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Ask HN: Remote companies prefer not to hire remote developers from India?

I have been working as a full time developer in India for about 6 years now, and am trying to get a remote job. However remote work culture in India is practically non-existent, hence I am looking for international engagements. However I don't get interview calls at all(maybe 1 in about 50-60 job applications) and that too generally don't go beyond initial discussions(no assessment/grading of my technical skills). Most of them just reject me upfront even though I match the skillset exactly(and can demonstrate my proficiency). To people hiring remotely: What do you look for people when hiring remotely? Is there something I can do to make my job applications appealing. I understand that Indian developers seem to have a bad rap internationally but there are good people too. However is it so bad that people don't want to hire out of India at all or may be I am just missing something?

badpun 7y ago
How is your accent? I literally cannot understand many Indian people (who were born and raised in India, thus developing their accents there), and I suspect I'm not alone. Are the interviewers asking you to repeat what you said, or to get closer to the mic etc.?
- mightymosquito 7y ago
  Communication is pretty much sorted for me. I know exactly what you mean and do see people around me struggle with it. But I have never had people tell me to repeat my sentences or get closer to the mic etc. (Well it might have been because of the internet connectivity etc. but never because of my accent) I lived in the US for 2 years as a kid, so have a pretty neutral accent.
  - nimzo33 7y ago
    It may be partly because india is looked at having lesser talented developers (in the sense of questioning things, speaking up, really thoroughly thinking before starting to do your work and if it makes sense), while i know this is not always true it seems to be for majority from my experience
  - dominotw 7y ago
    I highly doubt living in USA for 2 yrs neutalized your accent. How do you know for sure?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - taejo 7y ago
      Two years as a child could be plenty to develop a local accent. I know people who lived in Germany for less than that time (usually because of US military parents) and return to Germany after decades of not speaking the language at all with near perfect accents. The combination of excellent accent with barely-existent grammar and vocabulary can be quite funny.
      - dominotw 7y ago
        german has very similar sounds to english though. The sounds of English and German are similar, as are stress and intonation patterns.Also, accent is not just sounds its also culture. germany and us have similar cultures. What exactly is neutral accent, I don't know what that even means.
        objectivetruth 7y ago
        I presumed it meant roughly halfway between "indistinguishable from native-born American speaking General American" and "Typical ESL accent for people who were born in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American
    - cm2012 7y ago
      My wife lived in Korea as a child for 3 years, and has a perfect korean accent to this day (we visited korean recently, people were surprised she was actually American)
- hirundo 7y ago
  I struggle with this problem daily at work. The whole company is remote and we have a new team of excellent developers from India. But in group meetings, while I listen hard I can rarely make out what they say. When my name comes up in a group conversation my standard answer has become, please describe the issue via email or slack. It's no use asking them to repeat themselves or to talk more slowly. To me it's yet another reason why I prefer async means of conversation over live meetings. I'm hoping that I'll learn to understand the accent after more experience with it, but if that's happening, it's slow going. Maybe there's a more systematic way to go about it, like finding books, podcasts, etc., spoken in strong Indian accents to practice with. Or even learning a little of their language to get experience with their cadence, etc. If I can learn a new computer language dammit, I should be able to learn to decipher the accent of people who are speaking my birth language coherently, with better grammar than I do.
  - antirez 7y ago
    I've the same problem, but reversed: since I know my strong Italian accent can be hard for people to understand, especially in phone calls, I often ask if we can instead have a chat. But people rarely accept, with the result of having a hard time understanding each other.
deleted 7y ago
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martin_a 7y ago
> I understand that Indian developers seem to have a bad rap internationally but there are good people too. Yeah, maybe. But India is probably known to most because of support calls from "Microsoft" and other shady scams. Some friends have lived and worked in India for a prolonged time and after listening carefully to all of them I will prefer not to work with Indians, too.
- dominotw 7y ago
  What did they tell you about working with Indians
  - martin_a 7y ago
    In loose order: - Deadlines don't matter: If it doesn't get finished today, maybe it gets finished tomorrow, nevermind if it needs to be finished today. - Quality doesn't matter, too. Customer is in Europe, unlikely that he will come over and be angry with us. Basic quality principles (talking about media production here) are simply ignored. - Come when you want and leave when you want. Working hours are just a recommendation, nothing to really stick to. - If you tell people they need to stick to the working hours so work gets done, they will probably get "sick" and not be seen for the rest of the week.
throwawayjava 7y ago
> However I don't get interview calls at all Remote != Offshore. Some remote work companies don't even allow you to work remotely from a location outside their home country. So "foreign national on foreign soil" is VERY different from "remote"! Moving development offshore is often not what companies have in mind when they say "remote", and for good reasons. Taxes, travel expenses, timezones, risk profile, etc. are more complicated. Especially the risk profile. And that's before considering more nebulous stuff like communication skills and "culture fit". At the very least, it's a lot of unknowns. So, make sure you aren't wasting energy applying for positions that were never open to international (or non EU in the case of Europe) applicants in the first place.
- mightymosquito 7y ago
  Already filtering that out. Unfortunately most people don't seem differentiate between the two clearly. So I generally end up writing a mail asking about their geographic hiring constraints before applying for the job. Also, when I say I get very less interview calls for whatever jobs I apply to, it is for companies which are looking to hire from other countries.
- rubayeet 7y ago
  I can relate to this. I’m not from India but from that part of the world and have been in the same situation as the OP. Many companies who advertise them as ‘globally distributed’ are simply not willing to hire someone who does not have proper time zone overlap. Plus the logistical challenges involved makes them more reluctant. Also, you have to keep in mind remote companies get more applicants per job posting than a non-remote one. Unless your application truly stands out it’s unlikely that you’ll get through the initial screening.
