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The article mentioned recent grads (working in Seattle for an India-based company) who wrote code on specifications, not “mechanical turk”-style employees. It w

The article mentioned recent grads (working in Seattle for an India-based company) who wrote code on specifications, not “mechanical turk”-style employees. It was followed by a quote from a former Boeing software engineer affirming this. Is your issue just with the amount ($9) being paid?

throwawayMUSE 7y ago
I worked at a Fortune 10 in the early 2010s for several years. We had a small army of local and offshore Indian contractors through Larsen and Toubro Infotech, an Indian IT company. They were paid between $10-20 an hour, many couldn’t understand English. These guys have no CS background and would get stumped writing fizz buzz. But hey, management got ball game tickets and other favors from the L&TI reps. One of the directors admitted to getting a cut under the table after he left to go work for a competitor. To be clear, we paid $120-150 per developer and L&TI paid them nothing. You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of code, no concept of unit tests, integration tests, manual or automated acceptance tests, usability tests, etc. Shelf life of most of this garbage was a few months if something ever did get delivered. This went on for years. The whole industry is corrupt.
- ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
  You must have been a pleasant employee to work with.
  - throwawayMUSE 7y ago
    I sense sarcasm. Is it because I called out a legit issue? For my employer, it didn’t matter because IT had a reputation of delivering garbage and so our business partners weren’t shocked at what they delivered. If something like this happens at a Boeing (I don’t know if it is), then heads ought to roll and people should be going to jail.
  - nutjob2 7y ago
    Actually, he sounds very good. The biggest problem in corporate environments is the amount of BS being spouted and people going along with said BS. When someone is actually honest and confronting issues, problems get fixed before they blow up. That's good for everyone. Of course generally the reason people go along with the BS is that either they're incompetent or mediocre and BS suits them just fine, or they've given up and are just happy to be swept along and collect a paycheck.
  - atpalmer 7y ago
    throwawayMUSE is clearly right. These firms are playing the same game as used car salesmen--selling you junk that won't make it off the lot, all for $9/hr. It's true even for non-critical .NET apps that the business is getting ripped off. In mission critical systems, it's literally life and death. Sounding the alarm doesn't warrant dismissive sarcasm.
- nonamechicken 7y ago
  Why would anyone pay $120-$150 per hour for .net code in India? Most American firms pay $25-30 per hour to the Indian companies. Also, do airplanes run on .net? >You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of cod If we are blaming entire nationalities, I have seen code written by an American. His idea of refactoring was copy paste the function, append a '2' to the function name and use it. There were at least a 50-100 functions like this in the project that had like 30-50 source files.
  - throwawayMUSE 7y ago
    I wasn’t blaming a nationality. Not sure how you’re drawing that conclusion. There’s a legitimate problem of offshoring programming work to “coders” in India who produce garbage only because management gets kickbacks.
- tmaly 7y ago
  If one could improve on this process, it seems like a huge opportunity. I have one person in our Mumbai office out of a 8 person team I manage. He had been absolutely fantastic with the work he does.
xtracto 7y ago
That Indian company is HCL. Ive hired and fired people that have worked in HCL here in Mexico. The culture seems veeery bad, as engineers coming from there have a culture of "do the minimum". And no ownership at all. As an extreme example, one ex-employee stopped working one day because his wireless keyboard did not have batteries (a kB connected to his work MacBook Pro). Colleagues told him to just buy some AA batteries while I was back (I would have refunded them to him) and he did not want to do it. Nowadays if I see HCL or Tata in resumes here in GDL, it is an automatic pass.

throwawayMUSE 7y ago

I worked at a Fortune 10 in the early 2010s for several years. We had a small army of local and offshore Indian contractors through Larsen and Toubro Infotech, an Indian IT company. They were paid between $10-20 an hour, many couldn’t understand English. These guys have no CS background and would get stumped writing fizz buzz. But hey, management got ball game tickets and other favors from the L&TI reps. One of the directors admitted to getting a cut under the table after he left to go work for a competitor. To be clear, we paid $120-150 per developer and L&TI paid them nothing. You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of code, no concept of unit tests, integration tests, manual or automated acceptance tests, usability tests, etc. Shelf life of most of this garbage was a few months if something ever did get delivered. This went on for years. The whole industry is corrupt.

ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
You must have been a pleasant employee to work with.
- throwawayMUSE 7y ago
  I sense sarcasm. Is it because I called out a legit issue? For my employer, it didn’t matter because IT had a reputation of delivering garbage and so our business partners weren’t shocked at what they delivered. If something like this happens at a Boeing (I don’t know if it is), then heads ought to roll and people should be going to jail.
- nutjob2 7y ago
  Actually, he sounds very good. The biggest problem in corporate environments is the amount of BS being spouted and people going along with said BS. When someone is actually honest and confronting issues, problems get fixed before they blow up. That's good for everyone. Of course generally the reason people go along with the BS is that either they're incompetent or mediocre and BS suits them just fine, or they've given up and are just happy to be swept along and collect a paycheck.
- atpalmer 7y ago
  throwawayMUSE is clearly right. These firms are playing the same game as used car salesmen--selling you junk that won't make it off the lot, all for $9/hr. It's true even for non-critical .NET apps that the business is getting ripped off. In mission critical systems, it's literally life and death. Sounding the alarm doesn't warrant dismissive sarcasm.
nonamechicken 7y ago
Why would anyone pay $120-$150 per hour for .net code in India? Most American firms pay $25-30 per hour to the Indian companies. Also, do airplanes run on .net? >You’d see .NET code with a single class that has a few thousand lines of cod If we are blaming entire nationalities, I have seen code written by an American. His idea of refactoring was copy paste the function, append a '2' to the function name and use it. There were at least a 50-100 functions like this in the project that had like 30-50 source files.
- throwawayMUSE 7y ago
  I wasn’t blaming a nationality. Not sure how you’re drawing that conclusion. There’s a legitimate problem of offshoring programming work to “coders” in India who produce garbage only because management gets kickbacks.
tmaly 7y ago
If one could improve on this process, it seems like a huge opportunity. I have one person in our Mumbai office out of a 8 person team I manage. He had been absolutely fantastic with the work he does.

xtracto 7y ago

That Indian company is HCL. Ive hired and fired people that have worked in HCL here in Mexico. The culture seems veeery bad, as engineers coming from there have a culture of "do the minimum". And no ownership at all. As an extreme example, one ex-employee stopped working one day because his wireless keyboard did not have batteries (a kB connected to his work MacBook Pro). Colleagues told him to just buy some AA batteries while I was back (I would have refunded them to him) and he did not want to do it. Nowadays if I see HCL or Tata in resumes here in GDL, it is an automatic pass.