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

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#381

Post by kamaal » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

throwaway1414 wrote: post #325

kamaal wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys. No. In fact this is precisely the kind of binary classification that forces people to make bad decisions. Please try to understand that people working Wipro or Infosys or TCS are humans like us, who use the same programming languages and same computers. This binary classification is why people up becoming SREs at Google,…

You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision? If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG. T…

>>You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision?

If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just committed career suicide.

>>If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG.

That is because most of the work in FANG's is not OS kernel programming or writing some earth shattering code. Most people are fetching stuff from HTTP end points, parsing XMLs/JSONs and posting to another HTTP end point. Or the same with a data base.

The peak hype I have seen is using Pig/Hadoop to deal with files of size a few KBs and call it 'Big data' programming.

>>This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.

Lol. I'm going to say again. Companies mean nothing. Show me your projects.

>>Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant.

Thanks for bringing this up, there are units at Infosys who design chips. None of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.

>>Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.

I've had friends at Infosys who worked on Airbus 380's software's validation team. To listen here that people like you think that's lower quality work than how HTML pages look on IE7 is one epic thing I've heard in a while.

>>If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.

As of now chances of landing into an SRE job is very high in FANG companies in India. Because that is the kind of work they want to be done from here.

>>And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of work has to be better than another.

It has to be. Some work is bad. I give it to you that people move for money. But they also end up committing career suicide.

Yes I do believe being an SRE worse than being programmer at Cognizant. This is not 'service company' mentality. These are facts.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#382

Post by ksk » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:34 PM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #370

ksk wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual way businesses deal with that sort of thing is by withholding milestone payments till the contractual obligations are fulfilled. Running such scams doesn't keep you in business for long. There is no one handed clap.

Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function. This isn't just an India thing. This is…

Ah yes, the $200 "military spec" hammer. Well with the government, you'd still have a job if you waste taxpayer money, since the government keeps collecting revenue. With a private firm, I'd expect them to go out of business if they keep wasting money like that. I work in pharma and I've been involved with a few consulting contracts. We chose our vendors very carefully and I can't imagine us ever paying when contractual obligations are not met.

>Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.

Its hard to imagine the owner(s) of the company not being good with numbers here. Surely, such frauds will be found out eventually? In any case if a company has indeed hired such a dishonest person, I would hope they improve their hiring process and do some due diligence on their previous record to weed out such people in the future.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#383

Post by kamaal » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #321

kamaal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here. Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again. Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser. >>On the other hand, sever…

I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response. >> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again. Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world…

>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity."

How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a product company and magically becomes passionate and creative.

>>In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."

This is how CMM levels worked. You'd also be interested in looking at the engineering practices at NASA.

>>So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? ....

None of this wrong. But you wrote you served notice and moved as soon as you saw the requirements doc, and how that killed your creativity.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#384

Post by fermienrico » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #355

eriken wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always negotiate, but if you accept an offer I expect you to commit.

I never quite understood this concept of loyalty or commitment to a business entity. You might interview the candidate and take it to the final stage with lot of effort but at the end of the day, the candidate is offered the job by the business entity and not personally by the interviewer. I don't see why the relationship should go beyond the applicable law of the land. Of course, once the candidate joins the company…

Agreed, one-sided loyalty is a foolish activity. I never understood that either.

To all the people mentioning ethics - a company can and will fire people without any reason. I know a couple of people personally who can't sleep not knowing why they were fired. In 30 mins, they were walked out. That's incredibly unethical but for some reason, not giving advanced notice to your employer is considered unethical? Hypocrisy!

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#385

Post by sumedh » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

osrec wrote: post #156

sumedh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Not sure how to respond to your anecdote.

If what you are saying is true then you should have a chat with the person who hired them to see what is going on.

