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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 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.
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'