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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#141

Post by cpmouter »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #132
niklasd wrote: post #50

I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he ans…

When I first became a manager, I had this really amazing mentor that explained to me a lot of the quirks of multiculturalism. I consider myself at least somewhat versed in other cultures, but I quickly learned there was a lot I didn't know about the mannerisms of people from India, China, Russia, etc. What I find sad, is that there are a lot of people in positions of power that either have no idea (or don't care) tha…

>people from different parts of the world see things and respond differently than you'd expect and then get frustrated when the outcome is different than expected

I get your point, but the fact that Indians say "yes" to everything (i.e. the fact they lie constantly) is not something that managers should get used to, it's something Indians have to correct.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#142

Post by dx034 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #126
kumarvvr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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's not really unique, many American school children do the same for their homework. It's a time-honored tradition (at least since…

You can design homework in a way that it's easier to solve yourself than copy the answer. Unfortunately, that's a lot of work so that few teachers do it. But I had several where copy-pasting never worked.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#143

Post by dx034 »

baybal2 wrote: post #122
kumarvvr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP. Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.

As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011. The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship. Can anybody imagine a governor of Califo…

Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#144

Post by sumedh »

osrec wrote: post #129

IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy, because you often end up i…

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best in my experience.

That is because you dont pay them well, the good engineers who are being paid well work in MS, Amazon etc in India.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#145

Post by senthil_rajasek »

niklasd wrote: post #50

I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he ans…

You are using an experience with a driver to someone with an office job. That is not a fair comparison. The president of the US lies constantly. What does that say about US?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#146

Post by crazygringo »

kemiller2002 wrote: post #132
niklasd wrote: post #50

I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he ans…

When I first became a manager, I had this really amazing mentor that explained to me a lot of the quirks of multiculturalism. I consider myself at least somewhat versed in other cultures, but I quickly learned there was a lot I didn't know about the mannerisms of people from India, China, Russia, etc. What I find sad, is that there are a lot of people in positions of power that either have no idea (or don't care) tha…

In my travels, I learned very quickly not to let that bother me, or else I would have gone nuts. I mean, the number of times somebody acted like I was an insane person because I started to eat X food with my hands instead of silverware, or silverware instead of hands. ("But in the last country I was in...!")

Fact is, you're the one choosing to be aware of and experience different cultures and travel, but they're not making that choice. And I had to conclude that they shouldn't need to make that choice if they don't want to. So I just sucked it up and would go along with the joke, "yeah us foreigners are such weirdos, ha!"

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#147

Post by yorwba »

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…

> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.)

I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't.

There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying.

I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#148

Post by sumedh »

throwawayqdhd wrote: post #57
chvid wrote: post #46

In my own observation the use of outsourcing to India (in terms of market share) has been declining for years. Either being replaced by work done here in Copenhagen or in countries nearer by - Poland in particular. As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working and you as a country become more foc…

Indians are fixated on certifications. My friends still can't believe that I make the kind of money I make without a CS degree (I studied literature). And when I tried to hire someone when I tried building an agency, the only thing candidates kept emphasizing was their degree and certificates, not their skills.

> Indians are fixated on certifications.

It acts a filter, when you have couple of hundred people for a job application, you cannot read each and every CV but you can easily narrow down your search by saying candidates having XYZ certification will be shortlisted.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#150

Post by koolhead17 »

We have a saying here in India: "You pay peanuts, you hire donkeys".

So a lot many comments in the thread is either generalization or a confirmation bias.

The India I know and software developers I know of are no less either in dream or dedication from peers in Silicon Valley or any other part of developed world. :)

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