jakobov 7y ago
Indians have a very bad rep. That being said the best developer I know is Indian. I once worked on a a mostly Indian team and could not understand anything they were saying during the meetings. What is your accent like? Can non-indians understand you easily?
- mightymosquito 7y ago
  Well I like to think so. I have never faced this problem in an interview/discussion. Neither has any potential employer has ever had problems understanding what I am saying nor have has anyone told me it was an issue while giving feedback(I have started requesting for detailed feedback for my application rejections. Most people don't reply , some that do didn't really say anything about my communication skills being bad).
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  This. It's unfortunate but true that Indian devs and especially Dev teams have a bad reputation amongst western companies. Nothing you can do about this to be honest, just be aware that it's an uphill battle for you to prove you are a good communicator and a skilled Dev beyond what would normally be accepted. On the other hand, and I know this isn't relevant to your case, but for some reason Romanian Dev teams have an excellent reputation from most people I've spoken too.
kkarakk 7y ago
Have you tried asking follow up questions on why you got passed over? some companies will respond and you can pivot accordingly. also if you are good enough for remote, you should really look at angellist, lots of startups in india are willing to hire remotely from other cities(i just got two offers for react dev work from startups in blore). stackoverflow is good for this if a bit sparse
- mightymosquito 7y ago
  Majority of the companies don't respond back. Till now I have been able to give maybe 5-6 interviews out of which 2 people responded back with feedback . One company just sent back a generic email about how I was not looking for but the second company/startup did give a nice and detailed feedback. And it just seems like there are more frontend related jobs than backend. I primarily do backend. I have been applying through stack-overflow, RemoteOk and Hacker-news who's hiring, however I haven't really applied using Angel-list till now. I'll check out Angel List
  - kkarakk 7y ago
    Full stack is the new normal, i advise you to learn some form of UI work(enough to be conversant)
MarkMc 7y ago
Hi Avneesh - I'm looking to hire remote developers in India. Please email me at mark.mclaren@mclarencollege.in or add your email address to your HN profile. To answer your question: I see a lot of Indian CVs that are just filled with buzzwords. When I see "J2EE certification" I get a sense that the person is not really passionate about the technology and is simply writing a CV that they think has the best chance to pass the HR filter at TCS Amazingly, I also see a lot of job applications where there is only a one-line description for each job they did. Tell me what tools and technologies you used for each job, and how strong did your skill become in that technology. Tell me what you liked and didn't like. I like it when an applicant is honest about where they do not match my requirements. It's good to say, "I don't have any professional Dart experience, but I've written this simple app and from what I've read it's pretty similar to Javascript and I have done plenty of Javascript". It shows me that you have thought about my requirements and aren't simply trying to bullshit me. I love it when you have done programming outside your job. That includes completing MOOCs or writing interesting blog posts about programming (as you have done!). You should have a portfolio of interesting projects you have done - even better if I can download an app or go to an actual website in addition to seeing the code on GitHub. I hate it when I'm interviewing someone and I'm not sure that they understood what I said. If you get to a Skype/Zoom interview with your potential manager do everything you can to ensure that there is smooth communication. Do not use a cheap laptop - get a fast computer with plenty of memory. Reboot it before the interview and do not have unnecessary applications running. Use a microphone that sits in front of your mouth like those Apple earpods, test your ping, upload and download connection speeds. When the interviewer is talking and you can understand them, nod your head and say 'ok' or 'uh-huh'. If you can't understand what they said, tell them - don't try to cover it up. More broadly, the main reasons people in the US avoid directly hiring Indian programmers remotely is: (a) Being a software engineer is the 'golden ticket' to a better life much more in Indian than the US, and this means every man and his dog wants an IT job in India. So you end up with a lot of people trying who have no passion or interest in programming. This means a recruiter has to wade through a lot of poor-quality candidates before finding someone who can even do FizzBuzz. Kind of related is that a lot of the cheapest software development for US companies is done by Indians - either outsourced to Infosys/TCS or using H1B visas in-house - so there is a subconscious bias against Indians (and occasionally more overt prejudice). (b) India is in just about the worst timezone for US companies, especially on the US west cost - when you are working they are sleeping and vice-versa. You will probably get more interest if you state you are prepared to work at least 4 hours at night - say from 9pm to 1am IST. (c) US companies are worried that you will steal their intellectual property. This is true to some extent of any remote employee, but particularly with a country where it is very difficult to take someone to court for breach of contract. (d) More generally it's simply easier from a legal perspective for US companies to hire people in the US. You may have a better chance by offering an initial 1- or 2-month contract to the US company, with the understanding that at the end of the contract they will either walk away or hire you on a full-time basis. (e) Indian accents can be hard to understand to western ears - a short video of you talking about your latest personal project is very helpful in this regard, and also as a general 'sales pitch'. Spend time to make a quality video and put it on YouTube. Here's a good example, although you should also include a talking-to-camera clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AexrSP9uY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AexrSP9uY0 (f) There are cultural differences that reflect poorly on Indians, particularly around not wanting to look bad. For example it seems Indians are very reluctant to say "we're behind on this task and will not finish by Tuesday" or "I don't understand your second point - are you saying that the user shouldn't see it until they are logged in?" or "Wait, I've never heard of RabbitMQ - what's that?" (g) I think many managers are worried their remote staff will 'slack off' and not work the hours they are supposed to. And to be honest I can't blame them - I myself find it difficult to maintain focus when I'm working from home. Maybe it would help your chances of being hired to say to your potential boss, "Every minute that I'm working I will record my webcam and screen in a Zoom meeting which you can review in real time or later"
