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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

story.californiasunday.com

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#31

Post by rorykoehler »

megaman22 wrote: post #18
kamaal wrote: post #15

Multinational companies took the wind out of the sails for most IT companies's ability to hire talent. Around 2008, there was a peak boom in offshore centers set up by most companies. These companies could afford to pay well because most of their revenue is either ad revenue or from companies like Microsoft which had a great sales pipeline going. These companies around 2014 - 2015 started to cut down heavily on offsh…

Almost univesally, during that period the response I received from our customers was that outsourcing was cheaper, but quality was so bad they hired stateside as soon as the contracts were up.

That is not necessarily the case though. That just shows they don't know how to hire.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#32

Post by superflyguy »

factorialboy wrote: post #23
collyw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok generalization again, but I see a lot more Indian names asking questions rather than answering them.

Nothing wrong with asking questions and seeking to learn.

Yes but where are the ones who have already learned and are answering other people's questions? And why so many silly questions? That was the question. There's a similar situation on Quora. You can look up just about any question and find multiple low quality answers from Indians. On both stress I there seems to be no attempt to do the hard work of diagnosing/debugging the problem to produce the minimal example scenario required by the site; instead it's just "fix my problem here's the code". It's just a different way of handling development which only works if other Stack Exchange users are prepared to spoon feed lazy developers. It's easy to see why many of the original Stack Exchange users have given up.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#33

Post by sumanthvepa »

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 reach global markets easily. There is a new breed of product startups out of Bangalore and other places that are born global (e.g. Zoho). They build products (not services) for the world, and not just India. Inward investment into the Indian tech sector was the highest it ever was (though still dwarfed by investment into the US tech sector and China's tech sector) https://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/2017-saw-... So the doom and gloom are not quite accurate. Yes IT services may have plateaued after two decades of torrid growth, but tech is doing fine thank you.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#34

Post by wnsire »

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.

> they are disincentivised to automate repetitive tasks

That's definitely the issue here.

As an engineer , you are usually trained to automate as much as your work as possible , and we create framework for that.

Outsourcer won't , or will not tell you about it because they need to charge you money for it.

At some point , it's very likely that India will suffer the same crisis as China labour from automation.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#36

Post by pjmlp »

reacharavindh wrote: post #10
ramblerman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian engineers are street smart If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.

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"?

The culture of always say yes, and never contradict what the western project manager says, regardless how ridiculous it might be?

Until it explodes and escalates all the way to the top.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#37

Post by jacobush »

reacharavindh wrote: post #10
ramblerman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indian engineers are street smart If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive and somewhat sheltered by western standards.

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 in the deeper sense in that if the outsourcing scenario is such that the western company orders a bunch of stuff from a checklist done, well, that's what's going to get done.

This is the same problem a large organization has locally too, but it gets amplified when you try to outsource things and increase turn-around time.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#38

Post by WhiteSource1 »

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.

Absolutely. BTW, that's one of the key issues why the Panaya acquisition was a failure for Infosys. The business strategy was right: automate for the corporate entity to increase quality and reduce costs. The problem was the outsourcers on the ground had no incentive to bring Panaya into the picture.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#39

Post by carlmr »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #35

The problem is that only the top 10% of Indian programmers are in the top ten percent.

My experience with our programmers in India is that only the top 1% of them are at or above mediocre. Most Indian universities are garbage degree printers. The top institutes are super competitive, but those people rarely stay in India.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#40

Post by dx034 »

wnsire wrote: post #34
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.

> they are disincentivised to automate repetitive tasks That's definitely the issue here. As an engineer , you are usually trained to automate as much as your work as possible , and we create framework for that. Outsourcer won't , or will not tell you about it because they need to charge you money for it. At some point , it's very likely that India will suffer the same crisis as China labour from automation.

> At some point , it's very likely that India will suffer the same crisis as China labour from automation.

Is China really suffering that crisis? I have the impression that they focused early enough on high-tech industries and that the increasing wealth (leading to higher cost) drives more manual labour away than automation.

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