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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's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
I honestly think that a lot of the current commentators are dead on when they say that this is a "fad" and this will eventually balance itself out. Wait until some corporations get a gut full of having their code halfway across the globe. Most companies aren't willing to let you work at home and yet they're willing to hire hoards of people they'll never meet to write their code? Heh. This will right itself eventually.
It will be interesting to see how long it can sustain its growth to prevent the same kind of retraction that hit Silicon Valley.
...a lakh is 100,000.
One entry found for lakh.
Main Entry: lakh
Pronunciation: 'lak, 'lak
Function: noun
Etymology: Hindi lAkh
Date: 1599
1 : one hundred thousand
2 : a great number
- lakh adjective
magic% dict lakh
3 definitions found
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lac \Lac\, Lakh \Lakh\, n. [Hind. lak, l[=a]kh, l[=a]ksh, Skr.
laksha a mark, sign, lakh.]
One hundred thousand; also, a vaguely great number; as, a lac
of rupees. [Written also {lack}.] [East Indies]
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Lakh \Lakh\, n.
Same as {Lac}, one hundred thousand.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
lakh
n : the cardinal number that is the fifth power of ten [syn: {hundred
thousand}, {100000}]
A couple of years ago on a train journey to Mumbai I had a long conversation with an Indian software engineer. Once he'd got his University degree he got a job in Silicon Valley, but only stayed a couple of years because he realised that although salaries are lower in India he would actually be a lot better off in India because your dollar goes a lot further there. In India he could actually afford servants - a maid, cook etc. as well as a big house with a swimming pool and car. So if you read this type of story and think of hundreds of poorly paid Indians in sweatshops hacking out code, think again.
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
Those jobs aren't ever coming back and neither will these.
Can I bum a sig?
Now would be a good time to put together a petition and send it to the various candidates and demand that there be some restrictions to all the tech jobs going overseas.
Good luck. Unless you accompany your petition with big sacks full of money, don't expect any results (other than a polite letter -- maybe). Those same candidates/elected officals didn't act when manufacturing jobs went offshore, why would they act now?
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've always wanted to post this in an "offshoring" /. article, but have always arrived late to the game.
Firstly, a disclaimer: good on India. I hold nothing against them for accepting, with open arms, North American tech jobs as fast as CEOs rush to send them over.
That being said, I believe we (ie. North Americans) are being fucking morons about this. We are willingly shipping them high skilled jobs so Mr. CEO can report a quick profit the next quarter. In the mean time, we are losing an entire generation of "junior" positions. I believe that will spell the end of software development in North America.
My current job is that of a software architect. It is a high-skill job requiring very specialised knowledge in the area where we make software. I got to my current job by starting as a junior programmer at this company. After 3 years I was bumped up to "intermediate" developer. After 3 more it was a bump to "senior" developer. Now they think I know enough to design the systems I build.
Two years ago my company opened an office in Bangalore (we have offices across the globe). All new hiring has been through that office, and they ship the programmers from India to various other offices for training on projects. In another years time, programmers in that India office will have performed enough implimentations to be considered "intermediate" developers. In a few more years they'll be senior, and in a few more they'll be in my position.
As this is going on in India, all our own new grads will be working at Starbucks serving lattes, and will be left out of the loop.
All for the sake of a quick stock boost. Good on India, shame on us!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
"Attractive Women: Stay away. Nerd Crossing"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade? One thing we can do is educate people, foriegn students continue to come to the US in greater numbers to learn. Another is tourism. How many Indian's want to vacation in Detroit? Our college costs keep rising to the point that it is becoming more and more difficult for the middle and lower middle class to get an education here. The middle and lower middle classes make up almost 70 percent of our population. Another thing we have is money lots of it. Not you or I, but the ones really pushing for globalization. The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more. These people find a service economy great for them, the lower classes have and always will bow to their every need. In fact, if the cost of service employees gets to high, then they can always push for more immigration, it is especially easy to get haitian or mexican labor to replace those high priced citizenry. It helps to give them a california drivers license. Most of these individuals were born into their position. Do not think for a minute Bill Gates was born into a low or middle class family in the suburbs.
