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India's Silicon Valley Offers the Cheapest Engineers, But the Quality of Their Talent is Another Story (qz.com)
Ananya Bhattacharya, writing for Quartz: Bengaluru's startup ecosystem is what it is because of its engineers. With an average annual salary of $8,600, engineers in India's tech hub cost 13 times less than their Silicon Valley counterparts, according to the 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report. The city is home to the world's cheapest crop of engineers, with the average annual pay of a resident software engineer falling well below the global figure of $49,000. [...] However, the city's talent pool poses challenges in access and quality. For the most part, "engineers haven't been hired very quickly, experience is average, and visa success is low," the report says. "The quality and professionalism of resources is also questionable in many cases," Abhimanyu Godara, founder of US-based chatbot startup Bottr.me, which has a development team in Bangalore, said in the report.
You think?!
Just think how the computer industry has conditioned us to accept lower and lower support quality and "self-service" as the norm. Instead of Talk to the Hand, it's Talk to the Bot.
If somebody called me a "resource", my professionalism would also be less than stellar.
Stephan
Wat?! India has the top software engineering talent on the planet, everyone knows that! That's why we must keep the H-1B Visa program in place in America because they are so much better than American software engineers. If we don't do that, the tech sector will collapse and bad things will happen! Why are you posting such anti-American false rubbish? Sincerely, The US Chamber of Commerce
We'll make great pets
not sure what that means. Anyway, of course the quality is low. They're suffering brain drain to other countries. You're not gonna work as a rank & file programmer for $8600 when you can get an H1-B an earn 13 times that in San Francisco, do that for a few years and either get a green card or come back to your home country loaded. It doesn't help that India is a sub-optimal place to live (dirty air, rampant corruption at the local level, etc, etc).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Now with only 16% of the initial frame with actual content... after it finally finishes it multiple layouting and re-renderings.
I've heard stories of Silicon Valley engineers saving up their money, moving down to Mexico or Central America, build what the locals would consider to be a mansion, and then marrying an underage girl from the local village that the elders allow because the village will inherit everything eventually.
India's primary export: WordPress themes and SEO-themed love letters to middle-managers.
When the best can can make so much more elsewhere, then there is a strong tendency for the local pool of talent to be just average, to sub-par.
not in indictment of Indian engineering, just expected for such a large disparity in pay....
if I could go somewhere and get payed 13X my current pay.....
....Waiting for the first chants of "Racist/Racism".....
These aren't a bunch of white guys...you can't take this way about them or their talents.....
What color is the skin on their code? It all looks the same on my IDE.
(and worse, it ain't the color brown that makes them attractive to megacorps - it's the color green.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
As mentioned in the story, quality is this or that...(I am paraphrasing...)
You know what, I had a young software engineer from Africa (a new graduate from one of their schools), who shrank a 301 line of code into 83!
It also ran faster if I could mention that. Before he took on the task, folks in my office (myself included), [quietly] belittled him, questioning his abilities.
He did the job. Before quitting for GM, this man had re-written manuals in English, a language he had to learn. Needless to say, he returned to our company as a consultant on some project that had incurred budgetary overruns and incompetency.
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
So where are the best engineers?
In aggregate, Indian engineers begin to mirror the differences between the India and the US/Europe generally.
India isn't just US or Europe with a sanitation problem, it's a civilization with its own inherent problems that have kept it that way. You can give people degrees, but that doesn't immediately resolve the other externalities that prevent them from being parts-interchangeable with their Western counterparts.
Maybe at some very elite level (very wealthy, educated abroad, etc) some small subset of Indians are interchangeable, but at the bulk level they tend to be on par with the rest of India at the same level.
If they were the same as Westerners, then India would be much more like the West and they would be employed at home in their own globally competitive industries and not clamoring for visas to work in the US.
You don't say "another story" when it's the logical conclusion of the same fucking story.
Cheap labor with phony degrees and no skills beyond following a script, from a country with a culture of scheming, scamming, and cheating will yield terrible quality of work and behavior. I don't know who's scamming who here. The tech industry for hiring Indian labor at "fuck you" prices and treating them like shit, or the Indian labor force getting bogus degrees and cheating their way to a job in an outsourcing firm that then sells the western tech industry a pile of lies on what they can produce. If India didn't have over a billion fucking people and a caste system, people might demand fair treatment, livable conditions, and wages. But then the west wouldn't get terrible, condescending "customer service" and cheap, shitty code.
