The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

I can offer so much on the topic, that it gets overwhelming as I type. So I am just writing my thoughts, some of them on the article and some based on the comments on this page.

- Not all engineers are of low quality. In my experience about 10% of them are as good as SV engineers.

- Infosys founder NRN is a socialist at heart. He pioneered sharing of wealth via stocks (ESOPs). And he did it so well, that all employees got it - drivers to janitors to sys admins to coders. So very unlike the shocking Amazon shop floor stories we hear.

- It has resulted in an ecosystem of Startups in India. Many of the ex-employees who benefitted from the Infosys shares, are doing their own startups (many of them product startups, as a result of getting bored with IT services). So it has acted like a YCombinator of sorts. There even was a ex-Infoscion startup group. And the best part is they can do their own angel funding. So no running for VCs atleast in the early stages.

- For the above reason, I revere him as much as may be a Gandhi or a MLK. The other two I read, only in a book. Very rarely do you get a chance to interact with truly great people IRL.

- Jugaad. This a word I hate with a vengeance. That's what gives a bad impression to Indians. And admittedly it happens a lot. Although Infosys founders, in how they ran their company, serve largely as a counter example. Minus of course some things like H1B visa issue. Just as a contrast read the story of Satyam (another IT company) whose founder Raju did wholesale jugaad and landed in jail in 2009, because the real estate leverage built on fake salaries of fictitous employees, his jugaad, failed.

- Product engineer skills. This is an area, where Infosys/others lack. And thats not only for aptitude or potential, but the culture. Because the Industry grew so fast - 100% YOY in early decades and 50% YOY in the last one - people were pushed to being managers & leads, after just two years of coding experience. And as such bulk of the work is very low quality coding.

- But the numbers in India are so big. Whether its the population of a billion+ or no. of engineers. That there is both quality and quantity. Just look at any coding site (HackerRank, TopCoder et al) and you will see Indian programmers dominating in numbers as well as few performing at a world class quality level.

- Regarding the bad experience, with Indian IT engineers. I wonder how many of them were with a company like Infosys and how many of them were with sites like UpWork/etc? Please note because of the overwhelming quantity of Indian engineers. Its not easy to find the quality engineers, which are also significant in number, but you have to be lucky or have to work hard. (Heck, may be there is a scope to do a TopTal like site, but just for India.)

The view I have on it is that in China, there is a large and growing interest in large, long-term investment in new technologies and new ideas. Obviously there's a continuum and China is also still implementing and scaling technologies built in the west, but there's a definite commitment towards breaking new ground as well.