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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#181

Post by techsin101 »

ramblerman wrote: post #3
reacharavindh wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

What are the naive about

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#182

Post by sullenpaladin »

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 head bobble just means that they hear you. It does not mean yes or no or anything else really.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#183

Post by madeuptempacct »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #132
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…

When I first became a manager, I had this really amazing mentor that explained to me a lot of the quirks of multiculturalism. I consider myself at least somewhat versed in other cultures, but I quickly learned there was a lot I didn't know about the mannerisms of people from India, China, Russia, etc. What I find sad, is that there are a lot of people in positions of power that either have no idea (or don't care) tha…

What do you think is different about working with Russians? The culture is the same thing. We had two off-shore teams, one from Ukraine and one from Bosnia and Herzegovina. There was zero difference in professional discourse when compared to American consultants.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#184

Post by [deleted] »

kamaal wrote: post #84
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…

>>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…

[deleted]

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#185

Post by osrec »

swedish_mafia wrote: post #178
osrec wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I’ve seen developers in the London office of some banks get paid over £150k who were not any good at software either. it would be disingenuous to say that isn’t common. I also saw some incredibly good devs there but you get both.

Very true. I was not really on the tech side, but often found myself correcting the code of some very expensive developers. Simple things, like not realising when things have been passed by value or by reference etc. Most developers lack the passion to be truly great at their work, because they consider it just a job. It's fair enough, but every so often you see a developer write effortless technical poetry with their code - they are a rare breed with innovation in their blood.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#186

Post by onecooldev24 »

chris_wot wrote: post #119
onecooldev24 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand the point I am making, then you don't deserve anything, let alone a 'job'.

Your point was that plumbers don't get paid $100k for any jobs, but in fact many plumbers do in fact get paid $100k+ for sufficiently large jobs. It's your analogy, not mine!

If you don't understand the broad idea of my statement, then sorry to say this my friend, you are a fool.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#187

Post by cpmouter »

ethbro wrote: post #175
cpmouter wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people from different parts of the world see things and respond differently than you'd expect and then get frustrated when the outcome is different than expected I get your point, but the fact that Indians say "yes" to everything (i.e. the fact they lie constantly) is not something that managers should get used to, it's something Indians have to correct.

Saying "yes" to everything, as has been explained above, has more to do with different cultural definitions of "yes" than lying. You ask me if it's going to rain, and I say yes, because I know with certainty it will rain tomorrow. Is it fair for you to call me a liar because you carried around an umbrella today?

>different cultural definitions of "yes"

https://i.imgur.com/gByDqFX.png

There's no 100% accuracy in weather forecasts so a mistake is understandable. Asking you if you finished your task and getting a "yes" when you haven't finished it is outright lying.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#188

Post by rubenbe »

carlmr wrote: post #131
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".

Asking open questions is a very good communication tactic in any country. In "yes" countries like India, Japan, China it's necessary. In other countries you often find out about whether your communication partner actually understood your question. Don't ask "Did you finish task X". Ask "what did you do on task X?". What you see as finished and what the other person sees as finished might be separate things. Maybe you…

I absolutely agree, plus asking "How much of task X could you already do?" is perceived as less aggressive than "Did you finish task X already?".

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#189

Post by billfruit »

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…

But in todays world, is not manufacturing anything an issue? Does UK manufacture even a safety pin, and they seem to be doing ok, by and by, focusing on services, financial businesses, licencing and IP etc..

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#190

Post by Clubber »

kamaal wrote: post #90
chris_wot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the problem with this is if you lie and get found out, you'll not get asked again in many Western companies.

Based on how politicians and how many second chances CEOs and other rich people get in the US I think its the same in US too. Its just that if you are working minimum wage, or you are a spoke in the gig economy it's different for you. Based on my experience working in the US, my American friends weren't very different. Its just that when you have sufficient you tend to worry less about over optimizing for the rainy d…

>Saying no to opportunities is very very expensive in India.

Unfortunately lying about your skillset is very expensive in the long term as well.

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