There will be many more. The India IT sector’s main play was cheap labor for low value-add IT tasks like basic dev or ops. The play a while back was to move day-to-day ops jobs to this cheap labor. Now the play is to automate this work so the jobs are disappearing. E.g when you move to the cloud with good architecture you don’t need tons of people pushing buttons and tweaking servers all day long.
The India firms haven’t really moved up the value chain much and thus there’s just less work there. They put fancy marketing on the front but their main product is still cheap labor for low value IT work. While there’s certainly advanced stuff happening in India, at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore.
Indian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry
India is a huge country with a huge population and a rapidly growing economy and a domestic market. Even if it was true a decade or two ago, should we still keep assuming that anything that affects the Indian IT industry is caused solely by the outsourcing industry.
Surely HN can stop having the same conversation every time anything regarding India and IT comes up. A claim like - All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard based on my anecdotal evidence - followed by a discussion treating it as a valid argument.
> Indian IT Outsourcing Industry ⊆ Indian IT Industry
Indian IT outsourcing has been the vast majority of cash flow into the Indian IT sector, that much is undeniable. There is some actually good Indian IT talent out there and it's picking up steam, but that's not where the money is yet.
And to the western/eruropean markets, Indian IT industry == Indian IT outsourcing industry. And the Indian IT outsourcing industry has developed a very strong negative stigma which I expect will completely kill it over the next ~5 years. Does the 'real' Indian IT industry have enough cash and momentum to survive that? Maybe, I'm not sure. One thing is for certain: all the low skilled IT workers which make up 95%+ of the outsourcing industry, they're all going to be permanently out of those jobs and new jobs like that aren't coming.
And from personal experience with those low skilled indian IT workers, I think it would be a miracle if even 1% of them are able to re-skill for the real engineering work that's now in demand. Not only that, but just the fact that you're in India is a strong signal that that you're terrible, even if you're actually not. I've seen Indian IT workers with CVs 3 times the size of mine and glowing recommendations from past employers, and most of them failed fucking fizzbuzz. After you deal with a dozen people like that, you just start to subconsciously dismiss Indian candidates because chances are, they're gonna be another one of those.
tl;dr: In terms of economics, the Indian IT industry is the outsourcing industry, and that cash well is drying up fast. Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka saw the writing on the wall and bailed on a high note.
This is why blind CV screening and remote tests in hiring are crucial. We all have these biases and sometimes the candidates that pass those phases are surprising.
Remote tests put off actually good talent, they are insulted by that kind of waste of time.
As for biases, bias isn't inherently bad. Bias is critical to how neural networks operate in ML. Removing bias is to intentionally discard valuable observational data and harm your rate of success.
I've had and seen this discussion many times, but haven't actually seen that much real world evidence. We don't have people dropping out of our interview process because of our tests, and we use them from all roles from customer support to C-suite roles.
Most developers with some seniority who I speak to believe they are an important part of an effective hiring process for developers, and are humble enough to take one. That said, we don't "insult" them with fizz buzz, we have a test that takes some thinking, and allows the best candidates to show off their skills.
> I've seen Indian IT workers with CVs 3 times the size of mine and glowing recommendations from past employers, and most of them failed fucking fizzbuzz. After you deal with a dozen people like that, you just start to subconsciously dismiss Indian candidates because chances are, they're gonna be another one of those.
A model based on a training set of 12, surely encompasses all biases accurately of a population of 10s of millions.
This is how good talent views any kind of tests. I can't blame them.
There is no other professional industry in the world, where candidates with 6+ years of professional success are asked to sit a god damned test every time they apply for a job. Insulting doesn't even begin to describe the problem with this concept. Don't get me wrong, I understand where the need for testing came from, but that doesn't change the fact that actually good candidates are put off by it and tend to dismiss employers who do it.
I’ve worked as a software developer for 20+ years and have hired others many times. People lie on their resumes to an extent that is difficult to believe until you see it. Sometimes they can talk intelligently about coding in a way that can get them through a “talk about your history” interview (a good interviewer can usually pierce the lies, but a mediocre or inexperienced interviewer might come out thinking they can code).
It’s very hard to guarantee that every first-round interview includes a seasoned lie-detector. A coding exercise is an imperfect, flawed, sometimes insulting approach that’s better than the alternatives.
When done right, it can be a nice conversation about coding, algorithms, and how to collaborate. And prove that the candidate can code.
Personally, I don’t mind being interviewed with a coding exercise even though I could be many of my interviewers’ parent. I love programming and talking about programming with programmers! And it gives me a chance to interview my potential future collaborators in a setting that’s less structured than a sit-across-the-table Q&A.
In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team. By well-framed, I mean introduced in a way that’s not insulting on the face of it, like a multi-hour takehome exercise before even meeting the candidate and talking about the job and why you are interested in them as a candidate. That’s just lazy interviewing and I wouldn’t want to do that either.
> In my experience, someone who refuses or takes offense at a well-framed coding exercise is probably not going to be someone you want on your team.
In my experience those who refuse are the top of the top. We adapted our interview and intake process to accommodate these people (usually with a more stringent and goal oriented probation period), and it was the best thing we did in terms of resourcing. The people we took on through this stream ended up being by far the best performing bang for buck employees. They are opinionated and snobby, but that's a good thing, because they actually care about their respective fields enough to have strong opinions. They don't waste time with tests and coding challenges.
That really depends then on what one is hiring for. An entry level position? Mid level? Senior? or Rock Star?
Those who are opinionated and snobby, even if they are the best preforming, may not be the best fit in many environments. A not insignificant portion of a senior developer's time can be spent mentoring people - and the snobby person may not be the best choice for that.
If the goal is to hire a team of one - great. If the goal is to hire into a team of half a dozen in what would be termed an enterprise development - the refusal to take a programming test may and work with the process rather than rebel against it may act as a strong indication that the person isn't going to be a good fit.
If you're hiring for 'enterprise development' you're already outside the interest zone of actually talented developers, so that works out I guess. If you're doing 'enterprise' just pick up a bunch of guys with Agile and Cisco certificates, indian outsourcing will also do just fine.
This might be the single most arrogant comment I've ever read on HN. At least those enterprise developers perform actual engineering instead of copy pasting the newest JS framework tutorials and pushing pixels around like all the boot camp hipsters without proper CS education nowadays.
> There is no other professional industry in the world, where candidates with 6+ years of professional success are asked to sit a god damned test every time they apply for a job.
But is it because it is hard to fake knowledge in other industries or is it because it is easy to find out programmer is faking?
If there's so many programmers who can't do fizbuz, are there as many managers, doctors, lawyers, etc who can't do basic stuff despite perfect CV?
> there's so many programmers who can't do fizbuz, are there as many managers, doctors, lawyers, etc who can't do basic stuff despite perfect CV?
Yeah, there are. Plenty of garbage doctors and lawyers out there who are allowed to continue practicing.
Here's why testing for developers exists:
1: They are incredibly important to business revenue. In a modern business, if a manager underperforms, nothing much happens. If your development team underperforms, you lose millions. So you try to get the best development team you can.
