Ask HN: Are developers in India highly over-rated?

Working in IT I often work with people who remote from India. Its all the same. You have those who are gifted and have a passion for what they do, and those who don't.

I think the most important thing to consider here is communication. Often it can be difficult to speak with foreigners in common terms.

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It depends if we are talking local or outsourced.

From a coworker, he says what you save in money up front you will lose in time trying to communicate what you want with them, getting the result, smacking yourself in the head while finding it makes zero logical sense, having to send it back, get the results, find more problems, etc, all with massive delays due to time zones.

His company laid off a lot of good staff and outsourced with him as the manager. He said it has not been worth it and makes his life dealing very unhappy. Like herding cats.

I don't deal with Indian programmers but I deal with DBAs and others that look after data centre infrastructure. They are more than worthless - they are dangerously incompetent. The massive company I work for has spent a lot of money insourcing to get away from these idiots after years of letting all their infrastructure decay and rolling outages. When you scale up all those incidental costs add up (but the contractual SLAs are rarely enforced because you're afraid to anger the people who are running your whole business).

That's not to say Indians as people are stupid. Far from it. Actually our company has a lot of Indian staff who are integrated locally and are excellent and intelligent, I consider them good friends. And some of them plain suck.

Most also recognise these outsourced people as scum. Though I feel that's a little unfair except for how they make dealing with them a living hell. Every part of the model is broken from their parent company contracts, managers, processes on both sides, communication and cultural differences (Indians as a rule always say yes whether they will do it or not because it's considered polite; they also won't action anything or even respond unless a higher manager is included in the mail). Technical work becomes impossible when you can't clearly get an answer about what is going on.

We don't outsourced to China but have a very multicultural staff. I would hesitate to say any race was "better" than the others. I only know outsourcing to India will eventually kill your business.

So that's our experience.

I think one difference that I've seen is that the US has a very different attitude toward computer programming. In the US it's more glamorous? That's not the right word, but it seems like when I talk to a number of foreign developers who emigrated to the US, it's more about being a good job than it is about being a genius hacker, rich by 25, or being a technical tour de force. I see a lot more women overseas who become programmers. Maybe because the culture is different, and becoming a programmer is like becoming an architect or engineer?

I think that different culture might self-select US developers the same way top schools produce highly motivated, successful people because they recruit highly motivated, successful kids. Not to say every US developer wants to climb to the top of some technical or economic mountain, but it seems like maybe there's a smudge more passion among US developers. Also, intelligent, math oriented individuals have other avenues in the US, like finance, (and unlike the rest of the world) dentistry and medicine are lucrative careers. Meaning you choose programming more because you want to program, but in other countries it's because it's a better paying job.

I've also noticed that in some countries, once you've done a few years writing code, you quickly want to join management ranks and develop a coding allergy. More so than in the US, where it seems like 50 year old developers still want to write code. I get the sense that, in some countries, if you don't get into management then you are a failure at some level. So in the US you can find someone with 10+ years experience developing software, but in other countries you just have people who've stagnated and never moved up.

I dunno.

Yeah. These folks questioning our ability are in for a rude shock in a few years . There's a whole eco system of mid tier firms + startups which are shaping up really well .:D