davismwfl 7y ago
So I have worked with Indian offshoring, remote and on-shore since the late 90's for various companies. Currently we have people in India and remote here in the U.S. The reality is that Indian developers are just as talented as their U.S. counterparts in most things. However, where I have seen struggles is around 3 key things. 1. Timezone difference is just too large to make it efficient. I routinely have to wake up very early my time or stay up very late just to have meetings or calls with teammates in India. This isn't a 3 hour difference like hiring in the U.S. remote. I literally have some calls that start at 10:30pm and others that at times start as early as 5am. This is a huge barrier to most companies and teams. This is why you are starting to see a lot of remote job ads with a +/- timezone difference. 2. Indian developers as a group are more specialized in their skillsets and expectations and less able to move things forward without on-site direction compared to their western counterparts. I think this is more cultural as this is how the larger firms in India work, but it differs greatly from most western companies. I found working with really good people in India, they still struggle to task switch and handling disparate tasks as is very typical in many early stage and smaller companies. Where this becomes less of an issue is with large multi-national corporations because those companies will have highly specialized positions which fits better. This isn't about intelligence or capability, just how one culture works vs the other. 3. Communication can be tough, and I don't necessarily mean understanding people like others are saying, although this does happen in some cases. What I mean is that communication is more about how things are said and interpreted. While most every educated Indian person I have ever dealt with has solid English skills (likely more properly than most Americans I know) there are distinct issues in translation of nuanced requirements for most things. Many times with super complex issues I have to find one of the Indian team members that I can communicate best to, make sure they get it and then have them help me make sure the other team members get it. Also, western people (especially U.S. sadly) in general I have noticed can communicate pretty poorly expecting people to adapt to them and learn their nuances rather than finding middle ground, so that doesn't help. There are a number of other factors I could share that also affect the ability to hire remotely in India but I already wrote a bunch, and in the end, I'd say item #1 is the biggest factor overall, 9.5-12.5 hours is a huge difference to make up for a remote team member.
- vidanay 7y ago
pjmlp 7y ago
Based on my experience in offshoring projects, and several Indian friends that I have made through the years, try to make a point that you wouldn't be like the low level devs usually offered from the likes of Wipro, TCS, Sasken, Infosys. Many western companies are burned with them, because they usually bring the top devs for sales and onsite development, but have lots of low quality devs doing grunt work, failing deadlines and delivering half promises. So the best thing you can do is differentiate yourself from them.
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  Serious question here, I'm in the interview funnel with wipro (senior Dev) and I'm seeing lots of comments like yours on HN recently. Is there something shady about them I should know about? Any articles or links to support their bad reputation would be appreciated. edit: Yup, I get it now. Their head of recruitment (whose signature address is a wework office in denver) just made me schedule a call with them days in advance only to let me know they don't think it's a good fit because they're now changing the posting to a manager role. This is also after a 5 hour take home code challenge and my original recruiter quitting the company.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    It’s less to do with India and more to do with “big consulting” (or bullshit consulting because that’s the only thing they’re good at). See the recent fiasco with Hertz suing Accenture.
    - b_t_s 7y ago
      It's also to do with India. There exists an even worse category of "small consulting" on places like odesk that caters to individuals and small businesses that are very budget conscious and whose need for software development is oneoff or occasional. Many of these folks are self taught, semi trained, or generally fizbuz challenged. Some of these organizations will quote whatever price you want for whatever work you want, regardless of whether they even know what it is, let alone how to complete it. They keep the deposit, write some garbage, and then stall, delay, lie, or ghost you. I would estimate that around 80% are form south asian formerly British colonies that many Americans pejoratively lump together with India. A lot of the rest are from other low income countries that have a history of english langue proficiency, but none of then have the population that India does. Anyone who has encountered this ecosystem is going to be especially cautious hiring remote devs from India just because there are _so_ _many_ of them who have no business writing code. Unfortunately, as a competent dev, this is probably going to make it significantly harder to get through the early hiring filters at many places. I don't know what the solution is, but I'd maybe focus some effort on visible markers of status/competence like open source contributions, giving talks, etc to try to differentiate yourself.
rando444 7y ago
Aside from the other feedback already given, time zones play a large factor in decisions like this. If developers from India run into a problem and you're half a world away, you usually don't hear about it until you come into work in the morning. They haven't made any progress due to being stuck, you help them out so they can continue, but they're done for the day. They come in the next morning, get stuck again, no work gets done, problem gets fixed, they come in the next day, and hopefully can continue working. Unless both parties are making themselves available 24/7, development cycles tend to go on forever.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  I've see cases where a whole team from Southeast Asia shifted work time so there was some overlap, but that also takes a toll.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    That also runs into transportation problems - my understanding is that there are a lot of people without their own cars in India (especially dense places like Bangalore) who rely on public transportation which shuts down overnight there.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      Sometimes the transportation issues work in our (US) favor though. I felt kind of bad about doing meetings early my time, which was kind of on the late side in Bangalore, until I realized that practically everyone there worked on a late schedule to avoid traffic. Without that factor, there would have been no time convenient for everyone.