2: There's no meaningful standardized testing. A Lawyer passes the bar exam, a doctor has to pass board certification, while any idiot from backwater India can call themselves a software engineer. But its important to note that neither the bar exam nor board certification tell you anything about how good that person is in their field, they just say they meet the bare minimum requirements. In the case of IT, the bare minimum requirements happen to be much lower than what most employers hope to attract, so they resort to doing testing themselves. It's not a terrible approach, but it does discourage top talent from applying.
3: Skill disparity. There aren't many '10x' lawyers or doctors or managers out there, but there are plenty of such developers. This is partially related to my 2nd point but mostly just a consequence of software engineering being a creative task rather than a learned flowchart like law and medicine. As an employer, you want to come up with some signal to find the high performers.
If insulted doesn't begin to explain it, entitled might.
I think the tests are annoying too. Still is ultimately called work for a reason, we show up to get things done that are challenging, sometimes unpleasant and often necessary.
As a developer who hires other developers, I don't place the value in testing on what a developer can code, but how quickly they can learn and how well they can solve problems and communicate - testing can help shed a light on non technical strengths or shortcomings.
A good test focuses as much on higher level analysis as coding. The majority of new developers with a few years of skills may not have developed quickly enough in this regards yet.
Do you mean the employer is entitled or the employee? I have seen low skilled employers (supermarkets) complaining about university grads. When someone should point out that they are a "jumped up grocer" and they don't get to employ firsts from Oxbridge
And turn it the other way around what if a potential employee insisted on employers doing a test.
Imaginin interviewing at uber and asking
"So MR Manger" what's the difference between a worker and an employee :-)
Or asking a series of q on the companies anti discrimination bullying discipline or grievance procedures.
The thread is about a developer's issues with being tested during interviews, so I would say the potential employee is entitled if balking about being asked about their abilities to the extent that the employer is the one signing the cheque, and a basis for the employer being able to add value in exchange for salary is still being established.
Knowing a little more than non-technical employers doesn't place an inexperienced developer in a position of expertise, only knowing a little more than the guy testing them.
If you are referring to non technical folks not being skilled at hiring for technical positions, I agree to the point that this is a common challenge where non tech people are put in charge of digital transformation, among other things.
Even highly competent and technical teams can struggle with testing incoming hires we.
An interesting idea is contemplating if tech people will be able to learn and transform business skills easier than non techs business folks might be able to learn tech. If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing. It's still a little surprising how few developers can do this in any country, so it might remain an inconvenient test and filter for a while yet.
> If this was attractive to tech folks, the hiring tests would include more business problem oriented questions than fizzing and buzzing
And yet business people don't get any tests. No one else on the entire planet gets tests for almost every role opportunity they want to explore. So why do developers have to?
Actually, I can answer that. The answer is because the overwhelming majority of a modern company's productivity is up to the performance of the developers. The business guys get away with under-performing because their underprformance is not a significant factor on the bottom line.
The commonplace testing of developers has nothing to do with ratios of good to bad developers, or the relative ease of assessing developer skill compared to other professions. It has everything to do with the fact that developers drive the lions share of modern business value so they've been singled out for shitty treatment with testing and kaggle competitions and similar garbage. I really hope to see a software engineering union rise in the next few years which cracks down on this and empowers developers to negotiate relative to their actual value in modern business.
People like you aren't needed in the world of high tech. Your role is redundant.
I'm a developer. Possibly a little more experienced from the level of ad hominem negativity you're comfortable directing at others to feel better about one's self.
A software developers union would be interesting. Accreditation from testing to be in a professional body will still have people who can hide among the work of others, but much less so. Also a challenge for a tech union would be the rapid changing nature of software development compared to other unionized industries to maintain a baseline. Not the first time it's been thought about.
Non tech positions are even harder to test for at hiring. Especially since so many hr, accounting jobs themselves are requiring increased digital transformation skills of knowing how to select and implement business systems.
Tech hiring interviews were designed largely by tech people.
The real hilarious part is seeing a non tech hr person try to buy a hr software system and implement it. Being the subject matter expert no longer means an ability implement and roll out programs as it used to - its a growing issue that requires people who can understand and work with detail.
Working with details requires an ability to care about the plight of others, organizations and their processes to prove to lower the suffering of people at the hands of their employment environments.
> I'm a developer. Possibly a little more experienced from the level of ad hominem negativity
Perhaps if you were actually more experienced, you wouldn't stoop to the ultimate irony of dismissing every point I made by attacking my tone. I stand by what I said, people like you are redundant in modern tech. I think when you tell yourself you're more experienced than me, you're conflating that with you being older and 'wiser' and less confrontational because your testosterone levels have dropped. The tech industry assigns a negative value to age and wisdom, sorry.
The funny thing is that for all your grandstanding about developer importance and productivity and what not, the only point you successfully manage to get across is that you are an obnoxious child that no one would wish to work with.
I could say the same for HR at BT we had one HR person come to present to our team meting and they did not know that the developers in BT are M&P Grades and not CWU blue collar grades.
Though I would agree that asking we have a business problem how would you solve or improve on what we do now is a much better q to ask.
Interestingly I know a few carpenters and they all have personal projects.
The analogy isn’t right because you’d need a similar carpentry task that takes 30 minutes like fizzbuzz (that should really take 5 minutes). It would be like asking a carpenter to put together their workstation from a disorganized shop. A pretty reasonable request.
Lots of people complain about this approach, but it is confusing as not a single good programmer has ever been bothered by coding screens. Who are these people who get upset? And where are their GitHub portfolios? Are there that many bullshitters who aren’t confortable enough in their skills to spend less than an hour on coding problems as part of an interview?
Is it really a 1-2 hour project? 1-2 hours is enough to set up a repository, project files, boilerplate code, and solve perhaps very simplified version of a problem. Each time I really spent 2 hours on take home assignment, the recruitment process terminates shortly after I submit the solution. It’s asking for free labor. Never ever a fully functional web application solving some problem will take 2 hours to create and those recruiting know it very well, oftentimes they’re just arrogant cunts testing for obedience.
As per slide 2, IT outsourcing still is the largest contributor to the IT industry. It is not a subset. As per this report at least. I couldn't find any other credible sources.
"All engineers/engineering effort/R&D in country X is obviously substandard"
This is obviously a very biased statement that suffers from the 'some/all' fallacy based on anecdotal evidences. Unfortunately the world works this way. What the majority sees and believes is what trumps, regardless of the truth.
Reading HN comments about the Indian IT industry triggers the Gell-Mann effect for me. Few people know what they're talking about and those that do are usually at the bottom of the thread. Of course then I open all the other comment threads and consider the comments in those threads correct and well informed.
I read the OP in a different way. In IT - as in pretty much every other field - there are many more low-level jobs than high-level ones. It's also much easier, and much less risky from a strategic point of view, to outsource the low-level ones than the high-level ones, so, most of those which were outsourced were the low-level jobs; we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs (millions?) here.
