammatically incorrect. At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education. Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India? Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave. >And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America. I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Brain drain.

JPKab 8y ago

See my other comment. We don't all think this way, and I'm sorry you feel insulted.