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Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#122I'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…
All three are not true at least for China. I'm guessing your experience mostly comes from working with outsourcing companies from these two countries.
Most notable companies in China are doing their own stuff, focusing on the local market and not outsourcing. Some are truly innovative and leading the trend.
Here's a good channel to learn a bit about Chinese tech scene
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#123I'll skip your questions as they've been already answered by the majority here and go straight to a fundamental difference in mentality here in India:
Most Indian IT workers work for service based companies. The lion's share of these, don't care about programming/CS at all. People having side projects are an exception. Very few people have proper CS knowledge other than that required to pass an job interview. Being a good developer is not incentivized in big service based companies also. The sooner you switch to a managerial position the better, otherwise you'll be stuck with a salary that is just disrespecting to you as an engineer.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#124I don't think you can really compare India and China at this point. China is competing with the US as biggest economy in the world. India's GDP is the size of California. There is just more money to go around. Also government policies in China strongly tilt toward homegrown companies.
Also outsourcing software from the US and the west to china is harder since since they don't speak English or use a Phoenician alphabet when compared to India. Also there are a lot of big high paying Chinese tech companies like tencent, baidu, alibaba, etc. I don't know if that exists in India.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strongly dispute this ECE vs CS characterization. CS is preferred over ECE in India. Source: ECE graduate from India. There is some wierd kind of projection going on with parent post.
My point is about outsourcing firms. Service companies prefer EE/ECE above CS. Of course product companies prefer CS candidates, and often pay well too. Albeit a good chunk of CS people get into service companies too.
When I was a Placement Coordinator at my college, a representative from TCS told me that a good thing about non-CS candidates is that you don't have to make them "unlearn" things.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 and 10x engineers are both real and not terribly uncommon, but often are not the same people. For the 10xer, it usually isn't that they do 10x more work, it's that they know how to make their org do 1/10th the work and get essentially the same results. They pay attention to business requirements and if you spot a senior engineer being listened to very closely by the people who make business requirements you…
perhaps one can say there are people who work with existing complexity well, and there are people who reduce complexity well. These two types of people don't necessarily overlap.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#127I 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.…
Which means you find programmers with no passion or love of their craft. The vast, vast majority of programmers in the entire world work 9-5 then go home and don't think about work, same as the vast majority of accountants, lawyers, dentists, bricklayers, retail workers and everyone else in every other profession. HN, SO, GH are all tiny niches really, but if you're inside them they look like the whole world.
I don’t think those networks you mention are good measures at all. Most of the great and passionate devs I know are not prolific on those sites. IMHO those sites are more often for new people to tech who like to showboat, and are likely to move on to something else that feeds their ego.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
With python and node typically comes a different approach to developing which should mean those tools are less useful.
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strongly dispute this ECE vs CS characterization. CS is preferred over ECE in India. Source: ECE graduate from India. There is some wierd kind of projection going on with parent post.
My point is about outsourcing firms. Service companies prefer EE/ECE above CS. Of course product companies prefer CS candidates, and often pay well too. Albeit a good chunk of CS people get into service companies too.
What are examples of service companies?
Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is about outsourcing firms. Service companies prefer EE/ECE above CS. Of course product companies prefer CS candidates, and often pay well too. Albeit a good chunk of CS people get into service companies too.
When I was a Placement Coordinator at my college, a representative from TCS told me that a good thing about non-CS candidates is that you don't have to make them "unlearn" things.
That reflects badly on TCS, not on Computer science or it's students.