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IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

nytimes.com

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Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#111

Post by jakub_g »

wehadfun wrote: post #89
skynetv2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. How do you justify this blanket statement?

I have been a close observer of code coming from India. I think the majority of the problems are because of vague, incomplete, and wrong requirements coming from the company that hired them. One company sent over someone. The guy spent a month talking to management, employees, probably the janitor and figured out what we actually wanted and the resulting code was decent.

This is part of the problem, and, in fact, part of the work of a software developer: given ambiguous and stupid requirements, you work with the customer to 1) make them clearer and 2) get rid of the unnecessary, complex requirements that do not bring any bussiness value. (My experience here shows though that it's not a standard thing in Indian culture to question the status quo).

There's a lot of implicit requirements that need to be taken into account when writing code: maintainability, security, performance, user experience, accessibility etc. It's better if everything is explicitly stated, but we don't live in a perfect world unfortunately. (My experience here shows that those implicit requirements are often not well executed, particularly when it comes to front-end code, due to a mix of: lacking experience, time pressure, different UX sensibilities).

Obviously, YMMV.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#112

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wehadfun wrote: post #89
skynetv2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. How do you justify this blanket statement?

I have been a close observer of code coming from India. I think the majority of the problems are because of vague, incomplete, and wrong requirements coming from the company that hired them. One company sent over someone. The guy spent a month talking to management, employees, probably the janitor and figured out what we actually wanted and the resulting code was decent.

That is the problem with outsourcing in general: much of the work a development team do is figure out what the problem really is and how to solve it. The actual coding part is easy in comparison. But the business people didn't really see this, and....well...the results were predictable.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#113

Post by godzilla82 »

whydoudodis wrote: post #57
burger_moon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you could also use that money to buy a diesel generator so you don't suffer from the daily power outages and you can buy a great water filtration system so you don't have to worry about ever drinking unclean water either.

Much of Bangalore and modern Indian cities are almost at par with San Francisco as far as Infrastructure goes. How do I know this? I travel to India 3 times a year for work.

Sorry you are so wrong. What do you consider infrastructure? I have lived in the bay area and in Bangalore, I have no idea how you can even compare them in terms of roads, city planning, utilities agencies, Civic agencies etc. I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#114

Post by snambi »

github-cat wrote: post #53

This is not good for IBM indeed. As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost doesn't mean you should shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. This will further affect IBM's software quality and hurt its revenue. Why not putting the money hiring less but good developers. If you are a developer, you would fi…

A lot of assumptions and bias in the comment above. You are implying that more expensive means higher quality. Less expensive means lower quality. Both are not true.

The truth is, "opensource software and cloud" disrupted IBM's business model of selling proprietary software that runs on IBM hardware and selling services to maintain these.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#116

Post by snambi »

gaius wrote: post #102
skynetv2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. How do you justify this blanket statement?

How do you justify this blanket statement? Because talented engineers don't want to work on the typical things that get outsourced, such as maintenance of legacy applications, helpdesks, implementation of dull ERP projects and so on. Therefore on average the quality of programmer at an outsourcing company is lower than at a real product company, and this would be the same at any outsourcing company in any country. It…

Okay... what do talented programmers like to work on?

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#117

Post by 794CD01 »

blizkreeg wrote: post #84
pavanred wrote: post #42

Everyone seems to be making the assumption that all the work IBM India does is outsourced from US. IBM India is the biggest domestic IT player in India with clients like Airtel, Indian Railways, HDFC etc.; IBM India also services clients from other countries in the world (which wouldn't have happened otherwise because its too expensive in the US). And, IBM India, has a few research labs setup that do independent rese…

You're getting a little defensive here. IBM was one of the crown jewels of American industry. It was an iconic company in its time. The fact that it now employs more people in India than the US is something to ponder. It isn't so much about the merits of outsourcing. Everything can be done cheaper by getting it done in another part of the world. Should it be? Sometimes the answer is yes, at other times, not. Imagine…

That was merely an accident of history. The I in IBM doesn't stand for American.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#118

Post by lagadu »

skynetv2 wrote: post #68
github-cat wrote: post #53

This is not good for IBM indeed. As lots of people know that IBM gets 21 consecutive revenue decline and it's forced to cut down cost. But cutting down cost doesn't mean you should shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. This will further affect IBM's software quality and hurt its revenue. Why not putting the money hiring less but good developers. If you are a developer, you would fi…

> shift your development work to under qualified developers or programmers. How do you justify this blanket statement?

Not the OP but I can likely offer some insight as someone who has had to deal with teams in India: The biggest problem was the employee turnaround rate. Getting a developer, even an experienced one to become fully productive in your organization if you have several or complex products is a process that can take over a year but the turnaround rate was high enough that there we needed to use a very significant amount of resources dedicated to training and keeping communication and quality flowing smoothly because having people who weren't veteran enough to be able to handle themselves and figure out the business case behind the task and user story was a constant state.

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#119

Post by ashwinaj »

maxxxxx wrote: post #40
timthelion wrote: post #5

I think that this is a good example of how racism, conscious and unconscious is making us worse at predicting the future. Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. But there wasn't actually strong evidence that Indians were less good at doing cutting edge research. This…

I'll probably get in trouble for this but from my experience even in the US majority-Indian teams prefer hiring Indians.

True, and it's true for other nationalities (Asian specifically) too. It's a shame that we talk about merit and behind the scenes it's all a sham with with cutbacks and shady hiring practices (and I'm saying this as an Indian citizen in the US).

Re: IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

#120

Post by e59d134d »

flarg wrote: post #72
pavanky wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. If you thin this is 10 years ago, you should watch some threads here and on /r/programming about people on H1b visas.

I've actually worked with and managed international teams for a number of major consultancy companies and outside of silicon valley I don't see much difference in skillsets and proficiency between the US, Europe and India.

Thank you. This always bothered me as someone with Indian background. It seems like some programmer make assumptions about my code and I have to do a lot more to gain acceptance in some companies/teams.

But on other hand, I have a theory. Indian firms write a lot more code. Their code quality distribution probably is same as any other group but since there is more code, a large percentage of overall bad code comes from India.

It is kind of like some teams in a large organization write a lot of code but they are the one with the most bugs and they get punished. Another team that rarely has bugs but they don't write as much as code as others and are rewarded for introducing least number of bugs in production.

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