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

The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

story.californiasunday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 429 posts

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#111

Post by kamaal »

kumarvvr wrote: post #47
sumanthvepa wrote: post #33

While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a massive domestic market demand and an ability to…

Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups. The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards. Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in En…

>>Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups.

The opposite in fact. The whole ecosystem is overflowing engineers. But what start ups want is people who can work for quite literally free, take no equity and work and make great sacrifices to make other people win(See Redbus, Foodpanda etc).

>>The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.

So just like everywhere in the world?

Also the many start ups won't touch your resume if you don't have IIT education. So much for not caring about 'report cards'. Report cards have value because the same start ups care about these things. You can't flip flop on certain values based on what ever is your urgent need.

>>There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.

When you go interview at Google, the white board questions are literally your ability to become a question-answer bank of algorithm question.

If you want to value pure ingenuity you need pay for it. You can't ask for one and complain you wanted the other.

>>A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

That is because there is a level how much of original creativity one can generate.

>>Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers.

The revolution has been there for long. But companies interview for one set of skills and expect candidates to demonstrate a totally different set of skills at work.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#112

Post by OliverJones »

In 2004, I heard a sales pitch from a VP of a big outsourcing outfit in Bengaluru (fka Bangalore).

In response to a question about turnover and preventing it, he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.

That was crazy. That was Sili-Valley crazy. There are limits to growth. It's too bad they're hitting good people.

But the business model of Infosys and other outsource IT services giants has always been arbitrage: buying something where and when it's cheap and selling it where and when it's expensive. Arbitrage is a risky game in the long run. And when the commodity being traded is people, people are bound to get hurt. It's just reality.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#113

Post by throwaway1414 »

kamaal wrote: post #84
stealthmodeclan wrote: post #63

What people don't realize is that there are tons of American companies which have offices in Banglore and one in texas or california and nearly all employees are Indian except a few. Those companies are massively profitable but they come across as American. Indian CEOs (somtimes even CEO is American but not having complete control over the corporation) of those companies send American employees for delivering keynote…

>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG. Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool. Product companies pay well, but the average…

> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area.

Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading.

Let us take FANG one by one.

Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area.

Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay are executed in Bangalore. The Bangalore office of Amazon developed many critical services for Amazon Prime from scratch.

Netflix: Can't talk much about Netflix because most of the work that does Netflix does in India is in the business, legal and marketing area.

Google: Are you kidding me again? A significant portion of some Google infrastructure services and some Google public services are developed in Bangalore.

Source: I have worked in two of the FANGs in Bangalore and I have friends in the others.

And I don't know where you are getting your heavily biased data point about NetApp from. If you take one data point and say the whole company works on internal PHP tool, well then here is a surprise for you. All companies work on internal PHP tools or something to that effect. They have their enterprisey systems to run. Every company does that.

Whoever has told you this very naive view of NetApp has forgotten to tell you that NetApp also works on data storage systems, cloud analytics, performance analytics, OpenStack based private cloud orchestration (whole distributed software systems developed from scratch in Bangalore). Before you keep spreading this kind of false data about the top-tier software companies in Bangalore, please lookup NetApp ONTAP and enlighten yourself.

Source: I have worked in NetApp too for 3 years.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#114

Post by qaq »

digitalzombie wrote: post #49
gaius wrote: post #27

A company will outsource because it’s cheaper, in the short term at least. But an outsourcer runs on billable hours, so they are disincentivised to automate repetitive tasks. So here’s the new competition: outsourcer who can do the job for 1/10th the cost, or In-house engineers with advanced automation who can do 100x the work at the same cost. It’s not about West vs India, it’s about business models.

It's more like abuse of Visa. These Indians cannot compete or shop around for a better salary which make native programmer's salary cheaper. If you don't like the cheaper salary then go back home and reapply for visa that's the choice they have and it's a disincentive to go through the whole process. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa > If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsori…

This only applies to US Visas most countries have very simple visa option for tech workers.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#115

Post by jdietrich »

stillwatersr wrote: post #65
ramblerman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can also only speak for the friends I know :) But I mean overly protected to a late age, and very strongly influenced by their parents. The flip side is that on average my Indian friends are also the politest people that I know, which makes me realize it's really a lost quality.

