The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’? • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#311

Post by hyperbovine » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #272

Alterlife wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.

There is a massive screening process in both India and China that results in the top fraction of a percentage of students going off to study in the US. Those are the ones who later go on to publish while at US institutions. So yes, there is some signal there.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#312

Post by osrec » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #298

osrec wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sev…

Every large organisation I've been in operates in silos, and these firms hide within these silos. Also, these firms have a bad reputation - everyone in banking knows it, yet they are still employed because they're cheap and let you add bodies to the shop floor when funding is squeezed. That makes managers look powerful with big empires, which helps getting promoted. So it's not all about code quality or productivity - sometimes it's just about looking like you're getting stuff done, before you leave and let someone else inherit the mess.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#313

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

osrec wrote: post #242

mritun wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35 lacks you mentioned is a good starting salary for a person at Amazon or MS. 10L is not, even in Pune.

35L is about 40k GBP - the average cost of a JS developer in many parts of the UK. Are you saying that's a starting salary for a developer in India - because in that case, why outsource?!

UK is famous for having poor dev rates. A coworker of mine transferred from Microsoft Beijing to Cambridge and had to take a pay cut because the payscale for the level he was at was actually lower there.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#314

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

cpmouter wrote: post #141

kemiller2002 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> i.e. the fact they lie constantly

I'm yet to discover a culture that doesn't do this, and the people from that culture are so inured to it they don't call it lying but "being polite".

As an example that would be widely understood by HN, Americans lie constantly when they ask "How are you doing?" - they really don't want to know how you are doing, and worse, you're expected to lie back with enthusiasm "I'm great!", even when you're not.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#315

Post by starpilot » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

Is it just me or do Indians greatly prefer to communicate and delegate tasks over phone versus email? I'm working with subcontractors right now, and it makes it a pain when it means doing daily calls late at night or early in the morning to talk to them in India.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#316

Post by pritambaral » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

throwaway1414 wrote: post #113

kamaal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG. Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG companies I wouldn't consider them too smart. Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on some internal php tool. Product companies pay well, but the average…

> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading. Let us take FANG one by one. Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area. Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and…

> Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay

I'm sorry, but those are not "high-profile projects of Amazon". Some things in the AWS roster are.

Prime Video and Prime Music are shoddy technical work. The former refuses to play movies on HD on Linux, and their technical support has no idea why, instead spouting bullshit like "Oh, Adobe Flash does not support Linux". The latter launched in India exclusively on Flash, and that was this year. Their current HTML5 music player locks up one of my CPUs even when nothing's playing, by making the browser constantly refresh the whole layout.

If your objective was to claim Amazon's Bangalore office put out good work, Prime Video and Prime Music are poor examples.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#317

Post by humbfool2 » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

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…

Let me be clear - “Not all Indian Developers are bad”. The reason why quality of engineers at Infy, wipro, tcs etc. is so bad is because of their recruitment process. They recruit engineers from various colleges like herd of sheeps and call it mass recruitment. Irrespective of the his specialisation (Mechanical, Electronics or Chemical etc.) Students practice code for a day and so go for interview and unfortunately many get recruited. Then there is one year of Training. After training these engineers get into software development. Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer. Indian college and companies need to change how they recruit students.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#318

Post by PurpleBoxDragon » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

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.

>Is there some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of India?

Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.

>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.

I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#319

Post by mkovji » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #253

cpmouter wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're missing the metaphor by being pedantic. I'll assume you're American (I am). You know how in a healthy, well-led team, if your boss suggests a course of action that's wrong at a meeting and asks for feedback, you and I would pipe up and point out the issues with their approach? In Asian cultures, my understanding is that would never happen. Instead, everyone would agree at the meeting, then feedback would be gi…

Its funny how you comment as if you know 100 % about Asian culture. Does one persons behavior define an entire continents culture for you?

Some people have worked in 16 diff teams in last 10 years and they have friends who have broader experience and they have super close conversation with managers, they don't go to agile rooms and draw something on the white board all the time and come out with no insights or progress after a hour or only have a skilled person come and give a direction in 5 minutes and nullify the whole one hour white board drawing.

I can tell for sure since i have been part of many such teams where we precisely point out any steps in the negative directions and offer tons of suggestions to improvize on the approach and most of the time come up with a way to gently impart some sense into the overseas managers who have no idea how to get what they want.

Your reasoning is so flawed because u didn't know when to use the word never, that doesn't mean your continents reasoning is flawed but i wish in hacker news there is a option to filter out certain people's comment globally forever.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#320

Post by gaius » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

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…

I once heard from a US based colleague that he said “do X but don’t burn any bridges” to a teammate in China. That apparently once translated means the opposite of its Western meaning! An expensive mistake that was.