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The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

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Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#371

Post by otakucode »

chrisper wrote: post #74
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…

I believe it is similar in Vietnamese culture. When we work with them they often say yes only for us to find out later that they had no clue what to do.

I wonder if a service like UpWork could take this cultural knowledge into consideration and change their design? I often see jobs posted that are straight up impossible... and they get bids. Someone will post "I want everyone who sees my AdWords ad to automatically Like my Facebook page" and they'll get bids from offshore IT shops claiming they will deliver exactly that. Those posting the jobs are completely unaware that what they're asking for is impossible and borders on the nonsensical. I've always figured somehow educating those people might be the solution, but perhaps instead just presenting potential work situations differently to cultures who say 'yes' to everything including the ludicrous might help?

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#372

Post by osrec »

ksk wrote: post #357
osrec wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, lets assume that this is happening. I would hope that the person harming their own business by willfully engaging with an incompetent third party is the one at fault here.

The thing is, it's not their business. They just show that they saved money and get promoted on to another role. The mess, when it becomes apparent, is for someone else to clean up...

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#373

Post by tlear »

imglorp wrote: post #199
mieseratte wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, we've had issues with Indian candidates informing us during interviews that they've already recently accepted an offer / started a new job, but that they're willing to come work for us instead. Completely oblivious to the fact of how big of an immediate red flag that is.

In some cultures, you're smart to get ahead any way you can, and they'd call anyone a fool who followed some set of rules or principles instead of getting ahead. For them, rules are artificial, arbitrary social constructs with zero benefit, while results are concrete. It's hard to argue they're wrong.

Actually it is quite easy, cost of doing business in such cultures is much higher as you can not really trust anything and must guard against a knife in the back at any moment.

There is a huge amount of friction that eliminates if counterparty can be trusted vast majority of the time.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#374

Post by otakucode »

BrandonM wrote: post #205
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...in any culture where you want trust and reliability. If someone doesn't want to be reliable, that's their choice, but don't expect me to be willing to engage in business with them.

I only realized when I started traveling internationally how much we (perhaps over-) value reliability in the US. We really pay a lot in terms of work hours and stress to gain what is sometimes marginally more predictability and reliability. In Mexico, Belize, southeast Asia, and southern Europe, I found everything to be much less reliable than I was used to. Everyone spent a lot time more waiting around. But I felt…

It might be an artifact of the system-centric nature of our culture. We seek to reduce everything to predictable absolute rulesets, to make things regular and reliable and tractable. I'm not sure if this comes primarily from the Industrial era and mass-manufacturing which has a tremendous conformity component, or whether it comes mostly from the more recent advent of computers.

We so easily accede to someone who says "its policy" without considering that the person involved clearly outranks whatever policy is being dealt with. Perhaps we've not been burned by strict adherence to policy and expecting the world to be regular and predictable as recently as those other cultures. It might just be a temporary thing, but I don't know. We've got things like "personal space" which were a very American concept for a long time, but which has since spread, almost certainly with many negative consequences, widely. So maybe this desire for people to accommodate systems rather than for systems to accommodate people will spread too. We're screwed if that's the case.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#375

Post by pritambaral »

throwaway1414 wrote: post #330
pritambaral wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's amazing to see how some people seem to be sitting on a high horse here and thinking that a HTML5 music player issue is somehow indicative of the work going on behind the scenes. Granted there are issues in Prime (Which software does not? Either people bitch about a software product or nobody uses it) but the context of the discussion here was comparison between the likes of Amazon and the likes of Cognizant. Tel…

Calm your horses (sorry, couldn't resist).

I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else. My only comment was on how Prime is not a "high-profile" project at Amazon.

You brush aside the issues I mention as "all software has issues". My point was to show the quality of the product, unlike the actually good technical products that Amazon has, not that the product has issues.

You seem to be emphasizing the distinction between the backend service and the frontend players. Given that Amazon owns AWS, I'd go out on a limb here and say building the backend they already have is not a challenge. I'd also like to point out that a poor technical product built by the Amazon Bangalore doesn't reflect well on Amazon Bangalore, and the frontends are indeed poor technical products.

> AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?

I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole.

> Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees?

Making no claims about the relative skill-levels of Amazon and Cognizant employees, I must argue, from first-hand experience with clients' tech teams, the notion of 'higher pay must mean higher skill' is wrong, especially in the Indian IT sector.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#376

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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…

If someone asks me, "Do you know how to do X?" I tell them yes only if I know.

If someone asks me, "Can you do X?" I tend to say yes, even if I don't, because, really, I can learn almost anything related to what someone might be asking me to do.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#377

Post by kamaal »

humbfool2 wrote: post #317
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 m…

>>Then there is one year of Training.

So more than your average CS engineering grad?

>>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer.

B.S.

Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#378

Post by ksk »

osrec wrote: post #372
ksk wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, lets assume that this is happening. I would hope that the person harming their own business by willfully engaging with an incompetent third party is the one at fault here.

The thing is, it's not their business. They just show that they saved money and get promoted on to another role. The mess, when it becomes apparent, is for someone else to clean up...

Okay then they are a dishonest toxic employee. The way to solve that is by trying to weed out such people in your hiring, and do due diligence on their previous employment record. I fail to see how that changes my conclusion.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#379

Post by JPKab »

commandlinefan wrote: post #234
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…

> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.

Thank you for saying this.

I love my Indian brothers and sisters, and think that the real offender in creating bad experiences with Indian devs are Indian businesses, which IMO have exploitative practices and emphasize over specialization. Even worse is the practice of requiring a 3 months notice to quit as a rule. There are 1 billion people in India, and I want the innovative, hard working, and kind among them to be welcomed to the US with open arms. I am deeply proud to have helped two highly talented young men get H1B visas and eventually green cards. They became great friends of mine and my family.

Sincerely, a white American guy who can't wait to travel to Maharashtra one day to visit Pune and Mumbai, and meet my friend's families.

Re: The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’?

#380

Post by JPKab »

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.

See my other comment. We don't all think this way, and I'm sorry you feel insulted.
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