I've found quite the opposite to be the truth. On average, my Indian friends are the most arrogant, rude people I know.

There's a bit of a culture clash. Hindi has no direct equivalent of the English word "please" and the closest equivalent of "thank you" has very different connotations that can be perceived as rude. Politeness in the Hindi language is subtle and complex. The verb forms used to express intimacy and formality in Hindi don't translate into English, so Indian speakers often seem a bit blunt and direct to native speakers. To grossly generalise, Indians tend to be less private and more personally inquisitive than Americans, which can sometimes seem intrusive or overly familiar.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/th...

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#116

Post by kamaal »

throwaway1414 wrote: post #113
kamaal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG. Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool. Product companies pay well, but the average…

> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading. Let us take FANG one by one. Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area. Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and…

I've worked in FANG companies too. In fact most people who left Google I know did it because they were largely in QA and their friends who were so called working in crappy services companies, often from colleges considered bad, did more code work then them. They were largely forced to leave and join start ups because the difference in experience was catching up with them.

Fb was purely a 'hire and send' unit in Hyd, and even now most of their core work is either Menlo Park or London. In fact London is where most of the folks go should H1B fail. The dev work Fb does in Hyd is an acquired company.

Amazon is a different case as dev teams do all the work, and there are no separate production engineering teams. So you do all that work, under a 'Software engineer' title. You would also be curious to see the attrition numbers in Amazon. They rival Infosys. :-)

Yup, NetApp if you don't work on core teams. Same with Cisco and Juniper networks. If you are not with core teams, internal tools is what you do.

This whole trope Services companies being crap, Mythical opportunities in product companies or 'Promised land' land immigration opportunities have forced hordes of talented people to get into SRE and other non-dev work, and then later end up realizing that immigration et al is largely political lottery which most of them lose. And yes once you go down these non dev paths for a few years, the guy from tier-2/tier-3 college whom you laughed at, for joining Wipro, will be having the last laugh.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#117

Post by jdietrich »

jacobush wrote: post #37
reacharavindh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. My generalization is of no use in a discussion. I only meant to say a lot of them(that I know) are. I can't vouch for billions of us :-) Could you elaborate "sheltered by western standards"?

I feel like a horrible person for this - but in an outsourcing scenario: listening a LOT to direction and not explore solutions very much themselves. This is probably amplified by their management giving them hell if they spend too much on exploring instead of ticking off the boxes that they can bill for. I.e. not only "you get what you pay for" in the sense that cheap labour might not be the most skilled labour, but…

I think it's worth contemplating the legacy of colonialism. The British Raj didn't exactly encourage initiative, which has undoubtedly left some scars. My ancestors did some unspeakably ugly things to the people of the Indian subcontinent in the name of "management".

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#119

Post by chris_wot »

onecooldev24 wrote: post #93
chris_wot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they do.

If you don't understand the point I am making, then you don't deserve anything, let alone a 'job'.

Your point was that plumbers don't get paid $100k for any jobs, but in fact many plumbers do in fact get paid $100k+ for sufficiently large jobs.

It's your analogy, not mine!

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#120

Post by v_lisivka »

kamaal wrote: post #90
chris_wot wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the problem with this is if you lie and get found out, you'll not get asked again in many Western companies.

Based on how politicians and how many second chances CEOs and other rich people get in the US I think its the same in US too. Its just that if you are working minimum wage, or you are a spoke in the gig economy it's different for you. Based on my experience working in the US, my American friends weren't very different. Its just that when you have sufficient you tend to worry less about over optimizing for the rainy d…

> India is different. You have none of this. And its on your shoulders. Ensure your hands work till you die, or you will die.

It was same in any country of the world just century ago. I.e. Indians are doing that not because of economic situation (which is much better than century ago), but because of culture. And culture is result of moral principles, which are moderated through punishments and support.

Post reply on HN