Not saying they're all bad, but the ones that are bad are bad to epic proportions.
Don't need to save up much to build a mansion in Mexico. The fulltime complement of guards, however, will eventually take a toll.
As well as kidnapping insurance for you and your family.
Water has been discovered to be Wet, and the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West!
More on this breaking news later!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And why can't we outsource those greedy bloodsuckers?
Aren't going to hang around for 8,600$ a year.
love is just extroverted narcissism
All looks the same in _his_ IDE. He's confessing that he can't code ether.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Without that, or to have these numbers normalized in some way, it is meaningless to just compare salaries.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Mike Nefkens, of HP Enterprise, soon to be DXC Technology, responded to a question about layoffs by referring to employees as "inventory" and stating, "well, you have to rotate inventory, right? Get rid of the old, obsolete stuff in favor of the new, fresh stuff"
Fact of the matter is, in a services company like HPE's ES, people are your assets, and knowledge, skill, and talent are valuable things not worth flushing away. Same goes for those customer-facing employees who have built relationships, or SMEs who build and maintain customer-facing applications.
I'd rather be called a "Resource" than "Inventory". HP/HPE/DXC has spent the last few years trashing morale and blissfully opening the floodgates wide open for brain drain, to replace experienced (but higher paid) people with warm bodies to satisfy existing contracts. IBM is following suit.
IT Nerds have a thing for underage girls....go figure.
I'm skeptical that India is REALLY producing engineers worthy of replacing Americans, or any other Western country.
The same can be said about the U.S.
Rednecks in the deep south still marry their sisters. Racism is still a big problem in society. Misogynistic execs in billion dollar companies like Uber.
It's not about the country, it's about the individuals. I've seen Indian engineers who are absolute rubbish, not worth the paper their H1-B is printed on. But I've also seen brilliant ones, smart and respectful. Keep in mind that in most countries, only 30% of people have the intellectual capacity to earn a college degree.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
HP Enterprise...formerly known as EDS?
They have a 30+ year history of employing C student, recent college graduate, idiots as programmers, former non-technical military as managers. Only skills are in marketing to Fortune 500s and government, using one competent 'prop worker', who will never be seen again, once the contract is signed.
As I said elsewhere on the tread: EDS _taught_ Tata, Infosys etc how this game is gamed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Engineers have a thing for underage girls....go figure.
FTFY
This is what is happening in the West also.
People are being dehumanized and they aren't developing to fill their potential.
This is going to be a major problem for the economy and the stability of our society if we don't change something now.
I don't, my AI does all the thinking for me.
"Overall, Bengaluru bagged the 20th spot out of 55 cities when evaluated on parameters such as performance, funding, market research, talent, and startup experience".
Pretty good, considering that Amsterdam ranks 19th in the same list. Notice that they are comparing entire cities, not software engineers, nor quality of the software produced. Amsterdam performs fine when it comes to selling softdrugs and the termperature is generally cooler. Everyone knows that Russia has the best programmers, but the country does not even make it to the list.
designed to keep America's tech sector afloat by brain-draining 100K highly talented and educated workers from countries like India, among other? What a funny article.
Every time a customer starts lamenting about cost and how everything has to be done right now and perfectly, I draw an equilateral triangle on a sheet of paper, label the corners accordingly (fast, cheap, good) and tell him to make a point at the spot where he puts his focus.
Most get the hint.
I forgot who said it, but it's true: Paying too much isn't very wise, but paying too little is a catastrophe. Paying too much means you lose a little money. Paying too little, though, means that you can lose it all. Because you'll always find someone who will make whatever you're asking for cheaper, but at the cost of quality and speed. Which can in the end mean that the product is not up to your requirements, rendering the whole item you bought useless and all the money spent on it wasted.
I'd rather pay too much than too little.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hello, my name is Harish and I am a computer engineer who received my degree in 6 months from the best university in India. I program in visual basic and C# and I am outsourced to Wells Fargo. I was trained by a big american friend who I then replaced.
