Slashdot Mirror
Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "The inevitable has happened. Bangalore, which grew under the shadow of America 's Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent. Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
1.5 lakh engineers.
What's a lakh, and why do they need engineers?
It will be interesting to see how long it can sustain its growth to prevent the same kind of retraction that hit Silicon Valley.
And I care because... why? At its height, Silicon Valley/San Fran contained thousands of individuals hoping to get rich quick by pretending to be techies. Now India has thousands of individuals hoping to have a better life by pretending to be techies. There's nothing new here. Move along.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Name five great software products that you're sure haven't come out of Bangalore.
The companies aren't based there, but enough of the work is actually done there that you need to put some actual thought into answering that question...
On the other hand, I don't have a high opinion of Bangalore-as-Silicon-Valley, either. I just don't think you'll get anything really remarkable out of people under those conditions. And if there's one thing the world doesn't need, it's more mediocre programming...
Show of hands please: how many of you have had to deal with these American techies (managers?). Is it possible to understand those "real nice" redneck boys down in the deep south? Very frustrating! I spend too much time on the phone because of them.
Interesting point that keeps cropping up in my meetings with Americans: tabling something in a meeting means exactly the opposite there. I guess we all have to learn how to communicate better with each other.
So all I need to do is move to India and I can have my own maids, cooks, and other servants? I'm getting my plane ticket right now! :)
Seriously, it would be interesting to see average income in both areas because it would shed a lot of light. Not your friend's pay or some millionaire in Silicon valley but the county's average income.
What I find most curious is the incredibly rapid turnaround in opinion seen on Slashdot. During the dot-com boom, everyone was happy to see Open Source, a truly global phenomenon, bloooming. But now I see this strange bifurcation of views. Open Source software created by people from all over the globe is still good. On the other hand global commerce, in which the lowest-cost providers of goods and services win, is being villified.
So when a Chinese company (operating in non-democratic government) manufactures the inexpensive hardware that powers your gaming PC, that's fine. But when Indian programmers (operating in a democratic society) start beating out American programmers for jobs, there are some sort of insidious forces at work?
When principals butt up against pocketbooks is the time when you see what people truly believe.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
All of my "middle class" relatives in El Salvador have at least one live-in maid, some have several as well as a driver and gardener. Interestingly enough, some of my relatives there work in the computer industry.
If you think times are bad, just wait till the election is over. The Republicans have struck deals with several dozens of corporations to postpone their outsourcing decisions till the 2004 elections are over. Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections... especially if Bush wins again.
There was an article in the WSJ last month about exactly this. Apparantly, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft are keeping a low profile in India. MS has gone so far as to remove their names from the buses that they use in India to ferry programmers back and forth to work.
Magnus.
Sadly, this appears to fall into the "globalization" groupthink. It's a "free market economy" therefore it must be good...right?
Since we've lost all kinds of other industries overseas (for instance, steel production) this latest trend is taken as simply the latest incarnation. No one seems to be thinking "gee, we were supposed to lose the manufacturing jobs while the high tech jobs stayed here".
There are many stupid things about outsourcing IT jobs. First of all, 50% of all software projects failed before outsourcing became prevalent. I'm personally sure that percentage will be significantly higher with outsourced work. Second, U.S. companies are paying to train large foreign workforces to compete with them down the road. Third, the lack of high-paying tech jobs here in America will ultimately hurt the economy, as well as causing many skilled tech workers to move to non-tech positions. One wonders if this new "lack of tech workers" will be used to justify new H1-B visa bills as the economy heats up again.
In my opinion, the whole debacle arose from executives being annoyed over the high cost of tech labor - they didn't understand that tech is hard, requires lots of education, and should be compensated accordingly. It's sad that contract software rates have fallen to about 50% of their level of a few years ago. It also looks like permanent position salaries have been impacted.
I'd like to see a few executive teams outsourced to India...then we'd see some real screaming about the practice.
This will right itself eventually.
I'd like to think so, but we'll have to see...
In the meantime, classified government work looks like the best bet as far as job security goes - that will never be outsourced.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Actually, I think it is elephant soccer, not polo.
But the elephant soccer is in Thailand. At least, some elephant soccer is played in Thailand.
There was an article about this a few years ago in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
A google search for elephant soccer also produces some hits.
For example, from The Surin elephant roundup:
True, the numbers seem huge, but they are quite meaningless. Quantity does not imply quality. I have seen projects with 100+ programmers being *completely* scrapped. I regularly interview candidates who can't write a simple program, in whatever language, but call themselves "Software Engineers". I have seen resumes of "MS Word Programmers".
Frankly, I think this is nothing great - I am surprised it happened so recently. Like many other articles, this is yet another sensational article from the Times of India Group. Can't understand why Slashdot keeps posting from this paper.
I work in Silicon Valley for a very large tech company, and in December 02 I spent a month flying hither and yon throughout India visiting all the major tech companies, so I think I can reasonably compare the two tech cultures.
/. - the geek drive seems to know no language or culture boundary.
