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Ask HN: India == bad devs?

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Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#11

Post by tubbzor »

eksith wrote: post #2

This isn't from HN, but I've noticed an implicit bias against devs from South and Southeast Asia (can't speak for China). On my resume, I go by the shortened form of my first name, not "eksith" and that was a conscious decision after putting my full name resulted in very few calls and emails. I'm not sure if that has to do with a perception of talent or simply a presumption of a language barrier, since I've also seen…

I remember reading a study (it is pretty generic and I'm sure done many times), where a research group put a stereotypical 'white name' on a resume and sent it out, then put a stereotypical 'black name' on the same resume and sent it out. I'm sure you see where this is going in that the 'white' resume received many more calls and interviews. This bias is unfortunate but pretty prevalent in most organizations, and is even seen in university admissions frequently (same ethnic bias, different reasons).

I have had several professors/GTAs at uni who are native Indians that I highly respect for their CS knowledge. The accent can be a little hard to pick up at first if you've never been around it but after that its all gravy :) Likewise I've had some who I've completely despised, just like every other person of every other ethnicity. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.

Edit: expand on last para

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#12

Post by kjhughes »

In the long run, such misguided stereotypes will intrinsically hurt and marginalize those who hold them.

One of the joys of having worked and gone to school with diverse and often distributed sets of people is that I've been honored to know extraordinarily bright and productive individuals who are dissimilar along many irrelevant dimensions. I'm thankful for the perspective and wish it were so universal that no one would wonder such questions.

I agree that it is sad that we're not there yet.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#13

Post by WalterSear »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #3

This has the potential to blow up into a huge flamefest. Short answer: No. Absolutely not. A longer answer would probably explain that in my experience over 10 years in the industry, much of that working with Naturalized Indians as well as H1Bs, I would say they are on par with anyone else in the industry, you have good and bad. I've met brilliant Indians, and worthless ones. Just like every other nationality. It's s…

The ones who come over here beat out all the ones back home for it. I've worked with many developers from India, and the ones over here tend to run rings around the ones over there.

IMHO, and I'm certainly no expert, but it seems that in india more people see IT work as a path to middle class wealth and this consequently attracts more people to the field, in the same way that people become doctors who have no interest in medicine, and people become lawyers without an underlying interest in law.

There are certainly good doctors and lawyers who aren't 'passionate' about their profession, but for the most part, interest is the path to competence, and so as more people enter the field for financial and social reasons, you end up with a overall lower quality of candidate.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#14

Post by Terretta »

WalterSear wrote: post #13
JeremyMorgan wrote: post #3

This has the potential to blow up into a huge flamefest. Short answer: No. Absolutely not. A longer answer would probably explain that in my experience over 10 years in the industry, much of that working with Naturalized Indians as well as H1Bs, I would say they are on par with anyone else in the industry, you have good and bad. I've met brilliant Indians, and worthless ones. Just like every other nationality. It's s…

The ones who come over here beat out all the ones back home for it. I've worked with many developers from India, and the ones over here tend to run rings around the ones over there. IMHO, and I'm certainly no expert, but it seems that in india more people see IT work as a path to middle class wealth and this consequently attracts more people to the field, in the same way that people become doctors who have no interes…

This answer adds value to the discussion.

It's been said much of American culture arises from the self selection of those choosing to leave home and come here over the last few hundred years.

Similarly, the choice of geography and company of employment by developers tells you a lot. If you can't choose the individuals, choose the organization all the more carefully as its employees will have made a choice too.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#15

Post by harrytuttle »

There's nothing wrong with the skills (you'll find similarly skilled people locally), but the communication and the pride in the work sucks from experience. This is true regardless of the remote culture: it's universal with outsourcing.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#16

Post by shock »

harrytuttle wrote: post #15

There's nothing wrong with the skills (you'll find similarly skilled people locally), but the communication and the pride in the work sucks from experience. This is true regardless of the remote culture: it's universal with outsourcing.