Many of those low-level jobs can be automated, while the high-level ones can't. As the cost of even low-level outsourced jobs goes up, and the cost of automation goes down, it's normal that lots of the most automated jobs get cut. Jobs of which India has a very high relative proportion, not because there aren't high-level programmers there, but because India has the strongest IT outsourcing industry in the World.
Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.
I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering.
There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
I doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that.
Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work.
I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.
Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with international clients, so I get to take calls from customers (often IT teams for large clients) from all over the globe. To use India as the chosen example, I've worked with teams that could out-engineer me on a good day, that clearly knew what they were doing. I've also worked with teams that, possibly due to language barrier issues, could barely comprehend their own code base, much less anything I was attempting to help them troubleshoot. To be quite honest though, I could remove "India" from that equation entirely, because I've worked with many US "technical contacts" that, despite speaking perfect English, lack even the most basic technical skills.
The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem.
I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.
>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.
I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
Do you have data supporting your claim. I know a lot of people who are really good and continue to work in India. Infact I have also seen a lot of good people coming back to India (since last 2 - 3 years). So things are gradually improving for good.
> at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore.
I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground.
> Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market.
Indian IT industry got shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one.
> It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent.
Pay good and you will retain talent.
> Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
Unfortunately the poor people who are usually illiterate are treated as a lower class.
The rich or upper middle class kids while growing up see that they and their parents can order the maids to do almost anything and so when the kids grow up they see the maids as a class of people who are not equal to them.
It becomes a status issue as well if you say you dont have maids then your affluent peers will think you are weird or that you cant even afford a maid.
>>And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers.
You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.
This is an important point. As a westerner living in Asia now, I'm always amused by the maid-mongering that goes on here: "Oh, do you have a maid, a driver, and servants?" These are widespread status symbols in Asia.
Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, Amazon Echo, Nest, etc etc. There is no need for full-time maids, you see.
I'm sorry if this sounds smug, but it's true. Indians reminding westerners that they have maids is something that makes us smile knowingly. Residual colonialism in the 21st century doesn't impress us.
I am not talking about enslaving or forcing someone. I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.
Excuse me - we have gadgets here and at an affordable cost too. Some people do make conscious decision to avoid automation so we can employ and help others. We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by. Western lifestyle is not a definite one as an ideal one. Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job. We got some positives too - that is what i stated.
>>I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.
You are making a virtue out of this. This is really like the British saying they ruling over us was good for us because of english, railways and parks. So they were screwing us for our own good.
Most of these maids, work on hourly basis on slave wages. And are generally treated badly. There are even spaces in Restaurants where they have to sit outside while their masters indulge in fine dining. And other times most people give away old throw worthy food to them. There is no 'help' going on here.
>>We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by.
Kirana shops near my home are shutting down like no tomorrow after GST, and a DMart opened near by. Indians are known to think through their wallets.
>>Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
There is a big difference between getting seasoned or at best indifferent to problems, than having no problems.
>>In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job.
I hope she recovers soon. Yours is a different situation and I understand, most of us(Including me) have many reasons(in my case, old parents) to not move to the west. But I imagine if I was there my life would be way better.
From an economic standpoint, this doesn't sound very uplifting. Any full time servant you hire is probably going to have less social mobility than you, and less education. And they are necessarily going to earn a fraction of your wages.
Employing someone full time to clean and maintain house isn't really uplifting anyone in a societal sense. Option 1: 30 families eschew automation and hire a full-time maid. Option 2: 30 families own a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher and hire a cleaner once every other week for 3 hours to maintain their house. The latter is what happens in western communities and it results in 29 more productive workers looking for gainful employment in the workforce. If you don't see why that is an uplifting thing for society, you should take a good hard look at your understanding of economics.
As for your anecdote of the family member with cancer, house nurses are indeed common and affordable in western societies, we generally call this service "hospice." And while I may not employ a cook, there are 150 restaurants in my city that will deliver meals to my doorstep within 30 minutes.
fjsolwmv: Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.
Of course they do, but not nearly to the same extent. And the point here is that in the context of this thread, using maids as a mark on the Indian lifestyle-superiority index in the shadow of IT layoffs is not a good look.
In general not though. They have maids because they need them, not as a status symbol. And it is largely for the fairly wealthy and not something generally aspired to (in and of itself).
In fact, a lot of people will instantly regard those with maids as "probably assholes" in the US.
Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.
Engineering can certainly be done outside. However, there is a real risk in having the core business competency and value be outsourced rather than something built up with employees at the company with an interest in the company's success rather than looking at it as just the next project.
The distinction here is between captive development centers vs outsourced IT services. The latter has previously had more jobs and is experienced more layoffs now. The former is likely still a growth industry.
I've had amazing outside outsourced engineering done both in India and Eastern Europe. In the case of India, it was with a specialty firm. The big job shops, be they in India, Philippines, etc. have a limited life cycle as outsourcing for basically "crud" apps goes by the wayside.
There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.
I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot.
>> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside.
I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!!
>> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?
I've found the quality of the "real engineering" in this scenario is much more variable than when using local talent (of any nationality, including Indian). I've worked with very high quality India-based "real engineering" groups and very low quality ones. It seems to me the latter dominate. I haven't seen the same variance in skill hiring from local talent originally from India.
Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.
Overall, I've seen more full stack skills, polyglots, and a willingness to tailor design and stacks to the problem. Companies want an FTE or two that replaces an entire off shore team and we accommodate to avoid off shoring.
We've adapted as a community to have a skillset and evangelize stacks that at minimum compliments off shore if not replaces them.
Simply put, after all the basic Dev and ops jobs left, we moved up the value chain.
It's a cycle and the off shoring firms will move up the value chain and US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science, etc. Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers. Furthermore, off shoring firms will likely be content to provide the cheaper, lower level rungs of the value chain.
For the first two, that's probably a better way to put it. Breadth and T-shaped skill sets are all the rage.
For the last bit, I tried to hint at that in my original comment. People who achieve that breadth outside the US can normally negotiate directly with employers in the US. This can give them more money and gives the company a more stable resource. The bulk hires from Infosys, Tata, etc. don't have this luxury.
For US employees, there's both the drive to keep ahead of offshoring and the fact that so many US employers will invest in their employees. This class of offshoring companies that are suffering don't do that.
Which is another point: These are not intended to be generalizations of all offshore teams and offshoring companies. The more breadth and automation an offshore company leverages, the more resilient they are.
I don't doubt that Infosys and Tata will survive, but the sheer scale of their employment numbers is going to take a permanent hit and stateside devs are again going to need to become even more jack-of-all-trades with more than one specialization to stay ahead.
I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.
Very fair argument. Let's dissect the argument, engineering firms have improved their soft skills and value proposition. Assuming these firms are US based and all american, then by going popular wisdom here, how can american firms possibly have poor soft skills than Indian firms! I'm sure there were many instances when quality received from Indian firms were abysmal. However, imo, it's sort of online propaganda-ish that Indian firms are terrible choice, compared to american vendors. Pick and choose your best anecdote. I recall, months back, there was some incident at BA(british airways, I suppose) and whole incident was spinned as Indian contractors in India messed up. Later, VP of the company, clarified that mistakes were made locally(read UK). I feel hatred rather than facts, largely dominate HN, Reddit opinion.
