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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."
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.
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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...
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.
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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!"
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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.
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.
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