- cableshaft 7y ago
  Going through this right now. This is exactly what's been happening in for our team. It's stretched out development time so much because of it. Tasks that could be done in a couple days are taking over a week just because each back and forth exchange costing an extra day. Code reviews by themselves can take so long that sometimes I just make the last changes myself and check it in myself because we've run out of time.
asdz 7y ago
Our company recently recruited multiple Indian colleagues. Then we realize that "paid professional certificate" is the root cause of everything. They don't have basic technical knowledge yet hold professional certificate. They don't understand any Linux commands and have not much network knowledge. My advice would be don't just blindly execute tasks and ask for instructions. Be initiative, give suggestions based on your professional knowledge. *my opinion might be biased because of the Indians colleagues that I'm dealing with
awithrow 7y ago
What countries are you interviewing with? I'm in the US and on a remote team. We have a counterpart team based out of Bangalore. The biggest challenge for us is simply the time zone difference. There is nearly very little time where the US team's working hours and the India team's working hours overlap. The only way to have face-to-face time is if people from one country start work really early and one country stay working rather late. This means that something like a code review can be delayed a long time. If two team members are working at the same time, the review might take an hour or two. If the review is between India/US team members the same review can take 3-4 days in the best case: (1. code, 2. review, 3. address review, 4. approve) So really we're looking for projects for the teams that can be done independently with as little cross-country review as possible but this is tricky for our project's current state of development. I guess the takeaways would be: Look for roles in countries that have working hours with overlap with your own. A remote team doesn't necessarily mean any timezone Look for roles with larger companies. If a large company does remote, it's probably more likely that they would have a team with similar hours to your own.
- jatins 7y ago
  I don't think the author is talking about _that_ kind of remote. A lot of companies have dev offices in India, while they sell in US primarily. Nutanix, Ruberik, SumoLogic come to mind. Author is talking more about office less companies like GitLab, Automattic. @OP FWIW, I know a friend of friend who worked at Automattic and GitLab had a couple devs from India last time I checked. (But from their salary calculator, it seems GitLab pays much below Indian market salaries)
  - mightymosquito 7y ago
    > Author is talking more about office less companies like GitLab, Automattic. So these are the exact type of companies I am talking about. > But from their salary calculator, it seems GitLab pays much below Indian market salaries I am not sure about this, but from whatever information I have been able to gather/ask people remote companies tend to pay much better than what Indian companies pay.
  - 7y ago
atonse 7y ago
One of the bigger concerns for some companies is about any international developer is intellectual property (rather than talent). 99% of them will not do this, but if someone does take your codebase and launches a copycat site, there is literally nothing you can do. No common court system where you could go after them. Not saying this has really stopped us (we still work with the occasional talented international dev that was referred) but all other things more or less equal, this can have a slight chilling effect on hiring.
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  Interesting, is this why lots of positions say "Remote (US only)"? I couldn't find any legal basis for restricting remote employees to a certain country but your theory may explain the rational.
  - dylz 7y ago
    Payroll internationally is likely a PITA.
gshdg 7y ago
If you're not even getting interviews, take a hard look at your resume. The resumes I get from India (and from H1Bs looking to switch jobs) are very different from those I get from European and American candidates. They're dense, verbose, and describe hiring requirements rather than results. Also, if you're submitting 50-60 applications at a time, you may be spamming, which only annoys hiring managers. You'll get better results from fewer applications with both resume and cover letter carefully tailored to the company and position. This is especially important when you're applying remotely from India, because hiring managers get glutted with spammy and irrelevant resumes from there. If yours looks exactly like the resumes of the hundreds of developers who've created scripts to auto-submit to every listing on Indeed with the terms "Python", "Java", or "C#" in them, it won't even get read.
whamlastxmas 7y ago
My last company that was mostly remote for everyone had two developers in India. Not sure how the first one got hired but the second one was hired because the first one knew him. My recommendation is to find remote offices that already employ people from India, or to meet people in India already working for US countries and befriend them
netsectoday 7y ago
> maybe 1 in about 50-60 job applications Are you submitting your resume with a script? This sounds like you are part of the problem. What if you got 50-60 low-quality job offers each day? You'd probably do the same thing: respond to 1 of them and immediately hang up when you realized you were tricked. > What do you look for people when hiring remotely? * Someone within 3 hours of my timezone * A resume tailored to the job position * Obviously not spam Side Note: I just got a robocall on my cellphone from the "SSN Department" saying, in broken robo-english, there is a problem with my Social Security Number and I need to call them back. FCC just got a report. This is also why your country gets a bad rap.
flanker 7y ago
Being a fellow Indian I am also facing the similar issue, I have been actively searching for remote work, facing the similar problems and haven't been able to pin point the cause. I don't spam and don't use generic scripts, I invest time in applying so it's more painful. I also have hard time showing my work with majority of my work being propriety in nature. After going through thread, going forward when applying I will also explicitly mention that I absolutely don't have a problem with the timings and maybe attach a voice clip also.
amriksohata 7y ago
I work in the UK and we hire remote teams in the UK (forget India for a second) and we have terrible problems keeping them on track, getting genuine honest updates from them, forcing them to follow processes, making them support out of hours, getting them to give us updates. So imagine all that but now 5 hours ahead of time. I agree with some of the comments on here of not being transparent. I feel most Indians are honest, but when they don't know something they won't admit it which makes people suspicious are they really claiming to know everything? (which everyone knows is impossible)

