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

Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 285 posts

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#111

Post by 0pranav »

la6471 wrote: post #75

This feeble attempts to generalize a whole nation or group of people will not succeed. Individuals differ from one another and Indians are the most diverse group in the world. Some of the engineers are good some are bad , just like everywhere else. The sooner humanity realizes the truth about individuality and discard the stereotypes attached to groups and aggregates the better it will be for the whole world. Amen.

As far as I read the article, it seems to address the Indian consultancy companies rather than Indians as people.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#112

Post by marmaduke »

klodolph wrote: post #92
random314 wrote: post #89

Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

I think either is ok depending on your intention: codes is to suggest the stuff is plural, countable etc, e.g. you have a Bash script, Makefile and Java project (full of files), this is a set of heterogeneous countable things, hence codes. Code is a "mass noun" implying countability or cardinality is irrelevant, e.g. push the code to github.

That said I always remarked Indians says "maths" where I would say "math", and I figured there must be some cross-language transfer going on from Hindi or other languages which use plural for intellectual property

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#113

Post by wbl »

klodolph wrote: post #92
random314 wrote: post #89

Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

And in the HPC world.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#114

Post by ivalm »

BossingAround wrote: post #100
klodolph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countri…

Except there are over a billion Indians, which is more than all of Europe+US combined. They are a standard onto themselves.

There are more Indian English speakers than British English speakers.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#115

Post by jkaplowitz »

BossingAround wrote: post #100
klodolph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countri…

I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself.

Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for centuries?

As well, Indian English is spoken by an estimated 125 million people, more people than the total populations of the UK and Canada combined and about a third of the US population. And this is the predominant version of English in a country of more than a billion people, which makes it standard enough there to count as a standard.

Deferring to a standard requires a context in which to say whether one is or isn't speaking standardly. Since we're discussing a topic about India on a US-centric but globally inclusive website, either we should insist that everyone uses the site's predominant US variety of English (I'm happy we don't do this) or the Indian commenter should be free to use standard Indian English in discussing this without that dialect being called wrong.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#116

Post by supernova87a »

klodolph wrote: post #92
random314 wrote: post #89

Thanks. Grammar check - its note "codes"; it is "code".

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

There are quirks to speaking with developers or workers in India who haven't also been trained partly in the US or Europe. A scattered assortment of unusual phrases or idiosyncrasies you may hear:

-- "please revert at the earliest"

-- Using the non-standard 10,000 base comma system when expressing numbers, versus 1,000 standard

-- A tendency to use abbreviations or acronyms which are not commonly understood, even by the direct team. E.g. "please excuse the IVR not working properly today" as if everyone is familiar with that abbreviation for the phone mail system.

There are other more amusing quirks to I'll try to remember and post. Such as, "do the needful". And not working on state holidays, aka Tuesdays.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#117

Post by dejv »

BossingAround wrote: post #108
gourabmi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get what you pay for. That holds true everywhere.

Umm... 20$ an hour, meaning 3200$ a month, would be quite a nice salary in a lot of Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, ...). You get people with BAs or MAs in comp science who have been developers for 2-5 years. While I'm sure some will say that 3.2k is ridiculous in country X, I personally met people in all of the above countries working for less while being more experienced.

20 USD/hour is not what developer earns, but what you pay for developer time. Overhead (buildings, managers, computers, toilet paper), sales commissions, taxes, and off time and eats big big part of that money.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#118

Post by treve »

BossingAround wrote: post #108
gourabmi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get what you pay for. That holds true everywhere.

Umm... 20$ an hour, meaning 3200$ a month, would be quite a nice salary in a lot of Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, ...). You get people with BAs or MAs in comp science who have been developers for 2-5 years. While I'm sure some will say that 3.2k is ridiculous in country X, I personally met people in all of the above countries working for less while being more experienced.

These are IT agencies though, competing in a global market. Not individual salaries.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#119

Post by izolate »

BossingAround wrote: post #100
klodolph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong—“codes” is correct in the Indian dialect of English. This is akin to arguing over whether “color” or “colour” is the correct spelling.

While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countri…

Indian English is also spoken in surrounding countries (Nepal, Sri Lanka). Anyway, what does the international exportation of a dialect have to do with legitimacy?

Linguistically speaking, if enough people speak a dialect, then it's legitimate. And there are more fluent Indian English speakers than there are British English ones.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#120

Post by BossingAround »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #115
BossingAround wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what I'll say will surely be controversial and will lead to many down votes, Indian dialect of English is not considered a "standard." As a result, the correctness of something in Indian dialect does not mean it is "proper English" or "correct English". If you go to non-English speaking Europe, most textbooks come from the British Council, and teach British English. If you go to China and a lot of Asian countri…

I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself. Are you going to claim that Canada uses nonstandard English simply because it's a hybrid of US and UK English with a few phonetic and lexical twists of its own? Or that Scottish English is somehow less legitimate than England's English (the two are quite different) despite Scotland being part of the UK for…

> I see nothing wrong or nonstandard with Indian English, as a native US English speaker living in Canada myself.

I try to see it from the perspective of a non-native speaker trying to learn English.

If I know no English, and pay for teachers to teach me English, I definitely do not want to be taught Indian English.

Not because it's wrong, not because it's $whatever_adjective, but because it will sound incorrect to the majority of native English speakers that are not of Indian origin.

In a similar manner, you don't see Cockney English being taught, and you don't think of as Cockney English as "correct". It has indeed its rules, and is perfectly understandable to the speakers. I have nothing against Cockney English. That said, I wouldn't want to be taught Cockney English by professionals who claim "it is correct." It is indeed correct, but it will hurt my communication even in the most of the UK.

Post reply on HN