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

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#231

Post by throwawayqdhd » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

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.

It's incredibly hard from a recruitment point of view. A degree in the US, even from a mediocre university, at least means that the student is capable of some amount of hard work and application.

But in India, colleges simply don't fail kids. Some others inflate their grades just for bragging rights ("our students had an average score of 80%).

So every time I see an application from a college that I haven't heard of (which is pretty much every college apart from the top ones), I would be skeptical: can this kid actually work hard or am I just wasting my time?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#232

Post by s_trumpet » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:31 PM 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…

Utter FUD. There are at least 3 major payment processors on the level of Stripe or Braintree. These have existed for the better part of a decade now.

India is a very domestic market - most tech products don't leave our shores at all.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#233

Post by throwawaydesi » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

I am really surprised at the vitriol and bias against India and Indians in this group. If similar blanket statements were made about any other sub groups in USA it would be met with quite emphatic censure. E.g. if you were to say that all/most of the people of a particular race/community were lazy or criminals based on anecdotal experiences.

Based on my experience India provides similar spectrum of capabilities in software development as found in US, UK, Germany, Singapore, China (I have worked in all these countries besides India in the software development field). I have encountered poor quality, mediocre and brilliant software developers in all these countries. I have found people who can deliver on commitment, who freeze in analysis paralysis, who can talk a big game but there is no substance as well as people who go way above and beyond and just knock the ball out of the park. Finally I think it ends up with what kind of leadership you can provide in terms of assessing the provider of service/capability, defining the expectation, tracking the progress and quality and pivoting based on the incremental progress, reacting to new discoveries etc. Of course similar to other comments this is anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#234

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

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 a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#235

Post by senthil_rajasek » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

niklasd wrote: post #207

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people including me are not experts in culture. I am not defending bad behavior. I am yet to find one single defining culture in the US and I have lived here 20 yrs. May be the rickshaw driver was being helpful. Hey you seem to not know where you are going... I don't know either so let's figure this out together... There is room for that interpretation too. I have been scammed by hospitals and HVAC guys in the US.

Overall, I see a pattern of degrading, second classing of non-whites by whites. This needs to stop.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#236

Post by mwarcholinski » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

I've worked before with my two startups with teams from India, and this was a disaster, but I think the reasons why were:

#1 Lack of my experience in dev area - how to work with dev teams (mainly external)

#2 Pricing - I was price sensitive, and in the long term, it caused that the code was not usable while scaling the business.

I hated it so much that after those two startups I've built my own software dev company focused on one technology and a quite small team of tech-savvy colleagues.

Below my checklist that I'm using to evaluate the outsourcing companies with who I would like to work -> http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#237

Post by commandlinefan » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #225

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. The problem, I think, is that management draws conclusions about the quality of Indian engineers based on interactions with the ones working in the US, who by definition are the absolute best of the best. "Sanjay is one of our best engineers", the bean counter says, "and my God, there's _a billion_ of them back in India!"

> by definition are the absolute best of the best.

I think that's probably true - the people who can claw their way through the H1B process are probably among the best India has to offer. I don't believe that that's entirely why management loves them, though. The fact that they work 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in crowded, noisy open offices without ever complaining since they're under constant fear of being fired at a moment's notice and being unable to find new work, coupled with the fact that they're capable software engineers, is why management loves them.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#238

Post by plinkplonk » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

tewewrwp wrote: post #103

plinkplonk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working" These generalizations make as much sense as me telling a random American HN user "I really hope that you guys stop indulging your blood lust by invading other countries and killing millions of innocents to make profits for your munitions industry and you as a country become less bloodthirsty" Most Americans are not killers, though t…

Anytime someone criticize India, people always come to defend it. As an Indian I disagree with you completely. It gives me anxiety when I think about dealing with employee of another office. I only do that if there is no other option. We should learn to accept criticism when it's valid instead of coming up with excuses. Also your whole comment is whataboutism.

I am not 'defending India'. I could care less about what people think of India. I am not a nationalist or 'patriot'/desh bhakt and have no problems with criticisms of any country or institution. FSM knows India and Indian institutions need plenty of criticism.

I'm just pointing out lazy forms of argumentation, essentially generalizing from narrow experiences, or media propagated stereotypes about millions of people, which is why I explicitly created a sentence of the same form substituting a stereotype about the USA.

My constructed 'criticism' is just as much out of whack as the original, and has no 'truth' in it, when made as a general statement about all of "Americans" / or more condescendingly "you guys".

There doesn't seem much of a link between 'bureaucratic work cultures' and size of the economy (Germany, China, Korea, Japan)

If you didn't understand that point, I don't know what to say.

I'll just say YMMV, and leave it at that.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#239

Post by senthil_rajasek » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:42 PM UTC

weltstub wrote: post #194

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What does that say about US? That most American like the taste of authoritarianism especially if it reinforces white supremacy. Source: I'm an American.

More like a russian troll

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#240

Post by pipio21 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

If someone works for me 18 hours instead of 8 consistently I will fire him immediately.

We do not want overworked and burn out slaves, thank you very much.

Making more than 6 hours of real deep work every day is extremely challenging. Someone who tells me he is working 18...

We have some Indians that work for us, on similar terms than Europeans or Americans, living in Europe. Good workers and have earned their place, like the rest.