Yours maybe not so much! Our other big engineering center is in a former soviet bloc country. My colleagues there are also quite good, and I'm told are even less expensive than India.
You can make your racist jabs about people defecating in the street, and while it's not uncommon to see someone urinating against a wall outdoors in Bangalore, I can also go to almost any city in Europe and find people urinating in alleys there too. I've never seen anyone defecating in public in Bangalore or any of the other places I've been in India, both in and away from big cities. Personally I find them to be obsessed with cleanliness, much more than we are here in the U.S. (Even if it doesn't extend to the outdoors and public spaces. And I see plenty of trash and litter here too.)
Back on topic, we give our colleagues interesting work to do – not drudge work, e.g. maintenance and sustaining engineering. Off hand I'd say it goes a long way to keeping them motivated and happy. I wouldn't stick around to just fix bugs either. When you're good, and you know it, you don't stay around for that kind of nonsense.
It all looks the same on my IDE.
Spoken like someone who has never seen an H1b's code or just doesn't know what good code looks like.
I'm talking about the color of the text, not the quality of the code (which is variable).
PS: I've seen some mega-shit copypasta-outta-stack-exchange code come from guys paler than freshly-fallen snow, and I've seen code gorgeous enough to make a grown man cry come from guys who positively reek of curry, so that ain't it either.
Point is, race/culture has fuck-all to do with code - it's the quality that counts (and not just "holy shit it compiled!", either.) That's the metric you use when you decide who should write for you, and who should not. It is true that the low-bid stuff almost always has low-bid quality, but you get what you pay for... something the aforementioned megacorps haven't quite figured out yet.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I think when we look back at this era, we will see it as a time of increasing global meritocracy. With barriers to commerce and job movement so low, it's basically impossible for a reserve of talent to stay dramatically underpriced for too long. If someone is working for $8000, it's quite likely (not inevitable, just likely) that they weren't good enough to get that job for $10,000, which was filled by someone else. If it was otherwise - if $8000/year workers could do the job of $50.000/year Americans - countless companies would have opened offices, scooped up the talent, and got ahead of their competitors. There is no cheap worker Shangri-La anymore, because nothing is hidden now. I actually think this kind of meritocratic pragmatism is killing discrimination faster than any social movement in history. That doesn't mean that once we're all sorted by merit, the top will necessarily resemble the middle and the bottom in terms of demographics...
"Cheap" is a poor quality to optimize for when speaking of engineers or programmers. Sorry but I don't think much of "cheap" as a recommendation. Oh I get it, the classic Indian/Chinese/Eastern European talent may be cheap because of circumstances and history. And the talent may well be there, though as always, check those credentials carefully.
In the end however, you get what you pay for. And this is the thing that the MBA set wants to downplay. The accountants like to optimize for money because that's what they know, understand, and get measured on. However an excessive focus on the expense side ignores the product, revenue and reputational angles that a company's future is based upon. You cannot cost cut your way to business dominance.
Cost cutting is a limited tactical move by a company. Make something fantastic, that the customers can't get enough of, and cannot get from anyone else, and you can become a corporate legend (and wealthy besides, based on merit). What sounds better to you?
I've spend 15 years working with them.
1 was good.
1 was good at following simple instructions and performing simple tasks.
2 were fucking dangerous.
The rest were a waste of effort and required an engineer here to rewrite all of the code. They went from bad to looks like they were dragged off the street then told to look at the code and figure it out from there--without ever actually learning how to write any code to begin with.
There's a range of intelligence and skill no matter where you go. The high end there is like the high end in the US -- there will always be very smart people. However, we do get exposed to a lot of the low end. The body shops (IBM, CSC/HP/EDS, Accenture, Wipro, etc.) are a revolving door for training new graduates...you might get one or two people who have a good grasp on the work they're doing, but the good ones tend to leave quickly. Body shop H-1Bs are a step beyond that, since they were able to do well enough to be sent to interact directly with the customer...but still not ideal. Direct hires (i.e. opening and running the Bangalore division of the company) tend to produce the best results, but there's still the turnover problem, time difference and communications issues.
