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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. 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.
Yeah, they do.
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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 rele…
That is simply not true. You could grow anywhere, it's different shades of difficulty though.
> It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand.
The revenue from exported domestically made software/tech products, compared to the size of the IT Services industry is miniscule. Almost nothing.
> So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs.
As an economy, we should strive for depth - rather than just mate hardware imported from China with some software. Such work is easy to replicate, and is not very different from IT Services in how challenging it can be. Semiconductor fabs however is the kind of thing we should get into.
Basically, an industrial base which manufactures hardware (and other real physical things) is harder to grow than software.
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Yeah. My generalization is of no use in a discussion. I only meant to say a lot of them(that I know) are. I can't vouch for billions of us :-) Could you elaborate "sheltered by western standards"?
I feel like a horrible person for this - but in an outsourcing scenario: listening a LOT to direction and not explore solutions very much themselves. This is probably amplified by their management giving them hell if they spend too much on exploring instead of ticking off the boxes that they can bill for. I.e. not only "you get what you pay for" in the sense that cheap labour might not be the most skilled labour, but…
Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.
My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong the maintenance work as much as they could.
Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative. This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.
On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.
Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.
TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.
Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.
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Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it. Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling…
Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Amer…
This is a big thing in India too. People become engineers and then decide what they want to do.
If 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…
May I ask which technologies have you worked on?
Here is my public CV : https://aravindh.net/cv_2018.pdf
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…
>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG. Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool. Product companies pay well, but the average…
Good engineers are moved to headquarter in the US.
Product companies pay well, but the average quality of work isn't necessarily better than services firms.
I work in a product company, so I've no idea what's happening in the service industry.
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Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it. Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling…
Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Amer…
Can absolutely confirm this saying for Romania of the late '80s and throughout all of the '90s (so, even after the Wall had fallen).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG. Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool. Product companies pay well, but the average…
Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Good engineers are moved to headquarter in the US. Product companies pay well, but the average quality of work isn't necessarily better than services firms. I work in a product company, so I've no idea what's happening in…
Not all though. Crazy politics for such things. You tend to get shafted instantly if you don't have leverage with your manager. And in India deep linguistic and state affiliations play into all these things.
I was lucky that I was offered during a situation where a whole center was being shutdown and they had to relocate a bunch of folks to maintain continuity. When the center was actually running, you had to be in the good books of the inner management cartel. Many equations decided who would get what, and job performance was the least of it.
Also you tend to suffer on the longer run if you are not in dev work, even in the US. One hears whole QA units or SRE units shutdown during lay offs, and that's understandable. After a while devs tend to do all work instead of having to deal with other teams to do only one extra step after their work.
But that part of relocation to US. I have many friends(Most people are in this category) who got shafted in office politics and never made it. Even if you do go, you go in L1B, where you can't change jobs and will likely be in EB-2(May be never see GC). These days they don't extend L1B(Thanks to Trump). So its again more or less the service company deal, you return in 3 - 4 years and now you are with non-dev skills.