badpun 7y ago

How is your accent? I literally cannot understand many Indian people (who were born and raised in India, thus developing their accents there), and I suspect I'm not alone. Are the interviewers asking you to repeat what you said, or to get closer to the mic etc.?

mightymosquito 7y ago
Communication is pretty much sorted for me. I know exactly what you mean and do see people around me struggle with it. But I have never had people tell me to repeat my sentences or get closer to the mic etc. (Well it might have been because of the internet connectivity etc. but never because of my accent) I lived in the US for 2 years as a kid, so have a pretty neutral accent.
- nimzo33 7y ago
  It may be partly because india is looked at having lesser talented developers (in the sense of questioning things, speaking up, really thoroughly thinking before starting to do your work and if it makes sense), while i know this is not always true it seems to be for majority from my experience
- dominotw 7y ago
  I highly doubt living in USA for 2 yrs neutalized your accent. How do you know for sure?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - taejo 7y ago
    Two years as a child could be plenty to develop a local accent. I know people who lived in Germany for less than that time (usually because of US military parents) and return to Germany after decades of not speaking the language at all with near perfect accents. The combination of excellent accent with barely-existent grammar and vocabulary can be quite funny.
    - dominotw 7y ago
      german has very similar sounds to english though. The sounds of English and German are similar, as are stress and intonation patterns.Also, accent is not just sounds its also culture. germany and us have similar cultures. What exactly is neutral accent, I don't know what that even means.
      - objectivetruth 7y ago
        I presumed it meant roughly halfway between "indistinguishable from native-born American speaking General American" and "Typical ESL accent for people who were born in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American
  - cm2012 7y ago
    My wife lived in Korea as a child for 3 years, and has a perfect korean accent to this day (we visited korean recently, people were surprised she was actually American)
hirundo 7y ago
I struggle with this problem daily at work. The whole company is remote and we have a new team of excellent developers from India. But in group meetings, while I listen hard I can rarely make out what they say. When my name comes up in a group conversation my standard answer has become, please describe the issue via email or slack. It's no use asking them to repeat themselves or to talk more slowly. To me it's yet another reason why I prefer async means of conversation over live meetings. I'm hoping that I'll learn to understand the accent after more experience with it, but if that's happening, it's slow going. Maybe there's a more systematic way to go about it, like finding books, podcasts, etc., spoken in strong Indian accents to practice with. Or even learning a little of their language to get experience with their cadence, etc. If I can learn a new computer language dammit, I should be able to learn to decipher the accent of people who are speaking my birth language coherently, with better grammar than I do.
- antirez 7y ago
  I've the same problem, but reversed: since I know my strong Italian accent can be hard for people to understand, especially in phone calls, I often ask if we can instead have a chat. But people rarely accept, with the result of having a hard time understanding each other.

deleted 7y ago

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martin_a 7y ago

> I understand that Indian developers seem to have a bad rap internationally but there are good people too. Yeah, maybe. But India is probably known to most because of support calls from "Microsoft" and other shady scams. Some friends have lived and worked in India for a prolonged time and after listening carefully to all of them I will prefer not to work with Indians, too.

dominotw 7y ago
What did they tell you about working with Indians
- martin_a 7y ago
  In loose order: - Deadlines don't matter: If it doesn't get finished today, maybe it gets finished tomorrow, nevermind if it needs to be finished today. - Quality doesn't matter, too. Customer is in Europe, unlikely that he will come over and be angry with us. Basic quality principles (talking about media production here) are simply ignored. - Come when you want and leave when you want. Working hours are just a recommendation, nothing to really stick to. - If you tell people they need to stick to the working hours so work gets done, they will probably get "sick" and not be seen for the rest of the week.

throwawayjava 7y ago

> However I don't get interview calls at all Remote != Offshore. Some remote work companies don't even allow you to work remotely from a location outside their home country. So "foreign national on foreign soil" is VERY different from "remote"! Moving development offshore is often not what companies have in mind when they say "remote", and for good reasons. Taxes, travel expenses, timezones, risk profile, etc. are more complicated. Especially the risk profile. And that's before considering more nebulous stuff like communication skills and "culture fit". At the very least, it's a lot of unknowns. So, make sure you aren't wasting energy applying for positions that were never open to international (or non EU in the case of Europe) applicants in the first place.

mightymosquito 7y ago
Already filtering that out. Unfortunately most people don't seem differentiate between the two clearly. So I generally end up writing a mail asking about their geographic hiring constraints before applying for the job. Also, when I say I get very less interview calls for whatever jobs I apply to, it is for companies which are looking to hire from other countries.
rubayeet 7y ago
I can relate to this. I’m not from India but from that part of the world and have been in the same situation as the OP. Many companies who advertise them as ‘globally distributed’ are simply not willing to hire someone who does not have proper time zone overlap. Plus the logistical challenges involved makes them more reluctant. Also, you have to keep in mind remote companies get more applicants per job posting than a non-remote one. Unless your application truly stands out it’s unlikely that you’ll get through the initial screening.

