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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#201

Post by mieseratte »

kamaal wrote: post #168
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…

We are not talking about those sort of failures here. But almost everyone who has every written code, has failed or written buggy code at some point in time. In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"

> We are not talking about those sort of failures here.

The thread is about working with Indian contractors who frequently lie, pretending they know what is going on. We are very much talking about this kind of problem.

> In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"

What I'm talking about is orthogonal to this. You can move fast and break things, but be straight forward to your manager about the risk involved.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#203

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

My experience with offshoring is that you need to put a lot of due diligence into hiring. I've worked with excellent Indian engineers, but we really had to interview a lot before we found them.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#204

Post by bane »

I think another way to look at it:

Many Indians who were legitimately good ended up in high paying jobs where they then used that money and skill to emigrate to countries with more comfortable standards of living. In my area, the Indian immigrant community has exploded, and almost entirely within the technology sector to start with, but now rapidly expanding to other areas as family members sponsor other family members and so on.

The wonderful halo effect is of course that family members who immigrated with the technical household head, but don't work in tech, are now employed at, opening and running all manner of businesses as well.

As a result I have a vast community of new, highly skilled and educated neighbors who are also ambitious and motivated.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#205

Post by BrandonM »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #193
carlmr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 any culture where you want trust and reliability. If someone doesn't want to be reliable, that's their choice, but don't expect me to be willing to engage in business with them.

I only realized when I started traveling internationally how much we (perhaps over-) value reliability in the US. We really pay a lot in terms of work hours and stress to gain what is sometimes marginally more predictability and reliability.

In Mexico, Belize, southeast Asia, and southern Europe, I found everything to be much less reliable than I was used to. Everyone spent a lot time more waiting around. But I felt happier and more relaxed, and the people around me seemed to as well.

I think it might be more cultural than you seem to think.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#206

Post by chappar »

kamaal wrote: post #116
throwaway1414 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading. Let us take FANG one by one. Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area. Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and…

I've worked in FANG companies too. In fact most people who left Google I know did it because they were largely in QA and their friends who were so called working in crappy services companies, often from colleges considered bad, did more code work then them. They were largely forced to leave and join start ups because the difference in experience was catching up with them. Fb was purely a 'hire and send' unit in Hyd,…

I guess it depends on which team you are in. I have worked for some of the well know MNCs(not FANG) in Bangalore, some of the teams I was part of did really hard core development work. Some of my team members in Bangalore were more competent than our US counterpart.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#207

Post by niklasd »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #145
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…

You are using an experience with a driver to someone with an office job. That is not a fair comparison. The president of the US lies constantly. What does that say about US?

It was just an anecdotic example of a more general habit that also affects office jobs. I heard that directly from people who have an IT team in India, and the answers here at HN also seem to imply that this is a wider shared experience.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#208

Post by specialist »

kumarvvr wrote: post #47
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…

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…

"...these projects devolved into internet searches..."

This is the 3rd millennium. Learning how to ask questions and find answers is a core competency. Along side critical thinking and problem solving, of course.

I now keenly remember a 4th grade teacher who would drill the entire class with random trivia style questions. "Where is the capital of Botswana?" "What is the root word for 'homage'?" And us teams of kids would race to find the answers. Great fun.

If home work assignments are easily fulfilled by quick searches and copypasta, the teacher is being lazy, not the students.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#209

Post by musage »

imglorp wrote: post #199
mieseratte wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.

In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.

> rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete

Sounds like "might is right". It's hard to argue that's wrong, you say? Why, then just kill the person who says it's wrong, EZ PZ! After all, only the results matter.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#210

Post by code_duck »

imglorp wrote: post #199
mieseratte wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.

In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.

A business not wanting to invest time hiring, training and integrating an employee who is likely to leave prematurely is not an abstract principle.
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