There are many bargain basement contracting shops in the US too. Find half a dozen just graduated students who decide they're going to go freelance rather than going corporate - and you've got a contracting shop that is making web pages for the local stores or an access ERP-ish for the local business or someone who thinks that they can do the account management for their doctor's office.
And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering.
My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...).
When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours.
Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it).
Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks.
Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools.
Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)).
For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time.
The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper.
The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.
This is wrong in so many ways. Indian engineering is many things just like in the US or Europe and you can get world class IT specialists in India. If anything, the existense of the IT outsourcing industry in India has helped establishing a growing educated middle class which is the prerequisite for one day being able to churn out even more world class engineers.
Yeah. Automation makes many webdev jobs redundant.
Let's say you have a restaurant or something. Before, you had to hire somebody to host/design your website. Now, Google/SquareSpace/Wix will do that for you. A lot of these sites also have payment options built in.
Sure, those sites you make automatically won't be so flashy as a personalized one. But, realistically, if you're a business, what you need is the location, hours, maybe a picture, and a list of what you're selling. That's something all these automated website generators provide.
Who cares? There's a difference between "really good" (spendy) and "good enough" (free). If you're a small business, you don't really need SEO. You just need to provide information to your customers.
You can of course pay for SEO, but that's my whole point. At some point, you're not willing to pay $50(USD) an hour to get the last few percent of profit, especially if your gross income is fairly small.
I think for all three, the basic SEO stuff is actually taken care of for you as well. I had zero interest in the services until I read that it meant I wouldn't have to consult yet another seo guide written within the last six months because I wanted to stand up something new.
Yes but for local businesses you also have to manage your product listings and your local listings with those $50 sites actually use the correct markup for local seo and is your browse structure optimised or even crawlable?
Yes - there's a difference between doing it yourself through the GUI for free because of website management tools and paying somebody 50 dollars an hour to hand modify forms and HTML for you.
Also, I believe unless you set the robots.txt file, most sites are crawlable, and SEO, like I said, is not really important for smaller businesses. Mostly they are existing customers who want to find out hours of operation and maybe any daily specials you might have, not somebody who stumbles across your site organically.
ROTFL sorry no I have worked on major sites and even if you use straight html you can screw-up your crawlability and using the latest trendy JavaScript frame works makes it a lot worse.
One major UK site made a simple mistake with the canonical tag on one of 12 websites cost them over £500,000 in lost traffic in lest than a week.
As I pointed out, crawlability and discovery isn't really important for "Mike's hoagie shop."
If you start making a lot of money, you'll have enough to hire high priced consultants. If you're just starting up and concentrating on your actual busines, not IT, you shouldn't be worried about the best web framework.
Also, for businesses just starting up, you just need simple HTML. The only information you need to expose are hours of operation, address, and a list of services/goods with prices. Everything else can come later, when you're getting enough business to justify it.
My main point is that small webdevs are going to start getting starved for work. They're getting replaced by generated HTML which do a good enough job for free.
You can partially thank failing Russian economy and depreciating rouble.
Indian outsourcing firms were not that cheap to begin with. Their target market were companies that will choose to outsource even when net monetary benefit does not exceed say 15%.
Now Russian outsourcing companies pop here and there, billing US companies not 85% of the US market rate, but 50% or less.
This was true about 10 years ago. But these days I find indian teams are equally as talented as Silicon Valley.
There was lot of fluff that was hired during those outsourcing boom years and obviously they need to let go off the less talented but it’s not right to color everybody with the same brush.
This might be true for some teams, but in general the IT market in India probably has a similar skill distribution to the IT market in the US; such that the top 15% of the market is the most talented, and the rest is by definition less so. In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley, so if you consider India as a whole, it will not be as talented on average as Silicon Valley.
As with any anecdotal evidence, people have widely varying experiences. When I was working as a freelance web developer (2010-2014) at mid-market firms, I had universally bad experiences with Indian teams.
>In the US, the top 15% of the market is in Silicon Valley
Wait. What? Sure, there's a concentration of talent in SV, but to simply say that the top 15% of all U.S. IT talent is there is pretty myopic.
I get your point overall (though I am not saying I agree). But, had to point out that you tossed out your belief as a "stat", as if it were some well-established fact.
Likewise, with your (admittedly) anecdotal observations on Indian teams. Pretty broad generalizations you seem to operate on.
We're entitled to our opinions, but what's ironic is that a worldview that rests on sweeping generalizations about groups of people is actually self-limiting.
I simply see this as fruits of cheaply and easily accessible internet and affordable Laptops. Bulk of the tech there is, is open source and you can learn anything from any corner of the world.
If you are in a competitive economic space, you will even have sufficient motivation to learn.
Not to mention if your only competitive advantage is price, there always is or will be a source of labor that is cheaper than you. For example, a number of startups I work with are now moving their IT support and basic dev to the Philippines. The quality of work is equally bad or worse, but it's even cheaper than India and the language barrier is comparable.
I noticed a lot of outsourcing work is going to Ukraine and Belarus. India got a head start because of English language but right now many devolopers in Eastern Europe speak fluent English as well.
I don't think Ukraine is catching up to India, it's just different work. In my experience, the typical job going to Ukraine is a different breed. If you can deal with the time zone and language barrier, they have a weirdly large supply of very competent developers.
In fact, C++ devs from that region are the secret sauce to a lot of large codebases I've seen.
It's very far from "poor" when IT industry is concerned :).
While pay rate is obviously lower vs US it's higher or on par with most EU countries. So for say Senior Java Dev (the pay is much more dependent on a stack vs US) making 66K - 72K which would be about half of what same person would be making in US (outside of SV), but tax rate will be around 3% vs 30% and cost of living is a fraction of what it is in US. When I was living in Ukraine my disposable income was like most of my salary vs in US it's a small fraction of my salary.
Parent is still in an inflated labor bubble. In most of the US outside of the major cities it can be a struggle for experienced engineers to break 80K. I had to walk away from a lot of hideously low priced opportunities when I lived in the mid-west.
I'd say very little of that work is for startups it's more for large financial companies, large established software companies, telecoms, hollywood etc.
Even in my limited consulting experience, it's not uncommon at all for a sizable org to have a small team in Ukraine.
A couple of times, even though that team does not have an officially important role, you would see stalls on major decisions until the remote team had a chance to weigh in.
This is what I chose, but there are some tradeoffs: there was a biomedical engineering in Cincinnati, OH company who recruited me that I interviewed with that wanted to hire me (and I was very interested in the work seeing as it was stuff that I did but in another field), but they wanted me work onsite…
After a couple of more years working remote, I may just go work for another lab again because its not too hard to find very interesting work, but the pay sucks (for non-degreed folks).
I looked at Amsterdam as they had/have some nice tax incentives for expats. And as I had the max no of years in the UK state pension I could built up a Dutch pension as well.