> This is true regardless of the remote culture: it's universal with outsourcing.

That's bullshit. It just means you didn't work with the right people. I've led remote teams (not indian teams) which got very high praise from the US management.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#17

Post by EliRivers »

It does seem to be awfully common in Indian schools to teach C++ from before 1998 (i.e. before formalising of the first standard), considered simply wrong today, using tools made 25 years ago (Turbo C++ for DOS is popular). Those taught this end up hitting the workplace knowing incorrect C++ and knowing how to use a 25 year old tool for DOS. I've no doubt they can learn modern C++ and modern tools, but it certainly creates a bad image.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#18

Post by sirwanqutbi »

EliRivers wrote: post #17

It does seem to be awfully common in Indian schools to teach C++ from before 1998 (i.e. before formalising of the first standard), considered simply wrong today, using tools made 25 years ago (Turbo C++ for DOS is popular). Those taught this end up hitting the workplace knowing incorrect C++ and knowing how to use a 25 year old tool for DOS. I've no doubt they can learn modern C++ and modern tools, but it certainly c…

Meh, we had to learn Pascal here in the UK (2005). In my opinion, learning C++ early on is better than jumping on a bandwagon language like PHP, and expect to learn JavaScript with relative ease.

I agree with Kohanz & API ... outsourcing companies throw peanuts at developers and expect quality code.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#19

Post by w0rd-driven »

dscrd wrote: post #5

Most individual Indian developers I have worked with have been good developers -- not to mention good people. But at the same time my experience has been that as a group they tend to fail at an alarming rate. That's why I'm now thinking that a better (even though also potentially flawed) generalisation would be "India = bad management".

I would rephrase that to be "Bad outsourcing = bad management"

Even as a US citizen fluent in pretty much only English, if you give me terrible requirements or can't even express them clearly, I'll give you a terrible product. I would call my work intermediate to advanced though I can cite far more capable people than I, in any nationality.

I think the rep India gets in particular is the cultural shift. Almost all outsourcing when you hear of outsourcing tales went there versus any other country. Of course you'll hear horror stories and of course if you heard them you would likely assume that "India = terrible".

My personal experience is more that management is terrible and have an extremely difficult time properly describing specifications. That you're trying to explain this to developers who by in large are not as fluent in the language as you means this will be naturally more work than just communicating with people in your geographic region. If the labor is cheap but you're spending 2-3x as many man hours just explaining the requirements, how much are you really saving? This really goes for any nationality "offshore" to your own.

Re: Ask HN: India == bad devs?

#20

Post by BhavdeepSethi »

Short answer: Depends where you're looking at. Long answer: In India, you'll find engineers dime a dozen. IT service companies like Infosys, Accenture, etc. recruit the bulk of the students from the universities. They don't care which background you're from. A CS/IT Engineer is at the same footing as an Electronics/Mechanical engineer as far as these companies are concerned. They train these undergrads for 2-6 months on a particular skil set (usually something outdated like JSF or Struts in Java or say some proprietary software) and these devs are responsible for delivering the projects for the off-shore companies. Most of these engineers have no clue what they're doing. They're not interested in the field. The only reason they continue to work there is because the work experience can be leveraged to do an MBA. To work on the projects, they pick up snippets from the Knowledge Base these companies maintain, manipulate the snippets enough to make them work with their project and then move to some other similar project. This probably covers 75% of the "devs" out here.

The rest can be categorized from moderate to literally the best in the world. Many of these devs end up going to US for an MS/PhD and so the pool shrinks further. Nonetheless, I've seen some really good devs out here as well. Companies like Google, Amazon, Flipkart, Apigee make sure they get the top brass from these lot.

I'm not surprised why many people may stereotype most of the engineers in India as "bad devs". Unfortunately a majority lies in that lot. Filter them out and the rest are as good as any out there.

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