61–70 of 141 posts
India still depends heavily on outsourcing.
It's rather expensive to look at Chinese outsourcing currently, India is still relatively cheap. Vietnam is the new hotbed of outsourcing.
I'm really interested in hearing more about this, especially when it comes to software development in cities like Beijing and Shenzen. The stories make it seem like China's developer culture is really harsh, almost absurd in the intensity level and hours worked. Another question is regarding the economic position of developers, here in the US it seems like a path way to a solid upper middle class existence, is it the…
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 o…
At the end of the day, it's all code. Not sure I would ever work for a company that makes you work like a sick man just to get even the with the uneven level field.
How hard is it to get into Tencent/Baidu?
There is one thing I'm completely sure about. Code quality is an order of magnitude worse. I'm not really sure why, but that's how it is. With a few exceptions, the norm is to get a shit show every time something is outsourced to a team in India or China.
The company was around 10 years old and transitioning from what one could term as a start up mentality into a full fledged product company.
Methodology: had formally adopted Agile around 2016-2017. A part of this adoption included some formal training by an experienced agile coach.
Code : I can probably speak for the entire country and say code is written in English. Most of the country learns English through highschool if not through kindergarten. Code and CS concepts are learnt in English too. Infact I've never seen code written in any other language.
Languages : Languages popular include but aren't restricted to Java, JavaScript and Python. Although I have observed that Java seems to be more popular or well known than C++.
Tooling: We used a majority of the Atlassian softwares to track the product lifecycle. Additionally we also had Docker, Kubernetes, ELK and Splunk Deployments.
Culture : This is where I'm probably not necessarily the best person to comment with respect to the whole country.
The work I did was valued and we were encouraged to understand why we were doing a particular task. You could discuss/debate over choice of technology or approach with your boss. Teams were empowered to make a majority of decisions.
Friends from fish-tin companies aka the outsourcing companies have drastically different views than mine. Run of the mill work - shitty culture.
I'm really interested in hearing more about this, especially when it comes to software development in cities like Beijing and Shenzen. The stories make it seem like China's developer culture is really harsh, almost absurd in the intensity level and hours worked. Another question is regarding the economic position of developers, here in the US it seems like a path way to a solid upper middle class existence, is it the…
We have a term “996”, which means working from 9am to 9pm per day, 6 days per week. It’s common in many tech companies.
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…
Is this still true? I have heard that years ago it was prestigious to work for the likes of Infosys but now the best engineers work for Indian startups and the outsourcing companies only get average ones or worse. This seems in line with the people my company gets from outsourcing companies. They all seem pretty clueless but the direct hires are quite good.
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.
I really hate this. Maybe there are a few real 10x engineers but mostly it depends on the environment. I think I have been a 10x engineer myself in one company where I could work with autonomy and get needed support. Now I work at a place where they prefer many 0.5x engineers under tight control that do what they are told.
I think a lot of us could do much better if we were allowed to do so.
2. Training was a thing a decade back. A lot of companies would spend a fortune on training people.
3. Even until a while back, and may be even now. Growth was high, and a lot of people got/are getting rapidly promoted. Sometimes this happens very early in career. You have a lot of managers who just haven't had any real programming or engineering experience. These people only survive by toxic politics and building cartels. So all your usual cartel politics apply. People close to bosses and butter their breads, get promoted, get to travel abroad, bonuses, raises, RSU's all flow in that direction. By and large, there is no merit. Appreciation or scope for talented people to get rewarded is very small or non-existent.
4. Networks matter when it comes to getting hired. Hopping jobs continues to be the only way you can good hikes. So a lot of interview gaming goes on. If you know people, you can hop forever. People hop jobs very often, until they can find a helping cartel boss. Until then 8 months - 1 year is what people stay. Barely work, learn or gain any experience and keep hopping. Even here if you have friends, the make the interview easy for you. If you don't have this, face 10 rounds leet code interviews.
5. Entire game is finding a boss whose bread you can butter, and get what you want.
6. Recently learning has become a thing. Thanks to internet, and interaction with the programmers in the west. Youtube, and MOOCs and all that. A very small, negligible minority of people focus on gaining skills. They are also not very liked in many places. The cartel bosses don't like smart programmers who could later become competition and take their jobs.
7. Moving to US continues to be the only way to get some decent out of one's career. Again it all depends on your relationship with the cartel bosses. Even here its often the wrongest possible who get to go. H1's L1's Green cards all flow in that direction. Which is why I often Laugh when, US claims its importing 'High quality talent' from India. You are getting the worst crowd from here. The real people are stuck. There are no managers to push their case, and mostly they have no network or time, to do a range of political ground work to move to the US.
8. Lastly skills don't matter. Its career suicide to learn and gains skills. Keep a stack of Machiavellian literature handy. That's the skills you need to gain to win in India.
Lastly your question is wrong. There is nothing like popular languages or agile or anything. Its just your usual thing as in the US. Except with the points above.
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 differen…