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Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
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Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#252To set context, I'm Indian. I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time. So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes; Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other i…
> I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes
I had to document and then teach over multiple sessions a small team from Infosys how to use Git. 3 weeks, and they all said they understood. Months later nobody could still check code out let alone commit. Then again, I’m not sure I’d be happy with them committing - a lot of their code was actual copy and paste from multiple Stack Overflow questions and answers unmodified into the same file!
I didn’t mind that they were being paid double what I was on, but I was mightily angry with the quality of their non-work :(
Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#253To set context, I'm Indian. I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time. So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes; Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other i…
OK So this sending zip files doesn't just happen in Indian IT companies, it happens in IBM India aswell, a friend of mine tells me how she sends her code in email or use some dropbox like service. These dinosaurs are quite antiquated because of the head of something something BS manager prefers zip over git. In other instances they dont get a testing server for months and then she has to navigate the buereucracy writ…
I used to work for IBM years ago. This sounded very familiar - especially the part about waiting weeks/months for a server to be physically installed and configured.
I have a distinct memory of basically begging my boss to let me expense a VM on AWS (this was probably somewhere around 2008-2009 IIRC) and we would have been up and running the samenday. Never happened - we just slipped the timelines for a few weeks and billed the client.
To be fair we did use clearcase for source control, but the outsourced teams were equally awful. There was a genuine concern that a lot of the team members out there were people's friends/family/neighbors because they never ever spoke in meetings (the lead would answer on their behalf if they were asked a question), and either we never saw any code from them or what we did was delivered slowly and was usually awful verbatim copy-paste work or simply just plain did not work.
Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#254Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#255As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this. Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor. The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses do…
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Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right. India has a lot of Engineering students. There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Sw…
Yeah. Tier 1 colleges. Tell me more about NITs and IITs. I study at a so colled top college. Where highest placement is always around 50-60 LPa. That doesn't mean teaching and other things are good (sure better than average, but that's not what I call 'good'). The highest placements are more because of students and a FEW professors who actually happen to be passionate. But in the entire class, there are less than 15%…
I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make. Nobody is saying all the students in top tier colleges studying CS are super passsionate into CS. Some are. A lot of them are not.
My point is that tier 1 colleges produce a lot of good programmers. The reason why they are good at programming can be because of high salary expectations, peerpressure, parents, status, passion, etc. I honestly couldn't care less as long as they do their job. The reason why companies like TCS/Infosys are bad is not because tier 1 colleges produce programmers that are not passionate about CS. It's because India has way too many Engineering colleges that is of abysmal quality. And those colleges accept students who otherwise would not have gotten into any decent engineering colleges
> Many came through good scores in entrance exams (myself included) and many through management quota (i.e Paying the institution heavy sum
I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting students. Highest package is not really what is used for defining tier A. What I meant by tier A are centrally funded colleges like IITs, NITs and really good private colleges like BITS and IIIT-H(not SRM, MIT etc). None of them take students by accepting money. If the college takes students by accepting money then it is definitely not tier A.
> The system is gamed like hell. With the abundance of such coaching kids, I don't think IITs and NITs can keep their previous charm.
Sure. The system is gamed. But it's still a fair system. The rules are same for everyone. You are measured by the number of correct answers you circle in the paper. Nobody cares about who your parents are. Nobody cares about what you wrote in your essay. Its a hard competetion. But it's a fair competetion. There is reservation at play for students from backward castes as well but lt's not get into that. Some would say it's good. Some would say it's bad.
Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Difference is, a lot of these people wouldn't get jobs as junior devs in the west, and if they did, there just wouldn't be so many "natural" opportunities to move into management. Whereas in India, the big outsourcing firms need such a large quantity of people every year, that thousands upon thousands are hired and placed in junior dev or test roles. And because these orgs are so large, there are many layers of middl…
I don't think this is true at all. The tech bubble in the West is huge and claiming junior devs in the West are anywhere less afflicted by the rat race syndrome than India is outrageously false.
The tech bubble in the west is bug, sure - but that's not the same as organisations with 100s of thousands of employees selling bodies as cheap as possible.
Furthermore, it's naive to think India is the same as western countries - it's a huge country with it's own unique culture (cultures, really), history and languages. For many Indians, software development isn't seen as professional career path; a dev job is little more that a vehicle to becoming a manager. And being a manager, in charge of people, elevates your social standing, to a position of kudos and respect - that doesn't happen in the west.
Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
60k from tier one engineering colleges. It includes all branches. Not only CS students. Similar number to the number of students enrolled as undergrads in entire engineering colleges in USA. The number of engineering students enrolled in India as undergrad is around 350k (It's not over half million. My bad). So students from tier 1 colleges makes about 17%. That's not a small fraction that can be ignored.
Statista says that CS in India is 880k + 660k of Electronics Engineering (CS adjascent field). That's 1.54mil students in the field that we are talking about. 60k of tier one - are fairly smart and probably half of them are brilliant and passionate(being very generous here). They are the outliers that prove a point. That said - 4 year degree shouldn't be a requirement in software engineering. It's a very poor quality…
Wow. That's a lot.
Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Tier 1 colleges. Tell me more about NITs and IITs. I study at a so colled top college. Where highest placement is always around 50-60 LPa. That doesn't mean teaching and other things are good (sure better than average, but that's not what I call 'good'). The highest placements are more because of students and a FEW professors who actually happen to be passionate. But in the entire class, there are less than 15%…
I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make. Nobody is saying all the students in top tier colleges studying CS are super passsionate into CS. Some are. A lot of them are not. My point is that tier 1 colleges produce a lot of good programmers. The reason why they are good at programming can be because of high salary expectations, peerpressure, parents, status, passion, etc. I honestly couldn't care l…
> I dont't really understand what point you are trying to make.
That the quality of NIT and IITs are decreasing. I have seen a lot of previous generation people who studied in IITs and have stellar achievements. But I don't think the same will be true for current crop of IIT and NIT students. To be clear, I won't be judging those people who are of my own generation, but this is a disappointment about how artificial the entry to these institutions has become. How many of them will be mechanically grinding leetcode as compared to their previous generation?
Increasingly so in recent years - the year I wrote JEE mains, the paper was much more susceptible to 'tricks' and 'shortcut formulae' taught by coaching institutions, than the previous years.
At this point, I have heard IIT professors expressing discontent about the coaching center crap. I don't know how you think it is still a fair game.
> I don't think there are any tier A colleges that takes money for accepting students. Probably explains why your batch had a lot of CS students who were not any good.
Fine, what defines tier A? I also mentioned lot of them with high state-level entrance exam scores are not "Good Enough", too.
In what I have seen, those people who do well in exams solely due to peer pressure and high expectations, don't very well understand the concepts. I have seen so many such book-worm topper kids not properly understanding recursion or algorithm complexity.