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

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

#81

Post by kamaal »

m_ransing wrote: post #72
abhinai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely correct. If you are a 10x engineer reporting to a mediocre manager in these countries, it really complicates things and in the end you learn wrong lessons in life.

So, does that mean if one is 10x engineer under mediocre manager in other countries, things are better for that engineer compared to these countries?

It depends on the cultural context. India is a society of scarcity, and with an over population problem. So people try to endlessly optimize for themselves, regardless of the consequences. And then hoard for themselves.

In other countries, it could be different. For eg, in the Bay Area, I saw similar behaviour, but it was not as intense or at the same level as I see in India.

Sure bad people, exist everywhere in the world. But the socio-economics context acts like a catalyst in the Indian system.

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

#82

Post by fosstrack »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #70
fosstrack wrote: post #47

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…

What is the culture like otherwise? Do you guys do happy hours and stuff like that? I’ve thought about doing a short term stint in India, if only to learn more about my cultural roots/heritage.

The culture is mainly collegial. We do all of those - birthdays, picnics, parties on the patio, etc. Ping me if you would like to discuss anything.

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

#83

Post by kkarakk »

kamaal wrote: post #78
maxxxxx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most software engineers work for outsourcing companies. " 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.

>>I have heard that years ago it was prestigious to work for the likes of Infosys It is, even now. Walk in to any engineering college, and ask where most people want to work. Another dark untold truth of Engineering in India is, Electronics/Electrical branches have a lot better quality students, than CSE/InfoScience. Sometimes it's like night-day. This is because a degree in EE/ECE gives you a diverse range of career…

i'd say most managers from india are pretty worthless if i talk from a purely experience based domain knowledge perspective, it's four years of college education they don't pay attention to followed by 2 years of a job they don't pay attention to and then ka-ching MBA PROGRAM followed by doing whatever the company that hires them wants them to do.

lots of wasted education and experience is basically pointless.

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

#84

Post by vxNsr »

abhinai wrote: post #16
alexandernst wrote: post #13

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 reason is simple. They don't 'care'. They don't get rewarded for writing great code. They are not responsible for maintaining it. They don't get to see it work in the wild. Most probably, they don't even understand the problems that the project is trying to solve. It is simply very hard to 'care' under the circumstances outlined above. And it is very hard to write quality code when they don't care.

I've seen the same thing with eastern eu/west asia outsourcing, where arguably they have fairly strong programmers overall, and can put out great projects, but the outsourced ones just suck. I believe it comes down to the same thing as in asia, if you don't really understand the problem and don't think you're gonna be maintaining the code you have no incentive to make it nice.

btw, I've seen the same thing with code in the US that is done by an outside team, it's just not as good as the stuff that you're gonna see internally.

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

#85

Post by kkarakk »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #70
fosstrack wrote: post #47

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…

What is the culture like otherwise? Do you guys do happy hours and stuff like that? I’ve thought about doing a short term stint in India, if only to learn more about my cultural roots/heritage.

haha that really depends on the company. if you work in a company that focuses on "stability" expect to be surrounded by people who think family and culture is the most important. if you work in a startup expect a collegial "brogrammer" attitude. if you work in an outsourcing company expect to be bored out of your mind working on relatively outdated tech and spend most of your time fixing the codebase

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

#86

Post by kkarakk »

maxxxxx wrote: post #67
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.

"10x engineers " 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.

>Now I work at a place where they prefer many 0.5x engineers under tight control that do what they are told.

won't these engineers basically be replaced once someone figures out a way to automate menial dev tasks like wix for eg

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

#87

Post by kkarakk »

neeleshs wrote: post #42
abhinai wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

2 years ago i'd say no but increasingly every new concept/tech stack i encounter has npm embedded in it to access a js library. same with python being used for automation/low level scripting.

unless you set out with the mindset of NO NODE/NO PYTHON, it tends to worm it's way into the project coz someone on the team thought it was convenient

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

#88

Post by kkarakk »

weka wrote: post #65
ayasenico wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hate how this is a thing. Mental health be damned. The only way this could be stopped if there was country-wide protests or walk-offs, but I doubt that would ever or could happen.

it isn't sustainable, people end up either moving to a less strenuous industry or pursuing higher education so they aren't devs anymore. it's really weird

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

#89

Post by manish_gill »

Depends entirely on your company. The most important distinction I've come across is whether someone is from a Service-based company or a Product company. Unfortunately, the service industry leaves a lot to be desired in terms of quality. I work for vwo.com (a Product company) and I can speak a bit about my workplace:

Programming Languages: We use heavy Javascript for our core libraries, VueJS and Angular for frontend (different projects), PHP/MySQL backend (legacy) with our own home-baked framework. We also have our own edge nodes with lots of OpenResty/Lua, and our data pipelines are in Python, Java and Scala.

Language: English predominantly, but discussions and meetings can be a mix of English and Hindi (we're based out of North India). I switch to English exclusively if there's a teammate who doesn't understand Hindi very well.

"Is Agile used": I think the question is broadly about engineering practices and yes, we do use Agile/Jira, doing 2-week or more Sprints in cross functional teams. It's not perfect and everyone has their own complaints with this model, but oh well. We do heavy code reviews and have a dedicated QA team - for both automated and manual testing, extensively E2E.

Culturally, we're pretty open and transparent. Everyone /broadly/ knows what everyone else is working on. It's not startup culture, but as far as mid-sized companies go, it's pretty good. Not a whole lot of politics, a "get the job done" attitude. We occasionally open source some projects via Github. Work from home/Vacation policies are decent. I'm currently on Christmas holidays actually ^_^

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

#90

Post by icebraining »

throwaywaslkdjf wrote: post #59
wxyyxc1992 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe true in China

"Maybe true in China" is not an argument. I find comments like these not helpful and disturbing. The amount of blind dislike for other countries without a proper argument makes me read less and less of hacker news.

"Other countries"? The person you're responding to is Chinese.
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