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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#291

Post by DanBC »

cpmouter wrote: post #187
ethbro wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "yes" to everything, as has been explained above, has more to do with different cultural definitions of "yes" than lying. You ask me if it's going to rain, and I say yes, because I know with certainty it will rain tomorrow. Is it fair for you to call me a liar because you carried around an umbrella today?

>different cultural definitions of "yes" https://i.imgur.com/gByDqFX.png There's no 100% accuracy in weather forecasts so a mistake is understandable. Asking you if you finished your task and getting a "yes" when you haven't finished it is outright lying.

> Asking you if you finished your task and getting a "yes" when you haven't finished it is outright lying.

That's incompetent management. The question should be reworded to avoid yes / no answers. "How much has been done?" would be a better question.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#292

Post by sus_007 »

ilarum wrote: post #30

I personally know someone really smart who was on an H1B visa in the US with his family. Recently, when hit with an RFE (request for evidence) during a routine renewal of his visa, he decided that it just wasn't worth the trouble of living in perpetual fear (settled status wait time is about 15 years) and shifted his entire family to Canada. I bring this up because while Trump may attempt to target visa abusers, some…

When you say settled status wait time is about 15 years , is it just for Indians or other nationalities too ?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#293

Post by poulsbohemian »

intended wrote: post #155
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read. It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.

No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more. The exam and grading workload is unserviceable . This is the crux of it. And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day! Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in t…

>No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.

Growing up in a poor Seattle suburb in the '80s, that was very close to the (public school) student-teacher ratio we had as well. The school my youngest two attend now is significantly improved in this regard, but I suspect 30+ to one is still not uncommon around the country.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#294

Post by osrec »

Alterlife wrote: post #256
tome wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they in India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about Indians.

I am in India, and I can't help but feel insulted by this comment. Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India? There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America. ---- edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.

Please don't feel insulted. It's merely a general observation relating to culture in certain geographies, not to be applied to you specifically.

For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action).

Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#295

Post by kamaal »

reacharavindh wrote: post #95
jacobush wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You hit a vein of deep true thought. I can share my personal experience that can help exemplify your point. Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone. My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies. Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were essentially l…

>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.

Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything ever again.

Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a sure sign of a loser.

>>On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a good product) show the true passion and creativity.

For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?

>>I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more.

These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to code what the requirements say.

>>I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate studies soon after.

Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying other reasons to move out of the country.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#296

Post by mkovji »

avip wrote: post #56
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…

This is ABC of travelling in India. Never ask "is this the train to Pune"? Ask where the train is going instead. The answer to Y/N question is always yes in India, and that can mean anything between "I don't speak English" and "NO".

I have heard so many people say "I am not sure" and i have heard so many people say "No" and i have also heard some people say No and this is how you have to get to your destination or get to your answer.

So you are 100% wrong when you say "The answer to Y/N question is always yes in India".

Which makes me doubt/ blindly ignore any of your opinion ever.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#297

Post by mkovji »

pjc50 wrote: post #105
kamaal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be very helpful in achieving a goal. In a country like India where opportunities are scarce, saying no in many cases can mean permanently losing the opportunity to do something big. Saying 'yes' and failing is a lot more better than saying 'no' and not trying at all. If I'm not wrong this isn't just limited to India. I think it was Richard Branson who said something to the order…

> Saying 'yes' and failing is a lot more better than saying 'no' and not trying at all. Not for the person whose money you've spent on the failure.

It only indicates the person's failure and inability on not able to validate whether the yes the other person said is true or not and hence he deserves to loose money.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#298

Post by ksk »

osrec wrote: post #284
ksk wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime I hear this I fail to see how it makes any sense. Either (1) All the firms hiring them are idiots and are unable to judge competency and continue falling for the "scam" every year, year after year on every project, with every company. (2) Your propositions are incorrect. They do have good engineers and they do end up doing good work.

They pick their targets very carefully. They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT. They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Th…

>They will generally aim to get contractual sign off from business-focused people that know little about IT.

In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?

I know quite a few "business-focused" people. It is not so easy to fool them even if IT is not their core competency. Businesses typically will include several protection clauses in the contract and set the legal jurisdiction to their own country. I don't believe it is easy to fool businesses for years on end. They would go out of business pretty quickly.

>They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.

Then data would show that those firms have no long term contracts or repeat business from previous clients. Does it?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#299

Post by mkovji »

mieseratte wrote: post #128
kamaal wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all failures are in the 'WW2 Normandy' Ballpark. In fact in almost all cases, letting people fail is how let them learn.

We're not talking about hiring some interns and giving them room to fail here. If I hire your firm and you tell me you can achieve an objective, then I spend money and come to find out you can't and you knew you couldn't, you've defrauded me. If I ask if you can perform a task and you tell me you know how, then I find out you have no idea, you've lied to me. I'll take a "No, but I can figure it out" any day of the we…

Some people assume it is a yes when some one says no, but i can figure it out. Whose to blame here?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#300

Post by KeepTalking »

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…

Seems like mismatched expectations largely on your part. You get what you pay. If you ask for the cheapest workforce, you get shoddy work. I am not arguing the validity of your experience but I think it shows lack of depth.

On the other end of the market, there is a very talented workforce that commands a premium price that delivers world class products. You just need to know where to look. Most western tech decisions to use Offshoring/Outsourcing are based on the key belief that costs can be lowered. In a truly capitalist market, workers are also looking to extract their maximum worth (and upward mobility) and If you pay less, your workforce will bail at the first opportunity.

Additionally, no one wants to work for a project that is driven by a spec document that you authored and requires no design input from the local team

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