jakobov 7y ago

Indians have a very bad rep. That being said the best developer I know is Indian. I once worked on a a mostly Indian team and could not understand anything they were saying during the meetings. What is your accent like? Can non-indians understand you easily?

mightymosquito 7y ago
Well I like to think so. I have never faced this problem in an interview/discussion. Neither has any potential employer has ever had problems understanding what I am saying nor have has anyone told me it was an issue while giving feedback(I have started requesting for detailed feedback for my application rejections. Most people don't reply , some that do didn't really say anything about my communication skills being bad).
Zenbit_UX 7y ago
This. It's unfortunate but true that Indian devs and especially Dev teams have a bad reputation amongst western companies. Nothing you can do about this to be honest, just be aware that it's an uphill battle for you to prove you are a good communicator and a skilled Dev beyond what would normally be accepted. On the other hand, and I know this isn't relevant to your case, but for some reason Romanian Dev teams have an excellent reputation from most people I've spoken too.

kkarakk 7y ago

Have you tried asking follow up questions on why you got passed over? some companies will respond and you can pivot accordingly. also if you are good enough for remote, you should really look at angellist, lots of startups in india are willing to hire remotely from other cities(i just got two offers for react dev work from startups in blore). stackoverflow is good for this if a bit sparse

mightymosquito 7y ago
Majority of the companies don't respond back. Till now I have been able to give maybe 5-6 interviews out of which 2 people responded back with feedback . One company just sent back a generic email about how I was not looking for but the second company/startup did give a nice and detailed feedback. And it just seems like there are more frontend related jobs than backend. I primarily do backend. I have been applying through stack-overflow, RemoteOk and Hacker-news who's hiring, however I haven't really applied using Angel-list till now. I'll check out Angel List
- kkarakk 7y ago
  Full stack is the new normal, i advise you to learn some form of UI work(enough to be conversant)

MarkMc 7y ago

Hi Avneesh - I'm looking to hire remote developers in India. Please email me at mark.mclaren@mclarencollege.in or add your email address to your HN profile. To answer your question: I see a lot of Indian CVs that are just filled with buzzwords. When I see "J2EE certification" I get a sense that the person is not really passionate about the technology and is simply writing a CV that they think has the best chance to pass the HR filter at TCS Amazingly, I also see a lot of job applications where there is only a one-line description for each job they did. Tell me what tools and technologies you used for each job, and how strong did your skill become in that technology. Tell me what you liked and didn't like. I like it when an applicant is honest about where they do not match my requirements. It's good to say, "I don't have any professional Dart experience, but I've written this simple app and from what I've read it's pretty similar to Javascript and I have done plenty of Javascript". It shows me that you have thought about my requirements and aren't simply trying to bullshit me. I love it when you have done programming outside your job. That includes completing MOOCs or writing interesting blog posts about programming (as you have done!). You should have a portfolio of interesting projects you have done - even better if I can download an app or go to an actual website in addition to seeing the code on GitHub. I hate it when I'm interviewing someone and I'm not sure that they understood what I said. If you get to a Skype/Zoom interview with your potential manager do everything you can to ensure that there is smooth communication. Do not use a cheap laptop - get a fast computer with plenty of memory. Reboot it before the interview and do not have unnecessary applications running. Use a microphone that sits in front of your mouth like those Apple earpods, test your ping, upload and download connection speeds. When the interviewer is talking and you can understand them, nod your head and say 'ok' or 'uh-huh'. If you can't understand what they said, tell them - don't try to cover it up. More broadly, the main reasons people in the US avoid directly hiring Indian programmers remotely is: (a) Being a software engineer is the 'golden ticket' to a better life much more in Indian than the US, and this means every man and his dog wants an IT job in India. So you end up with a lot of people trying who have no passion or interest in programming. This means a recruiter has to wade through a lot of poor-quality candidates before finding someone who can even do FizzBuzz. Kind of related is that a lot of the cheapest software development for US companies is done by Indians - either outsourced to Infosys/TCS or using H1B visas in-house - so there is a subconscious bias against Indians (and occasionally more overt prejudice). (b) India is in just about the worst timezone for US companies, especially on the US west cost - when you are working they are sleeping and vice-versa. You will probably get more interest if you state you are prepared to work at least 4 hours at night - say from 9pm to 1am IST. (c) US companies are worried that you will steal their intellectual property. This is true to some extent of any remote employee, but particularly with a country where it is very difficult to take someone to court for breach of contract. (d) More generally it's simply easier from a legal perspective for US companies to hire people in the US. You may have a better chance by offering an initial 1- or 2-month contract to the US company, with the understanding that at the end of the contract they will either walk away or hire you on a full-time basis. (e) Indian accents can be hard to understand to western ears - a short video of you talking about your latest personal project is very helpful in this regard, and also as a general 'sales pitch'. Spend time to make a quality video and put it on YouTube. Here's a good example, although you should also include a talking-to-camera clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AexrSP9uY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AexrSP9uY0 (f) There are cultural differences that reflect poorly on Indians, particularly around not wanting to look bad. For example it seems Indians are very reluctant to say "we're behind on this task and will not finish by Tuesday" or "I don't understand your second point - are you saying that the user shouldn't see it until they are logged in?" or "Wait, I've never heard of RabbitMQ - what's that?" (g) I think many managers are worried their remote staff will 'slack off' and not work the hours they are supposed to. And to be honest I can't blame them - I myself find it difficult to maintain focus when I'm working from home. Maybe it would help your chances of being hired to say to your potential boss, "Every minute that I'm working I will record my webcam and screen in a Zoom meeting which you can review in real time or later"

