Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 141 posts

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

#41

Post by zed88 »

I can speak of similarities. Both in India and China, programmers are basically 'bred' out of an assembly line like education system. Which means you find programmers with no passion or love of their craft. Which means it's rare to find good natural programmers, which you do in western countries because it's pretty much based on meritocracy rather than degrees.This shows in code quality and how projects are handled.

So from my point of view its a cultural problem in both countries where the likes of IIT graduates are preferred over a simpleton with great passion, skill and knowledge of the craft.

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

#42

Post by neeleshs »

abhinai wrote: post #29
delinka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more that existing projects are in Java, so I have experience in Java, Java works, so why learn something else? Just start the next project in Java and it'll just work.

That would imply that the world moved from Java to Node.js / Go / Python just because they are cool new technologies.

But did the world really move from Java to Node/Python?

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

#43

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

afarrell wrote: post #4
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #2

In those counties, hierarchical management tends to be the norm. Managers have much more power, and there isn’t the equivalent of these rockstar 10x engineers we see in the US. Respecting the hierarchy and the process of governing employees can be much more important than delivering a brilliant feature.

> isn’t the equivalent of these rockstar 10x engineers Wait, is the “rockstar 10x engineer” a thing in real life? I get that people can be highly knowledgeable in a certain area or familiar with certain tools or highly effective at cutting to the core important details of a problem and making it clearer.

i suspect that the 10x thing is highly dependent on problem domain and expertise in a specific field, a person may get to be very good at say frontend, but if he moves on to another domain he may be much less effective.

maybe there are people who are 10x across the board, can't be ruled out.

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

#44

Post by startupdiscuss »

afarrell wrote: post #4
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #2

In those counties, hierarchical management tends to be the norm. Managers have much more power, and there isn’t the equivalent of these rockstar 10x engineers we see in the US. Respecting the hierarchy and the process of governing employees can be much more important than delivering a brilliant feature.

> isn’t the equivalent of these rockstar 10x engineers Wait, is the “rockstar 10x engineer” a thing in real life? I get that people can be highly knowledgeable in a certain area or familiar with certain tools or highly effective at cutting to the core important details of a problem and making it clearer.

Rockstars are definitely a thing in real life. They may have long hair or tight clothes. They sing or play instruments and are often surrounded by fans. Unfortunately I’ve never seen one involved in computers.

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

#45

Post by neeleshs »

40acres wrote: post #10
vidanay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only question I have about this is _who is doing the thinking part of their coding_? Someone has to be working just a furiously architecting and concepting for all these programmers hammering out code for 14-16 hour days.

Another question is regarding open source tools, maybe it's a US bubble but I don't think I've heard of any Western companies adoping Chinese open source tools.

A lot of Chinese contributors to many Hadoop projects

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

#46

Post by abhinai »

rxin wrote: post #38
abhinai wrote: post #32

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 reward…

This is definitely not the case for China.

Which part?

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

#47

Post by fosstrack »

To add perspective as someone with 10+ years in the US and 7+ as founder in India: You should really qualify as to whether you are looking for development practices in outsourcing companies or tech startups.

Code quality and practices in Indian outsourcing companies are as good or bad as that dictated by US IT departments (out-sourcers), usually large non-technical firms.

Startups, however, are significantly different. I haven't seen much difference between US startups and Indian ones in terms of caring for your own code, jumping on the latest trends, and, generally, pushing the limits of what can be achieved. Indian startups, especially outside of Bangalore, do have to struggle to get proper funding. So they have to be practical on what they focus on.

Have no first hand experience with Chinese startups. But I would presume that they are no different.

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

#49

Post by waholleyiv »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #40
gregmac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this relate to maintenance? Whether code is practical or not is not a black and white issue, and a solution that "works" today - meets all specs, generally bug-free - doesn't mean it's maintainable. In fact, most of the code I've dealt with from people who basically only value the metric of "does it work?" completely fails at being maintainable. What I mean by this is as soon as you start trying to add/chang…

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 “practica…

What you're describing is about end-user empathy than being "practical" or "clever".

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

#50

Post by RickJWagner »

abhinai wrote: post #24
startupdiscuss wrote: post #9

IMHO the big cultural difference between the sub continent and the US is an emphasis on a particular notion of being “practical” over what I would call a particular notion of being “smart.” I assume you are familiar with the particular notion of being smart. You are quick to think of solutions, the solutions are supposed to be novel, you have particular cultural knowledge, detailed opinions and a nerd sense of humor.…

I am not sure if Java is any more practical than say Node.js or Python.

From what I've seen, Java offers more tooling and handy utilities. Examples: Remote debuggers, thread dump utilities (and analyzers), byte-code injecting tools, etc.

I haven't done a lot of 'production' Python or Node, but I have heard people gripe about the need for some of these.

Post reply on HN