Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000. No they don't, cause they don't deserve (intelligence required for the work they do) and the supply is abundant. Why can't western developers accept basic economics and move on to greener pastures.
The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
51–60 of 429 posts
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#52It is telling that the defining book of the decade on tech startups— Zero to One was a runaway best-seller in China but didn't even sell 50,000 copies in India. India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.
Do you have a source for those numbers?
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#53While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a massive domestic market demand and an ability to…
Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards. Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in En…
> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards
You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and they seem to be doing OK.
I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#54> The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that new tech could make two-thirds of the Indian IT workforce “irrelevant” by 2020. Indian newspaper headlines warned of an IT jobs “bloodbath,” There was an amazing answer to this "bloodbath" fallacy during an AI/ML conference in Bangalore. One of the panelists talked about "Manure" - During the Victorian era there used to be lot of horse carriages. More horses meant more ma…
That would be reassuring provided existing IT workers can be re-skilled to handle AI/ML stuff and that's a very long shot.
AI/ML stuff is extremely hard and requires a lot of creative and problem solving skills. You can't just split an AI/ML system into neatly delegate-able steps that can be outsourced.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#55I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he ans…
"yes" this is true. Fear of failure is high and not knowing something is generally considered shameful.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#56I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he ans…
This is ABC of travelling in India. Never ask "is this the train to Pune"? Ask where the train is going instead. The answer to Y/N question is always yes in India, and that can mean anything between "I don't speak English" and "NO".
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#57In my own observation the use of outsourcing to India (in terms of market share) has been declining for years. Either being replaced by work done here in Copenhagen or in countries nearer by - Poland in particular. As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working and you as a country become more foc…
Indians are fixated on certifications. My friends still can't believe that I make the kind of money I make without a CS degree (I studied literature). And when I tried to hire someone when I tried building an agency, the only thing candidates kept emphasizing was their degree and certificates, not their skills.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#58While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a massive domestic market demand and an ability to…
The problem is that we manufacture very little, and a disproportionate part of our GDP is services. If you take away services, there's not a lot of money coming into our economy. The size of our economy is tiny in comparison (smaller than UK's) and per-capita income is one of the lowest - there's not a lot of headroom to grow for companies targeting the domestic market.
The point I'm making is, until manufacturing and industry take off, we won't offset exported IT Services with domestically focused tech of the "software" kind.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#59In my own observation the use of outsourcing to India (in terms of market share) has been declining for years. Either being replaced by work done here in Copenhagen or in countries nearer by - Poland in particular. As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working and you as a country become more foc…
Indians are fixated on certifications. My friends still can't believe that I make the kind of money I make without a CS degree (I studied literature). And when I tried to hire someone when I tried building an agency, the only thing candidates kept emphasizing was their degree and certificates, not their skills.
Wow, that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them, and not by what they can accomplish with the skills they have gained. A degree does not make a competent employee from what I've experienced.
Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?
#60If anything, Indian engineers are street smart, and pick up new tech and tools very quickly. Of course, everybody can, I mean to say that there is a cultural attitude to quick adaptation to changing conditions. Source: myself, Indian CS engineer, now living in Europe. Sure, the simple laborious IT tasks are going away with automation for good. But the labor force will pick the next best thing. As long as labor is che…
> Indian engineers are street smart If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.
I think both can simultaneously be true in a typical outsourcing scenario. The incentive for an outsourcing agency is billable hours and not rocking the boat. Couple that with the different management cultures in the US and India, and it makes perfect sense that the American company would see the quiet and overly optimistic compliant attitude as not being street smart, while the Indian company sees that they are keeping the gravy train rolling and making bank off fat and somewhat stupid American companies.