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> bottom-of-the-barrel Indian devs with a handful of Western project managers It's really disappointing to see such casual racism on HN. Surely you could thin
by yunohn 5y ago
> bottom-of-the-barrel Indian devs with a handful of Western project managers
It's really disappointing to see such casual racism on HN.
Surely you could think of a better adjective than "bottom-of-the-barrel" to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company?
- malteof 5y agoYou can also read the post as “out of all Indian devs (who on average tend to be cheaper than devs from most other countries), hire the bottom of the barrel”. I doubt they meant that all Indian devs are bottom of the barrel.
- dmurray 5y agoI'm not making a racist judgement here. There are good and bad developers of all races and from all countries! To be conservative in my financial estimates, I made the assumption that chess.com's technical workforce is mostly made up of less accomplished developers, and, orthogonally, of those in areas with a low cost of living. If I said "bottom-of-the-barrel Silicon Valley devs", I would have estimated their costs 3x higher, but I wouldn't have become racist against Californians.
- yunohn 5y ago
- lukevp 5y agoThe phrase you’re focusing on is taken out of the larger context, which was estimating the lower possible bound of expenditure on staffing. Bottom of the barrel means the lowest quality / cheapest of a given option, which in this case would be the lowest-bidding team of engineers from a low cost of living country, and the combo of those 2 often is India. It’s a reference to the way middle managers think about cost reduction and not the OP’s feeling about Indians.
- yunohn 5y agoYes, I understand English and semantics. I still disagree with the derogatory phrasing. The intent could've been phrased in innumerable alternative ways, with various other words and idioms and phrases.
- sgt 5y agoNobody is doubting that there's amazingly talented Indian developers out there. Some of them are running huge IT companies in the US, as you know. However, anyone who has worked with a "random" outsourced IT company from India knows how atrocious it can be. Between hiring US developers (much more expensive) and average Indian ones, the difference is usually night and day.
- yunohn 5y agoI've worked with under-skilled developers all over the world. Including NL where I currently reside - none of them are Indian, all Europeans. Either way, I wouldn't call entire swathes of any of them "bottom of the barrel".
- Jensson 5y ago"bottom of the barrel X developers" means the cheapest/worst among X developers. You can say bottom of the barrel European developers, bottom of the barrel American developers, bottom of the barrel Indian developers etc. None of those statements says anything about how the quality of those developers relates to developers outside of that area, it just says you take the bottom for that particular group.
- CrazedGeek 5y ago"bottom of the barrel X developers" can also be really easily read as "developers who are X and therefore bottom of the barrel", and whenever I've heard similar phrases in real life, there's always at least some level of insult being cast on whatever X is.
- Jensson 5y agoIf he just said "bottom of the barrel developers" people would have assumed he meant "bottom of the barrel developers in USA" and not "bottom of the barrel developers in the World". You can get developers much cheaper in India, which is why you have to add that part as otherwise people would protest the number as unrealistic because not even bottom of the barrel developers are paid that low in the area they were thinking of. The more accurate description would be "bottom of the barrel developers in India", but people would complain about that as well, but maybe not as much.
- KMnO4 5y ago> Surely you could think of a better adjective There’s nothing wrong with Bottom of the barrel. It’s describing the work done, not the nationality of the workers. > the bottom of the barrel The cheapest, worst, or lowest quality. Used to describe an item in a range of comparable products. [0] If all software companies were in a barrel West highest cost at the top and lowest cost at the bottom, even the worst quality local companies would be somewhere in the middle. They just can’t compete with the labour cost of overseas developers. If you’re looking for something to be produced at minimum cost, you’re literally looking for bottom-of-the-barrel. It has nothing to do with racism. If India’s economy exploded overnight and the cost of labour went up 10,000%, North American businesses would look elsewhere. If American developers could be paid $3/hour tomorrow, we would hire those developers but still call any American writing code at that price “bottom of the barrel”. [0]: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/bottom+of+the+barrel https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/bottom+of+the+barrel
- yunohn 5y ago
- Smithalicious 5y agoI didn't take it as a statement on the average Indian developer, just on the extremes, the variance. I personally have no trouble asserting that the worst Indian developers are worse than the worst American developers without making any claim about average quality. There is a large cohort of developers in India and other third world countries whose main exposure to programming concepts is poorly taught classes with sometimes hundreds of students to an instructor for instance. That kind of thing simply does not exist in that capacity in the west. Minimum wage laws and such are also a contributor here, people of such poor skill are simply not employable in the west because the price floor for employing someone is so much higher. None of this has anything to do with race or ethnicity, only societal wealth and development inequalities.
- yunohn 5y ago
- xeromal 5y agoI have no skin in this debate, but the companies I have worked for simply see a line item on their budget they can shrink after a product has been built. They use a small team of western devs to build and launch something and they go "Why do we need to pay this team to sit here and fix bugs??". They move the team somewhere else and hire an offshore team to manage the project. Project runs fine until something crucial needs to be fixed or a new feature needs to be added. Thing gets duct taped together until the project collapses. Repeat ad infinitum.
- yunohn 5y ago> but the companies I have worked for simply see a line item on their budget they can shrink after a product has been built These Western companies are almost always led by Western people. Surely, they could use their supreme knowledge and avoid this situation, by taking the decision to not hire underpaid/unskilled developers?
- 5y ago
- nine_k 5y ago"Bottom of the barrel" here might not mean "intrinsically incapable", but rather "agreeing to work for lowest wages in the industry". These can as well be students. With the cost of living in India being so much lower than in the US and even eastern Europe, Indian developers is probably the least expensive option for those who is looking for people who can actually code and speak decent English. No racism here, just unequal distribution of life standards.
- School-Cotton 5y agoIt has nothing to do with racism. I can confirm, having worked with them, that a lot of cheap outsourced developers are incredibly bad software engineers, and India happens, for various cultural, economic, and historical reasons, to produce a lot of cheap outsourced developers. (For example: being a large, poor country with unusually high English proficiency relative to most other large, poor countries). It’s also true that some of the very best and brightest developers I’ve worked with have been Indian. Usually they are working for high salaries at famous companies, not for outsourcing firms. “Race” has nothing to do with it.
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoDownvoting for violation of HN rules around best interpretation, and replacing it with worst interpretation.
- Fuhrer01 5y agoIts not racism, I'm an Indian and I agree, you just get what you pay for. If you pay like that of a starbucks barista, that is the quality of devs that you'll get.
- freewilly1040 5y agoI share your disappointment but am happy to see the top upvoted reply calling it out.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- antishatter 5y agoSo by your own admission they hired the lowest possible cost developers. What do you think bottom of the barrel means?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrei_says_ 5y ago> Surely you could think of a better adjective than "bottom-of-the-barrel" to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company? I (not op) agree that the issue is with the offshoring structure and practices. My experience with offshoring is that the devs are given tasks without context and not allowed to make decisions at higher level, are thus unable to “own” a project beyond the micro tasks. Also, often write code which is not cohesive with the whole, do not take (are not given) time to learn the appropriate APIs and do not communicate when confused. For me this exposes structures that put people under pressure, punish mistakes and perceive questions as lack of experience. This has little to do with ethnicity and much to do with colonialist thinking and exploitation. Coding sweatshops cannot produce deep thinking and the level of ownership needed in a development partner.
- geodel 5y agoReally? How is "bottom of the barrel" racism? You seem to have chip on the shoulder. > .. to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company? Well people are mostly hired intentionally. Whether at top of the line and highest wages or bottom of the barrel lowest wages. Also maybe you are not that familiar with India, you'd be surprised to know what are "lowest possible" wages in India instead of just lower wage by western standards.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]