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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?!
If somebody called me a "resource", my professionalism would also be less than stellar.
Stephan
....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?
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.
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.