Of course, this is assuming you're dealing with the typical offshore services customer. Most have no clue about IT or software dev, don't want to know about it since "it's not their core competency" and don't have the ability to objectively evaluate work quality. I can definitely see this being a problem if someone wants true Silicon Valley engineer material for $8600 a year. When I think of that, I think of someone building large chunks of functionality from scratch, not a run of the mill DBA or sysadmin or .NET/Java developer. Just because of a massive economic imbalance, you don't get to change the "Fast, good or cheap, pick 2" classic engineering adage.
The interesting thing will be what happens long-term. Wages in the US and Europe are probably going to continue to stagnate or collapse altogether, and costs will only go up in developing countries. There's going to have to be some equilibrium established...it's not sustainable for someone in Silicon Valley to command $250K+ for what amounts to routine work, and it's not good for either country when companies (whether or not they know better) see the ability to hire for less than minimum wage and just dump all domestic employees.
Yeah, I love when these guys come to work for us - they expect gold plated IT service, totally hands off.
Since our company outsources some of its other internal IT functions to call centers/teams in India and we occasionally have to deal with their almost complete incompetence. Just for S&G I make a point of being unhelpful as possible to return the favor.
My experience with Russians is they are arrogant way beyond their ability and second rate origins They are often good at byte level stuff but please don't let them design large systems.
Some humans smarter than others - is this news?
"Engineer" can mean 1,000 different things. Please define what you mean by that. Certain types of engineering doesn't require higher math to be involved. This allows self-taught people to thrive in those roles, but there are other sort of engineers where n-dimensional calculus is mandatory or people die. For example, aircraft designers - you want them to know their higher maths AND for someone else to validate the answers.
I've traveled a bit - 5 continents so far. Spent years overseas. There are idiots and brilliant people everywhere. "Talent" is determined locally for most things. Engineering talent has much to do with being taught to things that math allows, but that nobody else has ever tried.
Being willing to fail on the way to success and being willing to fail 100 times on the way to success are key traits.
When there are 1,000 people in line for your job, if a mistake is ever made, perhaps, there is a culture of not allowing failure?
I won't blame an individual for something that has been ingrained since they were toddlers. They've been in competition for "resources" all their lives. That can be water, food, toilets, schools and universities. Inside India, lots of bad colleges have started to meet the needs for parents wanting to send their kids to technical engineering schools. It isn't any different than in the USA where "online" schools sprang up to get govt money provided to non-standard students for attending non-accredited schools. It is a racket in the USA and it is a racket in India. The schools get their money. In the US, those degrees don't carry much weight (the US or Indian variety) because history has taught HR drones that graduates from those places tend NOT to be skilled in the ways their company wants.
Part of the failure is due to society and parents and govts demanding more and more "STEM" major graduates, regardless of the result.
I attended a well regarded engineering university in the USA. It is still top 10 in for the major and was top 5 when I graduated. I was not the smarted person in my graduating class of 22 students in my major. I wasn't the dumbest either. I did learn how to learn and how to think critically.
I've been lucky to have worked with brilliant people all over the world, but I've also worked with people who had great credentials, but were idiots and shouldn't be allowed to count change at McDonald's or BK or Subway. The one thing that seems to be an indicator of less-smart people which good credentials is how loudly they tell you about their credentials.
I've also worked with some brilliant people who had next to zero formal training. Their aptitude was natural in the subject we were working.
Anyways, India doesn't have a surplus and it isn't vacant from brilliant people. They have exceptional universities that graduate "brilliant" engineers too. But average people will always exist everywhere in the world. That is the nature of averages. ;)
Well, the original article is alluding to the fact that indians (dot not feather) are so cheap over in India, but that their actual skill, professionalism and all is severely lacking.
In general if you say that about a race of people in general, you'll get immediately attacked.
Sure, one brush doesn't paint everyone, BUT...in my experience to date, in MANY years in IT...the indians that come to the US, while many can do rote coding, if the requirements are very well and specifically spelled out, they just cannot in general seem to innovate or come up with code or processes that require individual thinking, creation and invention.
I dunno if it is how they are taught over there, or something to do with culture, or what...but that's what I've seen over and over again.
