Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

story.californiasunday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 429 posts

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#151

Post by cpmouter »

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…

I've tried Zoho and it's the most unreliable, "ghetto" thing I've ever tried (for lack of better words). UX/UI-wise, it looks like it was slapped together by a bunch of amateur programmers.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#152

Post by bhouston »

osrec wrote: post #129

IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy, because you often end up i…

I was dealing with a smart IT engineer from India and then I found out that he has sold me code for peanuts he had created for another client (and was already owned exclusively by that client, which was a major venture backed company), and then I caught him selling the code I paid him well to create exclusively to a third client also for peanuts. Basically no regard at all for IP rights and the contracts he signed, just doing whatever he could to make a quick buck. Not sure if it was just him or a cultural thing. But ended up an IP nightmare.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#153

Post by sumedh »

StudentStuff wrote: post #59
throwawayqdhd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them

That sounds sad to you because you are looking at it from a Western perspective, when you have couple of hundred people interested for a job you can use a certification to filter lot of the candidates.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#154

Post by oblio »

collyw wrote: post #66
icebraining wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.

Stack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.

No way. Even on Stack Overflow the ratio of answers to questions is below 1.

Yup, found it:

select 1000 * (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1 and AnswerCount = 0) / (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1);

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

=> 132 for me.

so 132 answers for 1000 questions, on average.

You're looking at popular questions, that have a ton of answers. But the long tail is huge and most of those questions have 0/1 answers, most likely 0.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#155

Post by intended »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #137
_xzxj wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah even before the internet was widely used you would go to the library and copy stuff out of encyclopedias. It just took longer :)

I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read. It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.

No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.

The exam and grading workload is unserviceable.

This is the crux of it.

And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day!

Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in test checking?

Online communication ? How do I know this information is correct? Who can provide proof of work for this comment?

Testing is onerous- And when incentives and resources are inverted/out of Sync, it’s not possible to test effectively.

This is the hidden factor.

If all Indian/Chinese teachers could turn around tomorrow and complete assessments accurately, rote learning would drop dramatically.

Failing that you must resort to large scale standardized testing. Which humans optimize for by just learning the test.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#156

Post by osrec »

sumedh wrote: post #144
osrec wrote: post #129

IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy, because you often end up i…

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. That is because you dont pay them well, the good engineers who are being paid well work in MS, Amazon etc in India.

Not sure about that... I worked at an investment bank in London, and had a tech team support our quant desk from India. I signed off on the costs and they were ranging from 10 lakhs to 35 lakhs per person. I think that's comparable, or even better than MS or Amazon for the city they were in (Pune).

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#157

Post by sumedh »

OliverJones wrote: post #112

In 2004, I heard a sales pitch from a VP of a big outsourcing outfit in Bengaluru (fka Bangalore). In response to a question about turnover and preventing it, he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year. That was crazy. That was Sili-Valley crazy. There are limits to growth. It's too bad they're hitting good people. But the business model of Infosys and other outsource IT services gia…

> he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.

Inflation in India is pretty high as well compared to developed countries.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#158

Post by overcast »

saiya-jin wrote: post #85
avip wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

it's part of the culture to be nice (to strangers) and NO is considered rude. brings a lot of funky and frustrating moments not only when travelling. another is that strange indian head-shake that is so hard to reproduce - never figured it out completely, but it felt like when I eventually ask yes/no question and they say yes with that shake, it's actually more like no/don't know/maybe

The old bobble head :) I was there for a month, the whole country, and it's their form of agreement/understanding. Particularly when you're trying to teach them something.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#159

Post by sumedh »

chris_wot wrote: post #92
sidcool wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the biggest IT services company with $100 billion market cap. They are bad at many things, but making money is not one of them.

Someone needs to help reduce that market cap. They really are the pits.

You can always start your own company and compete with TCS :)

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#160

Post by v_lisivka »

carlmr wrote: post #135
mieseratte wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about hiring some interns and giving them room to fail here. If I hire your firm and you tell me you can achieve an objective, then I spend money and come to find out you can't and you knew you couldn't, you've defrauded me. If I ask if you can perform a task and you tell me you know how, then I find out you have no idea, you've lied to me. I'll take a "No, but I can figure it out" any day of the we…

>I'll take a "No, but I can figure it out" any day of the week, but lying is a cardinal sin in any relationship. ...in western business culture.

... in Christianity.
Post reply on HN