Firstly, the big tech titans over there are ALL dependent upon the US economy. WiPro, TCS, Zensar, Infosys, etc. are all oriented towards the export market. The managers over there pay way more attention to the health of the US economy than to the economy there in India.
India has an amazing infrastructure for developing engineers. The IIT system, for example, is easily comparable to the best universities in the United States or elsewhere in the west.
My colleagues in India make significantly less than I do, yet they do live in quite comfortable middle-class-land. Yes, they do have servants, but in India, this is pretty common and not limited to techies.
The eagerness, drive and overall "geekness" of the technical people I worked with would be instantly recognized on
Currently, the average work experience of the Indian engineers I'd been working with was pretty low - they were all in their early-to-mid twenties. What this meant was that most of the architecture and design work (and hence the "innovation") was created in the States, and then shipped overseas for the implementation. But they're very hungry, and very driven (as I said earlier) - I suspect that we'll start to see a lot more original development and design in the next 5-10 years as the tech base matures and gets some experience under its belt.
This is why those export companies (like Infosys) are now eager to not just position themselves as implementors but designers and innovators as well - they want to move up the tech "food chain" because there are about a dozen countries (in Eastern Europe, China, etc) that want to occupy that place in the Food Chain where India now sits.
The thing is that this offshoring business is actually possible because of the success of the Internet. I often work from my local coffeehouse when I'm not in the office, or telecommuting from home. If all I'm doing is slinging bits, does it really matter where I am? Often the answer is no...my saving grace (thus far) is that I don't work in an easily commoditized discipline.
My observations below come from my experience managing a distributed software engineering organization with presence in San Jose, CA and Delhi, India. I have a total of about 25 people working for me with have in the US and have in India (think of that poor guy who is split between the two countries - that must be me with all of my travel between the two!).
Let's face it will swing back to balance over time.
Right now, there is an incredible head-count cost advantage to moving a project to India, with many companies doing. The drive to offshore to India is driving demand there heavily. It is difficult to hire quality people, wages are going up quickly, people are jumping between companies, and it is much like things were in Silicon Valley during the bubble years.
What we will see, is that the head-count cost advantage, over time, will narrow and the other costs of going off-shore will come into play (coordination, latency, frequent travel, etc.). As this happens people will become more and more selective about what goes and what stays.
In the long-term, I think "offshore outsourcing" will fade to a degree, while "internal offshoring" (building distributed development teams within your company. I believe that the trend towards distributed deveopment organizations that take advantage of cost differntials and cherry pick the best talent in various geographies (as hard as it might be to believe, not everyone wants to live in Silicon Valley or the US for that matter, I have an excellent manager, with US Citizenship, orginally from India who moved back) will continue and accelerate.
What does this mean for us in the US? It means that we will have to go up the "software value stack" and work at a higher level. If a task can be done somewhere else for less cost, it wll be. This mans that we have to be constantly working to be at the cutting edge and have the breadth and depth to add significant value and coordinate project in these distributed teams. In a sense we each have to take the role in our projects that Linus has in driving the development of Linux.
If it is any comfort, realize that we aren't the only ones feeling threatened. My friends in India are all worried and looking over their shoulders at places like China, Vietnam, Ukraine, etc. wondering how they will move to higher and higher value-add activities over time.
I am not sure if this is a wonderful thing. As it is there are too many sub-standard colleges, and basic equipment and teaching staff is lacking in many. Such hypergrowth, in my opinion can cause nothing but trouble. I don't think the basic systems and infrastructure are there to support such an endeavor. Yes there are currently very good institutions but they are very few in the top tier. Most just dispatch their students with a "token" degree.
Frankly, I think this insane growth in the engineering colleges, is just too much of herd mentality. - not unlike the dot com mania. And instead of treating a college as a social cause or obligation, most of the "engineering" and "medical" colleges are nothing but commercial enterprises. They are run purely as businesses, even to the extent, that many are called "donation colleges." You pay a huge huge amount of money and you get in - even in medical colleges !! Just imagine one of those doctors operating on you. It happens in India all the time !
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
The company I work for, while incorporated in the US (for tax benefits and defense contracts, y'know), has the bulk of its employees in Bangalore. I, fortunately, have not had to work with the Bangalore office, since my work export control, meaning that foreign nationals can't work on it without special permission from the State Department. My coworkers on civilian projects, however, dread having to work with India. I'm not certain how much of it can be blamed on the Indian engineers themselves, and how much is the fault of poor communication, but all I ever hear about Bangalore is how often work needs to be sent back to be redone, and how inconvenient the time difference is.
...I had a point when I started writing this.
Do the company savings on salary and benefits make up for having to redraw a set of design prints five or six times? I don't know. I do know it runs the American engineers ragged and frustrates our customers when there's a schedule delay. The interface between the US and India is the real rough spot, I think. I know that purely internal work in both countries goes smoothly, but not being able to use our huge labor pool in India is hurting the American side of the business. Maybe I'm able to look at things dispassionately because my job isn't going overseas, but I *want* international outsourcing to work...and it's a rough start for my company. We need to overcome language and cultural barriers (any American who thinks Indian English and American English are the same dialect has never spoken to an Indian) and establish some actual communication between the continents, instead of throwing a set of design requirements into the ether and expecting the Magic Overseas Engineers to sprinkle some pixie dust and suddenly have a working set of engineering drawings.
