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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
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).
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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.
....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.
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.
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'
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.........
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.