I won't even go into how badly many/most of them I"ve see treat women in the work place. It seems they get away with it too, whereas I'd be canned in a moment if anyone heard me spouting some of the stuff they say not very quietly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's why as a product manager (and ex bofh) I only code in bash and perl and sometimes tcl. No compilation baby. Run it and let it crash in all its glory
Are you speaking from personal experience?
The majority of the country shit outside in the bushes, many times near their water sources. It's a tremendous problem with disease.
I'm skeptical that India is REALLY producing engineers worthy of replacing Americans, or any other Western country.
A major portion of India has been declared 'Open defecation free' by prime minister Modi. I've been following him on Twitter
Are you speaking from personal experience?
Nope. I'm not an engineer. I do IT support work instead.
I wish I could mod you up. The fact of the matter is I've worked with H1B's for a couple of decades. And to call them zombies reflects badly on real zombies.
Where are the various state licensing boards when people or companies offer their services without the requisite PE license? It's time to plug the "industrial exemption" loophole and see to it that those who offer themselves as 'engineers' actually meet some minimal educational and professional standards.
Have gnu, will travel.
Priests have a thing for underage girls....go figure.
FTFY
Wonder how many others fit in that sentence?
It seems you aren't one of those 30%.
It seems you aren't one of those 30%.
MSc from a regionally accredited U.S. University here.
And for the record, I was not trying to bash the U.S. I was merely trying to point out that it's an individual's intellect and skillset that matters, not where they are born.
Nobody controls where their mom was when they were born. Nobody controls what elementary school, and in most cases what middle/high school they went to. And not everyone was able to even go to college.
I was replying to an AC who effectively asserts that India is a third world country where people poop in the streets, and that because of that, its engineers can't be good. My point is that each individual should be judged on their personal abilities, not on the country they were born in.
Just like not every American is a cousin-marrying hillbilly who shoots up schools. But then again, I live in California so I've rarely even seen a real hillbilly.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Everyone knows that they don't move to Mexico or anywhere in Central America.
They move to the Philippines.
They move to the Philippines.
If you're ex-military.
engineers in India's tech hub cost 13 times less than their Silicon Valley counterparts
So, the engineers in Silicon Valley cost less than somewhere else, but the ones in India are thirteen times MORE less expensive than the ones in SV? Or are we supposed to gather that the SV engineers cost something that we should all consider a good baseline, but that the Indian engineers cost roughly 8% of that amount?
Lazy writers, being lazy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You know what, I had a young software engineer from Africa (a new graduate from one of their schools)
So that was here then.
I've also worked with some fellow programmers from India who were excellent. In America.
But that is totally irrelevant to the story, about the workers *IN INDIA* being quite horrible - which was also my experience when working with any team that dealt with coding outsourced there.
It's almost like the really good developers don't stay where they are, and go to first world countries to develop. Completely validating the story. HMM.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is nothing but a bunch of mouth-breathing racist bullshit from a bunch of terrified Trump dick-suckers who are afraid of having to compete on their technical merits with engineers in other countries.
It seems like engineering and similar teams get the least amount of vacation time, while those in more social oriented positions can get a lot more. I've had coworkers that have taken at least 2 months off per year, not for maternity leave or a honeymoon, since those teams are usually under far less pressure.
He has his designated shitting street just like any other Indian.
Ramesh, you can stomp and shout about racism all you want, but you still have to poo in the loo.
Only 17% of Americans can afford a college degree. Truly intelligent people realize it's a wast of time and money.
One of my brother's friends who I am also friends with on Facebook did exactly that. He moved somewhere in Central America (I forget exactly which country), bought a large estate, learned the local dialect, and does contract work as a software developer. He takes a vacation to visit family in the US during protest/coupe season.
"We don't want your merit aka caste system" --USA https://qz.com/889524
Casteism
Years ago I worked as QA Manager for an outdoor wireless radio manufacturer in Canada. The testers were making $42-55k a year. I kept getting calls from local talent agencies that they have experienced testers in India, and with timezone difference, can improve test time and reduce costs having a team in India.
They wanted $70k/yr per tester (plus paid 3 or 4 weeks vacation) . I never talked to them again.
Years before, we were offered $5k/month for a Chinese team of developers (3-6 people). We never found that to be worth our time. I'm not Chinese and language was a barrier for some of the devs.