Holland also has Mortgage interest relief so you could rent your UK property out and buy a property in Holland with some nice tax breaks
I know that of the people that I know who moved to Germany everyone is making about the same as they were at home (which is obviously anecdotal evidence). I have no doubt there are some jobs that pay more at the same time I know people making that kind of money or more in Kiev but it's fairly rare.
It is actually a €120K position - the only company in Berlin paying that amount, with very alarming reviews on Glassdoor - Thinkcell. So the recruiter was trying to low bail you.
I have a cousin who has a small SaaS business out of Belarus, and he says the top end of what he pays his devs there is $500, which is quite a bit lower than the numbers you're quoting here.
This is relevant to Ukraine in what way? I have unbelievably huge doubt that a Senior Java Developer with fluent English is making 500 in Belarus. Wargaming is Belarus company and they pay 50K in Kiev for Senior Python Developers and have a large office there. First random article on the subject http://goaleurope.com/2016/09/26/15960-software-developers-s...
EPAM generally quotes lower salaries vs what they actually pay as they think it helps set expectations in the market.
My guess this is due to the remnants of the good soviet math/science program in schools and universities. Which was originally heavily influenced by Kolmogorov by the way.
There is a good number of product companies that have large offices there (Magento, Samsung, GitLab, Wargaming, Grammarly, Ubisoft and a ton more) plus large outsourcing companies pay well and are generally working on large scale serious products
Magento is a wordpress plugin, or similar enough. Hardly a large company.
Samsung is a big hardware company, I'm not sure what they would have in software job but why not.
GitLab is a fully remote company, they don't recruit anywhere specifically. Their full disclosure on their (low) salaries and losing customer data is certainly driving away the senior folks I know.
Game companies are the shithole of the industry, the worst conditions and pays, worse than Indian sweet shops and failed SV startups. There is no sane job or career to be made there.
Back to the point. You're going to work in a consulting shop, soon enough.
I am not sure I follow :) the logic. This is a random list of product companies that I remember it's a small fraction of companies with large dev. offices in Ukraine. GitLab was a Ukrainian startup and has a large number of developers in Ukraine. Samsung had about 700 developers as far I remember.
The compensation trends have very low correlation to how things are in US. The largest local $ making companies are mainly gambling, crypto and porn but they are not very public although many of them a really huge.
I mean that good developers will migrate toward local companies that have good work conditions, good money, good projects, and good co workers.
The companies you quote are not better than a middle grade outsourcing company in these regards, so they're not stealing their talents. If they are the best companies you could think of, that explains why you can find decent developers in the local outsourcing firms.
Well the above to one extent or the other have all of the above but outsourcing companies are on par as far as perks. I am working for fairly large public US company and all of the above mentioned have nicer offices and more perks :). The reason I mentioned these is because they are to some extent well known.
Exactly you can see that in the eu the former WP countries with poor economies - causes a massive brain drain. I seem to recall seeing a quote that one of the Baltic stats some huge % f hat years graduates where working abroad.
The country, as a part of USSR, used to have an accent on industry development. Its higher education used to be free, and largely remains so. In 1990s, it turned very poor, and is still far from average European level. Hence a generation of very advanced developers asking rather moderate money. I hope it will not last, because the level of consumption and wages will rise :)
If they had a weirdly large supply you can be guaranteed an army of recruiters from FB, Amazon, Google et al would be lining up at campuses the way they do in India.
The only limitation these firms face in growing faster is getting their hands on talent.
Bullshit. Tech companies are not competing for worldwide talents. The companies you quote have at most 3 offices in Europe: London, Zurich, Dublin. The first thing a recruiter will tell you is to abandon your life and your family.
Google has offices in almost every countries but they are administrative offices with almost no employees. If you're a tech worker, you can only be in one of the very few tech locations.
They do have tech workers in multiple locations in Germany. At least one of them is almost only tech, but small.
But you are right, that those are not big major tech offices like the three mentioned. So most engineers in Europe would still be working out of London, Zurich or Dublin.
And also leaving your language, your currency, your bank, your culture, the entertainment you know (movies, culture, songs), the shops and brands you are used to...
I've worked with Belarusian developers and they were top notch. Belarus is very close with Russia and is considered the last dictatorship in Europe, so weigh that with a decision.
Having said that, the old Soviet / Eastern Bloc countries are very sharp. They were of course on the other side of the Cold War, which is what birthed most of our modern technology.
I don't know if this is still the case but the Eastern Bloc developers I have met years ago were all super strong in math and other science fundamentals. Very impressive.
I've had opposite experience. In my case, they were sharp but they were also toxic to be working in a team. So, we had to move our R&D centre to Poland.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I suspect they tend to be very headstrong and don't have a problem telling you that you are wrong with vigor. Then are willing to argue the point for an hour or two.
If you are not accustomed to it, it can be a shock, but it certainly can lead to finding the best solution.
Actually in Philippines pretty much everyone speaks a quite understandable English compared to the average Indian that thinks to be speaking a perfect English while the reality is quite different.
Maybe so, and many Americans aren't understandable to me as an Indian. I just wanted to point out that not being understandable is a statement about the person making it as much as it is about the people it's ostensibly about. Indians, in this case,
I grew up in a weird household, with half my family with strong Irish accents and the other with strong NYC accents. When I moved away from New York, almost nobody could understand me at all for a few weeks. A few teachers thought I was a non-native speaker.
I see a large number of bright Indian developers now staying back in country because its almost impossible to get H1B visas (that was actually the case even without Trump and now its getting much worse). This has started interesting trends in India. All of the sudden, now there is VC culture shaping up and I'm seeing lots of Indian developers doing their own startups. Indian newspapers frequently are putting spotlights on these young trailblazers and writing stories of their struggle and triumphs. There are startup events, meet ups and conferences going on virtually every week somewhere. And in fairly short amount of time, India has racked up some huge successes like Ola, Gaana, Oyo, Flipkart with stories to match with their SV counterparts. This scene is very different from what I had known 5-10 years ago where India held massive number of IT professionals but top 10% of talent pool kept getting drained out of the country. Despite having largest number of IT professionals, country was without its top talents and consequently without any products and startup vision. The scarcity of H1B visa had been magical for Indian startup scene and if this trend continues, US software dominance should have contender in future.
As an Indian CSE student, I agree with this. But there's more. The downfall of IT industry, and general decrease in need of IT engineers, is finally decreasing the amount of students joining engineering.
Admissions on avg are 50% of capacity, with many colleges having less 30%. This will lead to closure of many sub-par quality colleges, which I hope will improve overall quality of Indian IT engineers.
There are still plenty of H1Bs in tech in the US. It is true though that applications from India are very hard now, but that’s mostly because there was a lot of fraud and corruption in that space with Indian outsourcing firms up to no good. When you consider that the excess scrutiny is more than justified.
As for higher end work being done in India, I don’t think anyone doubts there are highly skilled people in India or that there are examples of successful startups, but that’s not where the Indian economy is in regards to tech (hence why the jobs are shrinking). The question is if the Indian tech economy can shift its export product away from low value-add work and that’s a very hard move to make—both because, today, the momentum is in the wrong direction and western firms have had very bad experiences with Indian outsourcing and thus even if they do outsource higher-end work it will likely go to other more up and coming countries in tech.
