How is code quality control in India?
Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#32The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers.
Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#33How does the SV crowd here see this? Considering that even entry web devs with only bootcamp experience often enough make >$100,000, outsourcing to India is a good idea, economically speaking. Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs?
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Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. To get the same amount of quality in india you’ll be paying roughly the same - and then have cultural and timezone barriers.
I don't think it's fair to assume the quality of Indian workers is worse. They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences. Uber is smart enough to know this and it's the exact reason they will end up paying less for similar quality. Also, in every company there are jobs that are trivial and jobs that require talent. I assume the more trivial jobs like bug fixing will be outsourced, whil…
> They are paid less purely because of cost of living and locational differences.
Cost of living is a red herring. No one’s going to pay me more if I live in Manhattan rather than the suburbs of Boise if they can avoid it. It’s all about the locational differences. If there’s a thick, liquid market for the product you’re selling, your labour, you’ll get a good price for it. If there isn’t employers have substantially more power to set wages. A lot of the reason engineers in SV get paid more is that they’re just better but the engineers in Boulder are pretty great too and fewer of them are getting those wages, even fewer in Boise. All about the competition for talent.
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#35Well this has worked great for Boeing, a once great American engineering company. On the other hand India has an excellent education system and highly skilled engineers, and any capital flow away from the five big cities in the world that sinks the vast majority of it can only be a good thing.
> India has an excellent education system
Explain in which way is it excellent?
Which part do you think Indian education system does well relatively?
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#36A better option: shift it's engineering to everywhere else in America, and go full-remote, but pay less.
Imagine if Uber told it's developers: we're cutting salaries by 40%- but you are now full-remote, and we want you to live somewhere less expensive than SV. Spread out across America!
A lot of folks would quit. But some would see the incredible opportunity. In that situation, I'd move somewhere like Chattanooga TN- average rent at around $1000/month, vs SF's $3000-5000. Food is cheaper too. And being a city, it's far less conservative than you'd think (well, okay, it is TN).
They could cut their engineering costs dramatically while improving the overall lifestyle of their developers.
And given we're soon going to be in a post-pandemic world where tightly-packed open offices don't exist anymore, they'd probably just be ahead of the rest of us by a few months if they did it.
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#37How is code quality control in India?
> How is code quality control in India?
Depends on the devs and the kind of team they are working in. It's difficult to provide an objective answer to that question.
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They produce plenty of competent engineers, but my layman's interpretation is the problem of capital being concentrated in Silicon Valley, so there's little chance for tech entrepreneurs to flourish within India itself.
No doubt they produce many great engineers, my argument is that they are not necessarily innovative (having studied in the same system, I've seen it first hand)
Innovation is a result of many factors, keeps changing with time. The Japanese were the top innovators for many decades, not so much anymore.
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#39The challenge with outsourcing is management overhead and turn around times. Biggest mistake I see my customers make is outsource and not control the quality of the engineers. Inhouse they have a sophisticated and long recruiting process. When outsourcing they take the first they get (and as a new customer, be assured, you do not get the best engineers but you need to fight to get them).
>turn around times
my company tried to outsource a ancillary product we develop in 2011-2013 timeframe. It wound up being non-viable and we brought it back in-house.
I think many don't see how pernicious turn-around times can be. They continue to build upon each other like compounding interest. It can be a very very hard loop to break out of. The cycle of question -> answer -> further question -> meeting can grind progress to a halt when each iteration takes 12 hours.
Re: Uber wants to cut costs by shifting its engineering to India
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good for India if it works out, I guess. But it feels - to my uninformed biased mind - like more of Uber flailing around while slowly failing. > Could a successful outsourcing project by Uber threaten all SV tech jobs? No. It could be part of some downward pressure at worst. Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing.
> Outsourcing to India has gone on for 2-3 decades. It's not some new disruptive thing. I guess what's different here is that Uber is a proper tech company and knows how to identify good engineers to hire. The same cannot be said of non-tech companies that have outsourced to consultancies like Infosys and Wipro.
And I don’t think that makes a difference. All FAANG companies (which I’d say can also identify good engineers) already have engineering offices in India.