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India's Silicon Valley Offers the Cheapest Engineers, But the Quality of Their Talent is Another Story (qz.com)

Posted by msmash on from the other-side-of-coin dept.

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.

4 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Nonsense! by zifn4b · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

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  2. Visa Success? by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

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    1. Re:Visa Success? by fisternipply · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes. And even the guy who knows his shit will often do things on the UI side that make absolutely no sense to a westerner. Their cultural background is so different that they just don't know what's acceptable and what isn't. My company's IT support division has a group somewhere in India and it's very frustrating trying to get anything useful out of them.

  3. Re:"Resources"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Good point.

    I had a very bad experience in the past. Five people attended the meeting from India, only one person was actually working on the code. That person had a very "unique" way of coding: no testing (at all!), no documentation, no version control, just piling up the code (of course no comments in the code). The manager was out of touch, except one week before the deadline, the manager was asking people to "lose the sleep in order to meet the deadline".