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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.
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.
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.
I've noticed in my dealings with Indian shops that they usually have one guy, per project, that knows his shit, and then you have 10 people underneath him that couldn't code their way out of an if statement. Any work that those 10 people produce is mostly garbage and if it functions it seems to be mostly down to luck. Most of that group seems to code cargo-cult style, haphazardly pasting together stackoverflow posts until something close to the asked output is achieved. Once you complain enough you start to get more in touch with their lead who guides the people under him in the more right direction. Code quality is still garbage but the output is closer to what is expected. The problem that I see is that lead is usually on more than one project and you have to fight for his time. To your point I notice that the lead is usually stationed someplace in the US.
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'
Sounds similar to my experience. I've dealt with several Indian teams over my career and they ran the gamut of talent. A few were REALLY good, I often wondered why they were wasting their time working for us honestly. Most were average at best, but at least they didn't cause much if any harm. Some were freaking dangerous and shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near a computer. You'd think that these guys would be the first to get let go, but they always seemed to hang around the longest. The dumbest one I ever met turned out to be married to a higher up's daughter which explained a lot (glad to see that giving cushy jobs to idiot relatives isn't just a US thing).
The biggest issue I ran into when dealing with Indian teams is the complete lack of problem solving. If something didn't go exactly according to script, they were lost. We once lost a whole week's worth of work because the India team ran into a text prompt that wasn't 100% the same as the one in the instructions and instead of either contacting us immediately or putting two and two together and figuring out that the gist of the prompt was the same, they sat there twiddling their thumbs until the next weekly status meeting so they could ask us about it. Sadly this is a reoccurring theme with most of our Indian people.