Your narrative has some flaws. Startup events have been happening in India since past 10 years or so. Ever since Google won the war with Microsoft.
Flipkart was founded in 2007. Ola soon after. This H1B visa issue is more of past 2-3 year issue. Admittedly it will have some impact. But definitely not the narrative you paint.
Thanks for that link, I didn't know that. But in any case, my point is not that H1B can't be an issue for any case. But that Startups scene in India got a boost around 2005-2007, when many companies started, and it was nothing to do with the H1B visa issue. Some failed as well. Guruji the Indian search engine.
H1b visa issue is extreme for immigrants from India, and the rules over the last 15-20 years are to be blamed. Trump administration is only making it worse (for immigrants and crooked employers) by plugging every loop hole and interpreting the laws to the strictest extent.
The last 2-3 years it feels like its become extreme because:
1) Too much noise in media about new POTUS being hard on immigrants
2) A rising US economy means more demand for engineers. So there's more need of engineers, H1b or not. Hence more companies are getting effected by lack of access to such talent.
At the risk of being downvoted until my comment is dead like below, I have to say I agree with muninn_. This is a great thing for India, and it's really unfortunate that the US has been poaching academic and technical talent to their own advantage, and the disadvantage of less well off countries for so long. The brain drain of the US (and the UK and Germany to a much smaller extent) is a real phenomena, and it's especially damaging for developing countries.
It's not like Indian developers are being kidnapped and shipped over on a boat to the U.S. Everyone who comes to the U.S. does so on their own volition, jumping through crazy immigration hoops. It's a free market for jobs, and if in the past Indian (or for that matter Chinese and other countries with a brain drain) companies couldn't complete, well that's their own fault.
Your position seems to be based in an assumption that the issue is competitiveness alone. Another factor is Indian companies like wipro and reliance are buying operations outright in North America.
The ship and kidnapping reference to slavery is in poor taste, It might be easier to get your point across and help people be more open to exploring your perspective if you weren't so easy and loose with colloquialisms that are rooted in something that likely doesn't represent you.
I'll add that the threat of H1Bs have been used as a threatening tool to US employees by US companies.[0] Can't work longer hours for less pay? Reasonably expect your wages to increase with each year? Fine! We'll hire someone from outside.
And generally, when someone takes a criminally low level of pay for their high skill labor, all workers, domestic and international, suffer.
[0] This is the other side of the coin, career American engineers being fired and "forced"(for their severance) to train cheaper Replacements https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
And Disney is just one example - tons of US companies "clean house" when they get frustrated at a high operating budget.
I hope such hardball tactics will set up those companies to fail at their digital transformation they are undertaking anyways.
All labor, skilled or not, local or not, deserve basic dignity and respect.
The reality sadly is some groups have to work much harder for much less and it is leveraged against not only them, but other groups too.
Seeing freelancer rates worldwide slowly creep up may be a significant of things to come. The cheaper labor is getting g more specialized and expensive.
It has been surprising me how much easier it has been to find remote talent solely on mutually being developers and starting with a foundation of respect (and clear specs). Communicating and working together well is needed especially for remote work.
The problem is that the US has capita available that other countries simply don't. If we follow this trend to it's extreme conclusion we end with a world where one country has all the capital and imports every smart, skilled, or otherwise top percentage person in terms of economic value, to the detriment of the entire rest of the world.
Other countries can obviously incentivize people and startups like the US does, and that may slowly close the culture gap, but the US is already way ahead in capital. It's also hard to justify incentivizing an industry which already makes more than most of a country does via capital injection. When half the country is food insecure, the 2-10th percentile of the country getting handed government money doesn't go over well, anywhere.
Its not a free market for Indian developers coming to US on H1b. Its just high paying shackled visa.
As someone who worked for a long time on H1b (at startups in US), I realized only later how shackled I was compared to even high skilled immigrants from other countries!
I think with tighter immigration restrictions in US and EU, its been amazing to see many product companies popping up in India (instead of just the IT services industry).
US is sitting on a golden egg (of H1b engineers in US). If US makes it difficult for Indian immigrants, sure the immigrants will lose in the short term, but long term it is good for Indian and Indians.
When I went to college in North Dakota, there was a similar feeling with kids from North Dakota getting technical degrees (computer science, engineering, medical) and then moving to Minnesota and getting jobs there as opposed to keeping that knowledge in state.
There was a real push to try and keep these people from moving to Minnesota. At the time, my three best friends and teammates were all from various parts of rural North Dakota. All ended up with engineering degrees. All said the same thing, "Why would I stay here and get paid $40K when I have a masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, when I can take a job in Minnesota and make $80K?"
this works for every level in India. People from villages move to nearby big towns, cities. and from there to state capitals or tech/business/finance hubs. If ND has no thriving tech ecosystem, whats the point staying there?
I concur. I feel that these H1B restrictions will help India in the long run. Instead of doing some mediocre coding job in the U.S., the same people can stay in India and change the face of the country.
I had also heard that many companies were moving contracts out of India due to the inevitable rise in cost and the existence of other regions willing to work for less. I've no clue how prevalent that is, though. It makes sense and should have been expected. Once a region handles anything (IT, manufacturing, whatever) for awhile, they get more experienced and skilled and start demanding higher rates, so if the low cost was the attraction in the first place, they eventually price themselves out. It is good to hear that India is responding in the right way, by forging their own path rather than relying upon contracts from foreign business. I look forward to see what develops personally (as a US developer)!
It'll probably get worse for a lot of people. I work in the public sector, in a municipality. Our IT department has been relatively big on the server side, utilizing consultants ever so often to ensure best practices.
To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're heading into the cloud. It's quite obvious to be frank, but without on premise servers we don't as many need techs to run our setup, and we'll probably need a lot less consultants as well as Microsoft offers this as part of the Azure package.
Financially it'll save us around 16 million Danish annually, which is roughly 32 jobs, and that's just operations.
In development things are changing as well. When we did our first webpage it was a huge project, involving a lot of developers. The most recent one didn't require a single developer because we used a standard product that one of our designers happened to know.
Not that it's all bad. We're looking for people who do blockchain, machine learning and big data, as well as project-managers who understand both digitization and business. Of course these requirements will pose a significant challenge for a huge part of the "traditional" IT workforce, which unfortunately isn't very business savvy or mathematical. I mean, parts of it is certainly very good at math, but typically not the people we can afford in public IT.
It doesn't yet, and by large I suspect it won't for the foreseeable future. We're doing proof of concept works on things like public records, task registration for legal oversight, landownership and such.
There is a company who've build an organizational component on blockchain tech. This may seem odd to a lot of people, but we're required by law to keep a bi-temporarily record of how our organization looked and who held responsibility for what areas and cases. So far he only option has been an old mainframe system, and it doesn't integrate too well with other components such as the pay-system. I'm not sure if blockchain will carry this responsibility, a lot of other companies are struggling to meet our demand on non-blockchain and it's an extremely hard market to enter, but the blockchain based solution came first, and is currently the only option, do who knows.