Is it different for IT work? I don't think coming up with design requirements for a program and then implementing them is a fundamentally different process than for a jet engine.
On the other hand, the broken English of the company newsletter is occasionally hilarious.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Indian friends I have, have told me that were shocked to discover after they arrived in the US that we did not have servants and cooks.
Of course, we *know* who the servants and cooks are in India and *their* standard of living.
Maybe India will get more than they bargained for... all they need is a class-based revolt.
They almost didn't survive. The result was A Good Thing for the consumer.
Now Japan has to worry about China, Korea and Taiwan doing the same thing to them.
It pays to go to work every day thinking it may be your last day there.
OK this might upset some people, but that's too bad.
As a Very Large Company(tm), we outsourced our help desk a few years back. It was a painful running joke in the office that if you wanted to do no work done, you'd "phone India" with a problem.
The joke stopped justover half a year ago. Our India helpdesk is incredibly efficient at fixing problems, the staff are polite, and there's no bad attitude. I don't care how much money the company has saved--they have improved the quality of their internal support, and that's something pretty damned valuable.
So before everyone whines about 'cheap but crappy outsourcing,' make sure that it really is crappy. I'd wager that for all but the most highly skilled jobs, the overseas work is as good as anything locally.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I get busted all the time for my mistakes. Embedded systems don't play by the same rules as the desktop world stuff. A single mistake can go out to thousands of machines. In the case some of the systems I develop, a single mistake can KILL people. I do my level best not to make mistakes- just like those Hardware engineers you refer to. Keep that in mind the next time you think that all the software world is like frigging Microsoft or an apps vendor where people keep buying their broken crap.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
First of all, the reason they said "Lakh" instead of "Hundred Thousand" is becasue the article was in an Indain based newspaper. Lakh (Hundred Thousand) and Crore "Ten Million) are indian finacial jargon that has been used for many decades. People also use it when they talk about numerical values other then money. My father still uses Lakh's when he speaks about numerical values and not Hundred Thousand. It part of their culture.
He had india doing his and the republican parties' phone fund raising.
Bush falsely offered protection for the steel workers knowing full well that EU/Japan/UN would force him to obey our agreements from the 80's. He had nothing to lose.
I would guess that Dean will not comment until he realizes that he has to say something. That may be interesting to hear. Do you argue for an overall world economy that will ultimatly help you or do you try to protect local high-end jobs?
I strikes me that our leaders will take easy ways out rather than do the right thing. Time to set direction for our nation the way that India did.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I really liked your analogy especially when you point out: "..If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash...". But perhaps you're analogy could be improved.
In all fairness, I think it's wrong to compare an engineering project as complex as the Big Dig to a relatively small (and relatively unimportant) piece of software like Real Player. Perhaps you can compare the Big Dig to the software that runs the recently landed Mars explorer Spirit. They put several hundreds of million dollars into that thing and they probably followed it with a more comparable level of quality control.
Perhaps the proper analogy would be comparing a Sony Laptop/Wega TV to an Apex or other lesser brand name company. With Sony you're pretty much guaranteed a solid product that works well and has all the advanced features. With the Apex you'll get a product that works decent with a few bugs and few advanced features. In this analogy Sony represents companies that have strict QC measures and pride themselves on quality whereas Apex represents your cheap software, slap-it-together shops.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
First, engineering is an industrial approximation of science. Ohm's Law isn't exact. It fails in the extreme. The engineer doesn't usually need a detailed understanding of quantum mechanics or GTR when working with electrical components. Computer Science IS math. Church's Thesis states this. It's as exact as mathematics itself. That's the difference. It's like comparing apples and oranges.
However, one could make the point that both engineering and CS require extensive project management and time management skills, a healthy dose of vendor documentation, and elaborate design.
The problem is that the line between advanced IT and engineering has grown thinner over the last 10 years. Sure, there's a big difference between writing a device driver and a creating a large scale enterprise application. However, I've seen guys who have done both. I've seen my share of guys with EE degrees working in what I term advanced IT (IT on a large scale with more sophisticated architectures). Of course, now that advanced math (combinatorics, algebra, and logic beyond discrete math) has been removed from most CS programs and CS has been moved to the engineering side of the house, this trend will continue. I understand the professional reasons. I respect them. However, I'd like to point out that Donald Knuth, Marvin Minsky, Dennis Ritchie, Martin Davis all have PhDs in math. I'm sure the list of prominent CS people with math degrees is extensive and on the theoretical side of the house it's all math anyway (once again, church's thesis).
I've always balked at people who say they like programming but can't stand mathematics. It just doesn't make sense. Either you haven't really studied mathematics or Alonzo Church is wrong. CS will always be an open and interdisciplinary field. AI is as much biophysics as it is engineering, and certainly requires an intimate knowledge of foundational mathematics as well. The computer program is mathematics, and fields like bioinfomatics, digital physics, and computational linguistics prove this.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....