Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

I'll summarize my experiences.

(1) (Too far removed) Engineers in India / China mostly work on projects meant for Western markets. They do not always understand the problems that the project is trying to solve. They rarely get to see it work in the wild.

They can't feel proud of creating something they will never see in action. If the project is a huge success, the engineers who created it will almost never be rewarded.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to care.

(2) (Culture) The culture prioritizes seniority over performance. Manager is always right. If you are a 10x engineer and your manager is mediocre but always right, good luck navigating the potential issues.

(3) (Wrong incentives) Most software engineers work for outsourcing companies. These companies get paid for delivering projects. Size of project matters. The incentive is to inflate the projects and create as much work as possible, maintainability be damned.

I think this is a symptom of outsourcing rather than the skills of people. When outsourcing they don't own the product or have any pride. My company has previously experimented with outsourcing to a European nation, and we get back the same shit show.

Disclaimer: Although I come from China, I never worked for a Chinese company. All of my opinions were gathered from internet and friends. And definitely not all companies are like this.

One of the reason that they need to work long hours is because they need to constantly change requirements to cater to market demand. The competition is always fierce in a country with 1.4 billion population. If your competitor come out with a good feature that you can't duplicate in a few days, you bleed out user base really fast. IP laws are hard to enforce here, companies copying each other all the time. Tech giants like Baidu/Tencent have extremely low bar of integrity. If you can't grow you user base to the extent that it's cheaper to just buy you out. Those big boys will just copy your product and promote the shit out of it in a few months. You won't stand a chance against them with the uneven playground. On top of that, poor planning and the fact that PM often come from non-technical background definitely doesn't help either.

Because of the demanding hours, developers are expected to change career path when they pass 30. It's really hard to keep up with the pressure when you have a family. As a result, coding is not seen as a craft but rather a mere part of a feature development process. Quality is generally considered less important than feature completion. Copy pasta code is prevalant among smaller startups because they would rather spend money on marketing rather than on good developers. Users are to be blamed for this as well. Regular Joe's care more about features and who's advertising for your product(hiring celebrities to promote apps/websites are a common thing in China) rather than how polished and well thought your product is. These are definitely not issues unique to Chinese companies, but it's just much worse.

Saying all this, just like in western countries, if you know your stuff, you will be paid very well. Big companies like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu can usually pay 50k USD or more per year for new grads. Not Silicon Valley good, but will definitely put you in middle class in China.

This is definitely not the case for China.

There is also another issue with “just works” and meeting specs: specs are almost universally under constrained.

I might describe an admin interface in terms of what it controls but implicitly I want large choice sets to have search functionality and dates to have calendars and so on.

A large choice set implemented as a massive drop down technically works but I don’t have to explain why it’s just wrong. The “practical” programmer may say hey it works and let’s move on. The “clever” programmer wants to impress with a new widget that is intuitive to use. In this particular case (interface design) I’d prefer the clever coder over the practical one.