All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.
If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.
Also, as of 2015 the Chinese had 60,000 dedicated cyber security engineers. This year the US I think has 9,000, maybe less, and they can’t even protect the US, much less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).
Ops people are so important.
NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.
China has one cyber security engineer per 22k Chinese and United States has one per 35k Americans. To match China we need to increase our amount of engineers by about 60%, or increase the effectiveness of an engineer by about 37%.
and what exactly are these "cyber security engineers" doing in china or is this just a fancy title for those monitoring the take from china's surveillance state
> All of those operations people should be immediately trained in cybersecurity and deployed literally anywhere in the country.
As someone with background in "cybersecurity". Most "cybersecurity" is automated now. Also, you need heavy background in math/computer science and programming background for cybersecurity. Something most Operations/IT people do not have.
> If you’ve seen the latest password dumps and how bad they are, cybersecurity is getting worse if anything.
That really has nothing to do with "cybersecurity". It's just operations "best practices".
> Also, as of 2015 the Chinese had 60,000 dedicated cyber security engineers. This year the US I think has 9,000, maybe less, and they can’t even protect the US, much less the rest of the world (unlike the globally deployed US Navy).
It depends on what a "cyber security engineer" is.
> Ops people are so important.
Sure. But it's also a highly automatable position too.
> NOTE: I actually am an AWS Engineer and I like moving to the cloud, but still.
AWS engineer? Do you mean you work for amazon or you work for a company that uses AWS?
I am not sure throwing more people at the problem will help. Developers need to stop making rookie mistakes. Parameterize all queries, question input coming from the client. Pretty much every major data leak was the result of someone doing something stupid like setting the permissioning to public on a repository rather than not being staffed to do it right.
I am afraid this is just more lipstick on the pig of a fundamental problem of the industry: the combination of 1) anyone can call himself a programmer and incompetence is widespread and 2) every company trying to maximize the data collection in the hope that will be valuable.
When you talk about the cloud, do you mean SAAS, PAAS, or IAAS? I'm asking because we looked into moving our infrastructure to the cloud and the numbers just didn't add up. We've started to move some application to SAAS but most of the stuff just doesn't make sense to move to the cloud.
SAAS and parts IAAS. We've already moved our operations to a "private" cloud we run on servers we rent, but we're positioning ourselves to go full scale Azure.
Business case wise it doesn't make sense to move just to go cloud. When we moved into the rented cloud we did it instead of replacing our old servers that were end of life. This meant we saved money over all because buying and running your own hardware is expensive.
Similarly it wouldn't make sense to move our SQL cluster into Azure just for the heck of it. However when our SQL server license is up for renewal, the move to the cloud will be the best financial option.
In development the story is a tad different. Our operations wizards can't do everything that our developers (both our own but also on open scourge components) require. We're almost 100% Microsoft in operations, but we run 370 different systems and some of these run in Linux, php, nodes, python and so on. By utilizing the cloud, we won't need a certified red hat guy on premise because Microsoft (or Amazon) will handle things like patch management and security updates. Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, but it gives us much more freedom to chose and build the applications to support our primary business of meeting the needs of our employees and citizens.
> Or in other words, it's more expensive to run our applications on a SAAS platform than on our own servers, ...
But isn't this just because the initial up front investment for your existing on prem infrastructure has already been spent, and that they are unlikely to all reach eol at the same time? Over time, won't the cost savings of the cloud model make up for the on prem write-off plus the costs of re architecture-ing for cloud? What sort of workloads do you never see moving to IaaS, where the costs of rearchitecturing are just too high? Any opinion on the new VMW on AWS offering, it's pricing, etc?
You do all of the above. First you go to O365. Then you put your AD and ADFS in the cloud as a DR. Then you target other things where DR is useful.
After that, you opportunistically move stuff as it makes sense. Then squeeze every provider of software and services, and pick off the stragglers by moving to cloud/SaaS.
>To be honest I'm not an operations guy, and never have been, but I do work in management and my good friend who heads the IT department is struggling to find new roles for the operations people as we're heading into the cloud.
He ought to look at more security based roles to fill that gap, unless that's a separate department for you guys.
Wow, I'm very interested to read more from you. A lot of what you say seems to be the same in many companies I know. Do you write a blog or have considered it?
There is often a significant amount of data flowing around in the public sector. When there is a constant baseline of a task to be done for the foreseeable future, it is often less expensive to fill that with a FTE rather than a contractor or consultant.
Things from the city jail management (transferring to state or federal when appropriate - or to the hospital and back - or to the court and back, etc...), payroll (and staffing management), data mining, managing assments of property, scheduling housing or business inspectors, budget forecasting based on weather models, keeping track of all the permits and where they are in the process...
There is lots of places where information technology has a role. Not necessarily high tech, but rather managing the information that is flowing through the system to make sure that the proper data goes to the proper places.
Its not going to be glamorous, but it sure beats paper and excel spreadsheets in email.
While big consulting shops may be brought in from time to time to do a project - the role of integration that software with the existing systems often falls to a FTE employed by the city, state, or whatever. Keeping that institutional knowledge about how things work is often priceless (well, you can put a price on it - how long does it take to figure out the system that Stan left behind... and if that's a consultant doing that, how much are they billing you for that discovery work?). In many public sector shops, the preserved institutional knowledge that a team may have can easily run into the collective century or more. That is a lot of understanding of how things work that can't be effectively outsourced.
Big cities have all sorts of IT needs. And they employ a lot of contractors. Firms like IBM and Palantir make a lot of money contracting for government IT contracts...
Some cities even have their own networking team, as running their own fiber plant and all that entails (traffic lights and other devices that need comms) is usually cheaper than renting out copper or fiber from your local telco.
I'd be extremely surprised if that were true. Cities like to do this sort of thing because it expands headcount but I doubt it makes sense financially if you account for all costs.
> Chicago has about 2900 traffic signals throughout the city. About 470 of these signals are interconnected through a fiber-network that facilitates the centralized monitoring and control of signal operations. Whether interconnected or not-interconnected, the signals are programmed to synchronize with signals immediately around it so that vehicles will pass through the intersections most efficiently. New signals are added and old signals are modernized every year depending on the need and availability of funds. While OEMC/Traffic Management Authority is responsible for maintaining the signal coordination and timing, Division of Electricity at CDOT is responsible for the maintenance of the signals and CDOT is responsible for the physical design, construction, and timing of signals.
