The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’? • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#71

Post by ivarojha » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:05 AM UTC

stealthmodeclan wrote: post #63

What people don't realize is that there are tons of American companies which have offices in Banglore and one in texas or california and nearly all employees are Indian except a few. Those companies are massively profitable but they come across as American. Indian CEOs (somtimes even CEO is American but not having complete control over the corporation) of those companies send American employees for delivering keynote…

Believe me when I say, the scenario is shifting and it's faster than ever. There are counterparts of American product companies (strip -> razorpay, for instance), they may be a total ripoff when it comes to product but they serve a different demographic and there are entirely different challenges in this next billion market.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#72

Post by manoj_venkat92 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

sumanthvepa wrote: post #33

While 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…

Yep. I'm 4 years exp software engineer in the Bangalore/Indian startup ecosystem. I don't doubt that the services sector is declining but there's a decent talent pool. At the same time, a good number of American Product companies/High-Valued startups have opened up their Indian counterparts to produce software that's super costly to build in the US.

But, I do hope that we shift our focus inward rather than towards US or somewhere. There must be enough demand as it is in India.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#73

Post by xor1 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:07 AM UTC

onecooldev24 wrote: post #51

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.

>Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000

I imagine a big enough job would easily clear $100k...

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#74

Post by chrisper » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:08 AM UTC

niklasd wrote: post #50

I 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…

I believe it is similar in Vietnamese culture. When we work with them they often say yes only for us to find out later that they had no clue what to do.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#75

Post by cataphract » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:09 AM UTC

niklasd wrote: post #50

I 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…

I've worked with people from Cognizant and sometimes I would get a plain "yes", other times a more helpful "Yes, I understood. Can you explain it again?".

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#76

Post by sumanthvepa » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:10 AM UTC

jeswin wrote: post #58

sumanthvepa wrote: post #33

While 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 an…

Yes. India is a poor country. Indeed a very poor one. But that does not necessarily constrain the growth of its tech sector.

First, tech growth is not primarily about domestic per capita income or demand for software in the country. It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand. i.e. use domestic demand to find product market fit and then expand globally. So global demand is more relevant than domestic per-capita income.

More importantly manufacturing itself is changing in ways that are lowering capital costs and the barriers to entry into manufacturing. The trend in IoT is an example of that. A lot of new products will primarily be driven by a combination of hardware and software capabilities. Skills that are reasonably widely available in India. (Although China has vastly more talent there.) That positions India in a reasonably good place. So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs. It will mostly come from many small companies that make niche-products serving and possibly dominating a narrow global market, with high margins. That's were the employment will come from. An example of this is a company that makes automation kits to convert traditional backhoes into remotely operated machines. The technology requires a combination of software, electronics and mechanical components. And Indian companies (or for that matter companies anywhere) that integrate well into global supply chains for these will do well.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#77

Post by kumarvvr » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:12 AM UTC

sho wrote: post #53

kumarvvr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP.

Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#78

Post by StudentStuff » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

jcbrand wrote: post #28

reacharavindh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, silly questions are fair game from everybody on SO and GH. There are just so many of us Indians, which makes us more visible. I browse SO just for curiosity, I have seen plenty of silly questions with all sorts of usernames.

(Let me preface by saying that of course there are world-class Indian devs, and ones who contribute to FOSS and who answer questions on all kinds of forums. What follows is obviously a generalization based on my limited and flawed perceptions. I've never been to India, so might lack some cultural insight here.) For better or worse, Indian developers in general have positioned themselves in the bottom of the market by…

What I really notice is many of the GPL projects I've trialled that were developed by Indian devs have 90% of the features one would expect, but often the way these features have been implemented ignore how whatever their building atop was designed to support these features.

For example, in one project that needed multi-tenancy, what was being built on supported subdomains per customer, with a strong permission system, all that was needed was a simple webui plastered on front. Instead, this frontend slammed all the customers into one domain, and generated random user IDs that customers will never remember. Worse yet, you were now either a user, or super-admin.

Problems like this are fixable, but I'd rather move on then work on rewriting poorly implemented frontends.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#79

Post by singingfish » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #14

I can only hope so, after near on a decade of dealing with TCS, HCL, Cap Gemini, Cognizant, and others. I tend to get drawn in because I'm working for an ISV that makes a product. The Indian third-parties get drawn in because the real customwr has outsourced a function to them. I now have to deal with the incompetent pm on the $outsourced side, instead of the competent, reasonable pm on the real customer. And eight l…

TCS: Total Catastrophe Services

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#80

Post by kamaal » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

niklasd wrote: post #50

I 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…

>>Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal.

In a country like India where opportunities are scarce, saying no in many cases can mean permanently losing the opportunity to do something big.

Saying 'yes' and failing is a lot more better than saying 'no' and not trying at all.

If I'm not wrong this isn't just limited to India. I think it was Richard Branson who said something to the order of never saying no to an opportunity. Always learn and do it.