davismwfl 7y ago

So I have worked with Indian offshoring, remote and on-shore since the late 90's for various companies. Currently we have people in India and remote here in the U.S. The reality is that Indian developers are just as talented as their U.S. counterparts in most things. However, where I have seen struggles is around 3 key things. 1. Timezone difference is just too large to make it efficient. I routinely have to wake up very early my time or stay up very late just to have meetings or calls with teammates in India. This isn't a 3 hour difference like hiring in the U.S. remote. I literally have some calls that start at 10:30pm and others that at times start as early as 5am. This is a huge barrier to most companies and teams. This is why you are starting to see a lot of remote job ads with a +/- timezone difference. 2. Indian developers as a group are more specialized in their skillsets and expectations and less able to move things forward without on-site direction compared to their western counterparts. I think this is more cultural as this is how the larger firms in India work, but it differs greatly from most western companies. I found working with really good people in India, they still struggle to task switch and handling disparate tasks as is very typical in many early stage and smaller companies. Where this becomes less of an issue is with large multi-national corporations because those companies will have highly specialized positions which fits better. This isn't about intelligence or capability, just how one culture works vs the other. 3. Communication can be tough, and I don't necessarily mean understanding people like others are saying, although this does happen in some cases. What I mean is that communication is more about how things are said and interpreted. While most every educated Indian person I have ever dealt with has solid English skills (likely more properly than most Americans I know) there are distinct issues in translation of nuanced requirements for most things. Many times with super complex issues I have to find one of the Indian team members that I can communicate best to, make sure they get it and then have them help me make sure the other team members get it. Also, western people (especially U.S. sadly) in general I have noticed can communicate pretty poorly expecting people to adapt to them and learn their nuances rather than finding middle ground, so that doesn't help. There are a number of other factors I could share that also affect the ability to hire remotely in India but I already wrote a bunch, and in the end, I'd say item #1 is the biggest factor overall, 9.5-12.5 hours is a huge difference to make up for a remote team member.

vidanay 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

Based on my experience in offshoring projects, and several Indian friends that I have made through the years, try to make a point that you wouldn't be like the low level devs usually offered from the likes of Wipro, TCS, Sasken, Infosys. Many western companies are burned with them, because they usually bring the top devs for sales and onsite development, but have lots of low quality devs doing grunt work, failing deadlines and delivering half promises. So the best thing you can do is differentiate yourself from them.

Zenbit_UX 7y ago
Serious question here, I'm in the interview funnel with wipro (senior Dev) and I'm seeing lots of comments like yours on HN recently. Is there something shady about them I should know about? Any articles or links to support their bad reputation would be appreciated. edit: Yup, I get it now. Their head of recruitment (whose signature address is a wework office in denver) just made me schedule a call with them days in advance only to let me know they don't think it's a good fit because they're now changing the posting to a manager role. This is also after a 5 hour take home code challenge and my original recruiter quitting the company.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  It’s less to do with India and more to do with “big consulting” (or bullshit consulting because that’s the only thing they’re good at). See the recent fiasco with Hertz suing Accenture.
  - b_t_s 7y ago
    It's also to do with India. There exists an even worse category of "small consulting" on places like odesk that caters to individuals and small businesses that are very budget conscious and whose need for software development is oneoff or occasional. Many of these folks are self taught, semi trained, or generally fizbuz challenged. Some of these organizations will quote whatever price you want for whatever work you want, regardless of whether they even know what it is, let alone how to complete it. They keep the deposit, write some garbage, and then stall, delay, lie, or ghost you. I would estimate that around 80% are form south asian formerly British colonies that many Americans pejoratively lump together with India. A lot of the rest are from other low income countries that have a history of english langue proficiency, but none of then have the population that India does. Anyone who has encountered this ecosystem is going to be especially cautious hiring remote devs from India just because there are _so_ _many_ of them who have no business writing code. Unfortunately, as a competent dev, this is probably going to make it significantly harder to get through the early hiring filters at many places. I don't know what the solution is, but I'd maybe focus some effort on visible markers of status/competence like open source contributions, giving talks, etc to try to differentiate yourself.

rando444 7y ago

Aside from the other feedback already given, time zones play a large factor in decisions like this. If developers from India run into a problem and you're half a world away, you usually don't hear about it until you come into work in the morning. They haven't made any progress due to being stuck, you help them out so they can continue, but they're done for the day. They come in the next morning, get stuck again, no work gets done, problem gets fixed, they come in the next day, and hopefully can continue working. Unless both parties are making themselves available 24/7, development cycles tend to go on forever.

rubinelli 7y ago
I've see cases where a whole team from Southeast Asia shifted work time so there was some overlap, but that also takes a toll.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  That also runs into transportation problems - my understanding is that there are a lot of people without their own cars in India (especially dense places like Bangalore) who rely on public transportation which shuts down overnight there.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    Sometimes the transportation issues work in our (US) favor though. I felt kind of bad about doing meetings early my time, which was kind of on the late side in Bangalore, until I realized that practically everyone there worked on a late schedule to avoid traffic. Without that factor, there would have been no time convenient for everyone.
cableshaft 7y ago
Going through this right now. This is exactly what's been happening in for our team. It's stretched out development time so much because of it. Tasks that could be done in a couple days are taking over a week just because each back and forth exchange costing an extra day. Code reviews by themselves can take so long that sometimes I just make the last changes myself and check it in myself because we've run out of time.