The poor salaries which I am talking about is Rs 2 lakhs for freshers who join IT consultancy services.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#386

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

mkovji wrote: post #323

crazygringo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my travels, I learned very quickly not to let that bother me, or else I would have gone nuts. I mean, the number of times somebody acted like I was an insane person because I started to eat X food with my hands instead of silverware, or silverware instead of hands. ("But in the last country I was in...!") Fact is, you're the one choosing to be aware of and experience different cultures and travel, but they're not…

every foreigner is always a wierdo, thats wat makes this world so much fun and exciting. foreigner by nation or state or city or apartment or school.

thanks for what might be my favorite HN comment ever ;)

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#387

Post by Alterlife » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

aspenmayer wrote: post #362

Alterlife wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I substituted 'them' for 'those'. According to the interweb, it's grammatically acceptable in informal English. Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually". ref: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them

> ...and as one of them incompetent developers in India, I feel the need to defend myself. In your original sentence, you are trying to use "them" as an adjective to modify "incompetent developers," but "them" should only be used as a 3rd person plural pronoun. Using "them" as an adjective is not proper; your examples sound strange to native speakers, and is usually associated with vernacular English in general. Nati…

The first example is straight out of the oxford dictionary link that I posted. It's at the bottom of the page under "Informal, dialect".

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them

A couple of other examples: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB33z9xoSw8&feature=youtu.be... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUsB4y5RVk

There are plenty more examples on Google.

--

I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#388

Post by pwneduser » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #383

reacharavindh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response. >> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again. Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world…

>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion and creativity." How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a product company and magically becomes passionate and creative. >>In this case, it was a Word doc…

"How does this change in a service company?"

You need to work for a good product company to understand that. From your other comments, clearly you work for a non-FANG, perhaps for a services company or another non-services company that do not seem to have the kind of work and expertise Google or Amazon has. You are also too biased to be completely blind to the possibility that must be some factors other than money because of which so many people want to work for the big product companies even though they are not the highest payers anymore. No amount of answering your questions is going to convince you how services companies and product companies are world apart unless you have seen both sides. And by product companies I don't mean companies like Cisco or Juniper (although they are technically) but they are now like dinosaurs moving slowly and are only marginally better than the services company. I mean the types of Amazon or Facebook or Google or LinkedIn in their India offices or the types of Directi or Flipkart (now Walmart Labs -- another great workplace) or Ola.

Any responses to you in this thread seems futile because you come with a very negative outlook about other companies and you are not ready to look back and question your assumptions.

Sorry, not everyone shares this pessimistic view and try to understand many of us have enjoy very productive and happy careers in these big product companies that you seem to believe are no better than the services company.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#389

Post by pwneduser » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #321

kamaal wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here. Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again. Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser. >>On the other hand, sever…

I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response. >> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again. Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in the context of a developing world…

"I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response."

Yes, I am amazed too at this kind of comments.

Your parent commenter seems to be exhibiting a strange mix of ignorance and arrogance. Likely works for an unhappy place in Bangalore where people are always bickering about their work which has made this commenter believe that the whole of industry in Bangalore must be like that.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#390

Post by pwneduser » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:38 AM UTC

pritambaral wrote: post #375

throwaway1414 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to see how some people seem to be sitting on a high horse here and thinking that a HTML5 music player issue is somehow indicative of the work going on behind the scenes. Granted there are issues in Prime (Which software does not? Either people bitch about a software product or nobody uses it) but the context of the discussion here was comparison between the likes of Amazon and the likes of Cognizant. Tel…

Calm your horses (sorry, couldn't resist). I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else. My only comment was on how Prime is not a "high-profile" project at Amazon. You brush aside the issues I mention as "all software has issues". My point was to show the quality of the product, unlike the actually good technical products that Amazon has, not that the product has issues. You seem to be emphasiz…

"I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else."

You are missing an important context of the discussion then.

No matter what complex software working at large scale one comes up for an example, one can find problems with it. Every software has at least one problem that makes it a deal-breaker for at least one person. Even Linux, which is so popular in the tech world. These problems more often occur due to priorities than due to dearth of engineering competence.

But these issues are orthogonal to the context of discussion. What you said about Prime's quality may be correct but irrelevant in the context of this discussion.

"I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole"

Perhaps you can provide some examples then?