By moving to a service economy where most of everything is imported, the middle class is left to struggle to maintain their status. More and more that is done with debt, easy credit for a good life now. Pay the rich forever.
Globalization is great for up and coming economies, it was great for Japan, but they are now losing to Korea, Indonesia, India etc.
The rich 1 percent would have you believe that this is all for the benefit of poor countries, ignoring the fact that when the labor costs and living standards rise in those countries, they'll be in the same boat. It will be a long time till we see programmers whose native language is Tutsi. But eventually they'll be a source of cheap labor too.
So what we have in effect is the very rich deciding the middle class is not dependant enough so they have decided to take from the middle and give to the poor.
Not exactly what Robin Hood advocated.
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.
hotmail.com
At least it was an indian guy who created it. Sold it to microsoft for $400 million..
Bash it all you want, hotmail was pretty revolutionary and is probably used by hundreds of millions of people..
Will code a sig generator for food
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.
Do you have any idea of the HISTORY behind such laws? It's because employers would pay below subsistence wages to unskilled workers (as in not even really enough to live off of...) so that they'd have to work 12 or more hours in a day just to make enough money to barely live.
Not a pretty sight, really.
Now they're exporting that misery to the third world countries because they can and it nets a profit short-term for the businesses.
It amazes me how many "get a job" people are so clueless- because they're NOT IN THE SITUATION AND NEVER HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. They don't understand that many of these people that are "too good to work a real job" (By the way, define "real job" for me... If it's manual labor, then you don't understand what many actually did in the Tech fields- not all of them were "web developers" that got laid off, etc. Many of the people that got laid off had "real" jobs that were worth what they were getting paid for them until the Great Downsizing...) actually have obligations like houses and the such that many of what you'd consider "real" jobs won't even pay for an efficiency, let alone the obligations like car payments, insurance, etc.
If you've not been there, PLEASE do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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
A lot of people make comparisions between engineering and computer programming. I happen to work in an engineering firm, but have a degree in CS, so I am very aware of both sides of the analogy.
The analogy sucks.
The reason the analogy doesn't work is mainly because engineering deals with real-life physical problems. Also, engineering takes place in a realm of (generally) fixed possibilities.
You don't have to design a building to withstand 1,000 mi/h of wind because you know that will never happen. However, your program, to be anywhere near 'bug-free' (which can rarely be proven, of course) must be hardened against every combination of inputs. The effects of wind, and the behaviors of steel, etc. are very well known. You simply don't have this kind of data in programming, because you are almost always designing one-of-a-kind logic.
You make the implication that engineers don't make mistakes. That is far from the truth. The main reason why you don't hear about engineering mistakes is because of the massive QC effort that goes on. Most projects have at least 3 milestone levels, where plans are reviewed by the engineer's internal QC process, and then reviewed by the client's QC process. When you submit for jobs, part of your submission must document your QC process. No QC, no job.
If software companies put in anywhere near the same amount of effort on QC, you would see a definite improvement in software quality. However, it would be very difficult for software companies to achieve this. This is because the use of standards in engineering saves QC time by minimizing the amount of work that the reviewer must actually check. While many software companies do have internal standards and practices, the lack of industry-wide standards hinders the QC process. Libraries can assist here, but there is still a lot of unique logic being written for programs that simply isn't checked well enough.
People bitch about the costs of engineering (like the Big Dig), but fail to realize that more than 50% of the time is spent checking the work. A lot of money is spent to ensure that these things are safe. If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash, I hope you're prepared to pay for it.
I don't know where your bitterness against programmers comes from, but you need to chill out (and it sounds like you could stand to learn a lot from a software engineering course).
Note: Many of my comments are in the context of public engineering projects. For private projects, plans are reviewed (in New Jersey) by the local Planning Board, as well as the Department of Community Affairs, a state agency.