asdz 7y ago

Our company recently recruited multiple Indian colleagues. Then we realize that "paid professional certificate" is the root cause of everything. They don't have basic technical knowledge yet hold professional certificate. They don't understand any Linux commands and have not much network knowledge. My advice would be don't just blindly execute tasks and ask for instructions. Be initiative, give suggestions based on your professional knowledge. *my opinion might be biased because of the Indians colleagues that I'm dealing with

awithrow 7y ago

What countries are you interviewing with? I'm in the US and on a remote team. We have a counterpart team based out of Bangalore. The biggest challenge for us is simply the time zone difference. There is nearly very little time where the US team's working hours and the India team's working hours overlap. The only way to have face-to-face time is if people from one country start work really early and one country stay working rather late. This means that something like a code review can be delayed a long time. If two team members are working at the same time, the review might take an hour or two. If the review is between India/US team members the same review can take 3-4 days in the best case: (1. code, 2. review, 3. address review, 4. approve) So really we're looking for projects for the teams that can be done independently with as little cross-country review as possible but this is tricky for our project's current state of development. I guess the takeaways would be: Look for roles in countries that have working hours with overlap with your own. A remote team doesn't necessarily mean any timezone Look for roles with larger companies. If a large company does remote, it's probably more likely that they would have a team with similar hours to your own.

jatins 7y ago
I don't think the author is talking about _that_ kind of remote. A lot of companies have dev offices in India, while they sell in US primarily. Nutanix, Ruberik, SumoLogic come to mind. Author is talking more about office less companies like GitLab, Automattic. @OP FWIW, I know a friend of friend who worked at Automattic and GitLab had a couple devs from India last time I checked. (But from their salary calculator, it seems GitLab pays much below Indian market salaries)
- mightymosquito 7y ago
  > Author is talking more about office less companies like GitLab, Automattic. So these are the exact type of companies I am talking about. > But from their salary calculator, it seems GitLab pays much below Indian market salaries I am not sure about this, but from whatever information I have been able to gather/ask people remote companies tend to pay much better than what Indian companies pay.
- 7y ago

atonse 7y ago

One of the bigger concerns for some companies is about any international developer is intellectual property (rather than talent). 99% of them will not do this, but if someone does take your codebase and launches a copycat site, there is literally nothing you can do. No common court system where you could go after them. Not saying this has really stopped us (we still work with the occasional talented international dev that was referred) but all other things more or less equal, this can have a slight chilling effect on hiring.

Zenbit_UX 7y ago
Interesting, is this why lots of positions say "Remote (US only)"? I couldn't find any legal basis for restricting remote employees to a certain country but your theory may explain the rational.
- dylz 7y ago
  Payroll internationally is likely a PITA.

gshdg 7y ago

If you're not even getting interviews, take a hard look at your resume. The resumes I get from India (and from H1Bs looking to switch jobs) are very different from those I get from European and American candidates. They're dense, verbose, and describe hiring requirements rather than results. Also, if you're submitting 50-60 applications at a time, you may be spamming, which only annoys hiring managers. You'll get better results from fewer applications with both resume and cover letter carefully tailored to the company and position. This is especially important when you're applying remotely from India, because hiring managers get glutted with spammy and irrelevant resumes from there. If yours looks exactly like the resumes of the hundreds of developers who've created scripts to auto-submit to every listing on Indeed with the terms "Python", "Java", or "C#" in them, it won't even get read.

whamlastxmas 7y ago

My last company that was mostly remote for everyone had two developers in India. Not sure how the first one got hired but the second one was hired because the first one knew him. My recommendation is to find remote offices that already employ people from India, or to meet people in India already working for US countries and befriend them

netsectoday 7y ago

> maybe 1 in about 50-60 job applications Are you submitting your resume with a script? This sounds like you are part of the problem. What if you got 50-60 low-quality job offers each day? You'd probably do the same thing: respond to 1 of them and immediately hang up when you realized you were tricked. > What do you look for people when hiring remotely? * Someone within 3 hours of my timezone * A resume tailored to the job position * Obviously not spam Side Note: I just got a robocall on my cellphone from the "SSN Department" saying, in broken robo-english, there is a problem with my Social Security Number and I need to call them back. FCC just got a report. This is also why your country gets a bad rap.

flanker 7y ago

Being a fellow Indian I am also facing the similar issue, I have been actively searching for remote work, facing the similar problems and haven't been able to pin point the cause. I don't spam and don't use generic scripts, I invest time in applying so it's more painful. I also have hard time showing my work with majority of my work being propriety in nature. After going through thread, going forward when applying I will also explicitly mention that I absolutely don't have a problem with the timings and maybe attach a voice clip also.

amriksohata 7y ago

I work in the UK and we hire remote teams in the UK (forget India for a second) and we have terrible problems keeping them on track, getting genuine honest updates from them, forcing them to follow processes, making them support out of hours, getting them to give us updates. So imagine all that but now 5 hours ahead of time. I agree with some of the comments on here of not being transparent. I feel most Indians are honest, but when they don't know something they won't admit it which makes people suspicious are they really claiming to know everything? (which everyone knows is impossible)