It appears that the City of Chicago maintains their own. As noted there, that is maintained by the division of electricity ( https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/cdot/provdrs/tra... ), which also maintains all street lights and signs. When one gets to a point where the municipality knows that there will always be work for some number of people - its cheaper to hire those people permanently than contract it out. This also provides a better SLA for the city (tax payers get rather annoyed if the street light is out and the response from City Hall is "we told the contractor about it, but they haven't responded yet - its the holidays.")
we're a small managed private+public cloud services provider and we only have 2 full time operations engineers to support 30+ client companies. we also have a handful of consultants that do specialized work, working a handful of hours each month. they seem to be serving a small cluster of customers each also.
we could support 40, our existing 2 engineers are basically under-worked - we have 2 because it would be insanely irresponsible to have just 1, aside from company ownership (which is able to do the work also, if needed). if we absolutely had to, we could cut that down to 1 full time guy. let that sink in; 1 full time guy to manage 40 customers.
having said that, we're still growing as a business, because we've embraced the new reality, but it hasn't been without turnover and pain. we're also putting money into developing products.
the kicker is, even with the R+D, we're more profitable now than 5 years ago, with LESS ops folks (ostensibly less people to do the actual work, though we all know that's not what's really happening). i imagine the same exact thing is playing out with larger in-house staff, as you describe.
this is the new model. WAY more output from less but higher paid full time people, small networks of high-$ specialized consultants, and smaller firms and IT groups working in mercenary fashion. embrace it, or you will bleed yourself dry in less time than you think.
> More than two-thirds of the candidates from the top 100 universities in the country were able to write “compilable code,” or that which does not throw errors when compiled into machine-readable code.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean? Most devs make typos or errors when writing new code at some point; the compiler spits out the reason (or your IDE helpfully points it out), you go back and fix it.
> One reason for the poor performance is the dearth of good instructors as well as misaligned college curriculums. “The school curriculum focusing on MS-Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc., rather teaching programming using elementary languages such as Basic and Logo is also the culprit,” said Varun Aggarwal, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Aspiring Minds.
What is said is partially true. The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends. However Basic and Logo or Excel is not true. I graduated in 2004 and Java was the most prominent language we used, followed by C++ and then C. All of these are very relevant even today.
However it was upto the students to explore more outside of what is taught in the curriculum. Even if you are not willing to actually learn programming you can still get good enough marks in both theory and practical exams. We had four practical projects but most of the projects were widely "purchased" from ready-made shops instead of the students doing it themselves, and the instructors were not competent enough to figure out if the projects are copied or self-made.
What should be taught in modern day schools should be Assembly (to get the basics), C/C++, ML/AI, Java, Algorithms and Data structures (Can't stress this enough - even a full year can be dedicated for this) and have at least one project each semester and have all projects scrutinised by external faculties.
>>The curriculum wont get updated soon enough to catch up with industry trends.
No instituition. Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books every time something the equivalent of React or Angular JS comes along.
You generally teach the base skills from which much can be learned and grown.
Also I don't understand this thing about asking colleges to train people in the latest tech that is out there.
In almost all cases I have seen, you are way better off hiring good generalists than one trick ponies.
> Not even in the US or any part of the world, will rewrite their syllabus and text books
The situation is different in India.. Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops. Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India. Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
Did I mention Angular or React? I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of. React and Angular are just libraries and any one can learn them if they have solid programming base.
But ML/AI is a very different beast as they require you to have good solid understanding of mathematics, statistics, probability theorem etc, which is difficult to acquire outside without spending considerable amount of time.
>>Our schools, though are called the same name as institutions in US, are basically skill training workshops.
All schools/colleges are that way. Unless you join a PhD program. Also in the west, emphasis on taking skill based courses is high. They even have a term for the other type of courses, they call it, Underwater basket weaving.
>>Last time I checked there are 100000 graduates coming out of school in each state, and there would be at least a million engineering graduates produced every year throughout whole of India.
Thanks to our population numbers. And why is this wrong. STEM education makes a person think, at-least, comparatively, more rationally than other courses do.
>>Remember there are no strict rules and things have to change with the changing world. India needs to think different than the rest of the world.
India is already doing enough. But at our scale everything breaks.
>>I mentioned ML/AI, and latest Data structures which is 100% relevant for any recent graduate to learn or at least be aware of.
Why only ML/AI? Because they are in demand now? A few days back it was Hadoop etc. Before that Java...
NO only that, but because it can be the new IT. Java, Hadoop etc are only languages and frameworks, that had at most a life span of a decade. But ML/AI is a whole new world. If things are going to be progressing in the current pace, then ML/AI could have a big impact on the world as the personal computers did and can be the next big thing of this century.
All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect. There could be serious job losses all over the world. And with the biggest of population in the whole world, India would be the worst affected.. It is best for any country's interest to progress in AI so that they could have a say in future policy related to AI, not to mention getting more jobs related to that field.
Few of the several fields that could be affected by a combination of AI/Robots/Automation that I could think of ->
> Manufacturing / Factory workers
> Defence personnel
> Agriculture
> Auto drivers (Taxi, Truck, Rail, Ship whatsoever)
> Teaching (Virtual teaching)
> Construction (Ready-made materials combined with smart machines)
> Medical professionals (X-Ray diagnostics etc)
> Doctors (though far-stretched but could be possible)
Why now? No body have solid answers when or will this happen, but if you look closely it's been only couple of years that machines got the ability to beat humans in at least few tasks we figured would require advanced intelligence, including accurate visual/speech recognition. That coupled with smart robots, and automation could replace a large percentage of existing jobs. Self-driving cars are a proof of this. This is little scary, but not alarming if there are proper policies in place. Any country need to be in the forefront of this technology or else can get sidelined really quickly.
For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it. The real math behind all this stuff is quite old. There are already courses available to do that. Indian statistical institute offers beginner to advanced courses in statistics which you can take, they have been available for decades now.
Anything that you will likely do with ML/AI will likely involve using a framework today.
>>All this automation and job loss that the original article saying would be nothing if AI comes into full effect.
We don't even know if that kind of AGI is possible, let alone achieving it anytime soon.
Heck we haven't even come close to defining what AGI is.
>>For almost all programmers who will eventually work with this thing, they will mostly use some frameworks to do it.
Frameworks only provide part of it. In the case of AI, they just provide a general way to represent neural networks. Each use case need a different type of network with hundreds of parameters fine tuned and trained. Of course you can download pre-built algorithms and model zoos, but they are at best couple of years old.
Also do you think that the best things will be available under a framework? There are open source frameworks (like Tensorflow), but you will be surprised at the amount of research under progress and what portion of it is available for public. For e.g. look at the amount of work that China is doing in the field (And available for public scrutiny) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp47v5OBXQ.
India (or any other Country) could do proper research in the area or end up buying these stuff from other countries, provided they give state of art technology to others. Just imagine a drone or an army of drones equipped with such AI technology can survey 24/7 and instantly take down your enemy even across a country.
When I was in college, back in the late 1990s, my university hired a new professor in the Computer Science department. He had 2 PhDs. In addition to wanting us to copy and paste all of our C++ code into Microsoft Word, blow the font up to 32 point size, and print it out in order to hand it in, he taught us the incorrect way to use cin, assigned homework to use it, and then informed the class that if you looked the answer up in the book and your code worked, you would get an F for not following his instruction.
Needless to say, I and a group of my fellow students went immediately to the department chair. He was fired shortly thereafter. He was an astounding example of total incompetence. I decided to look into these "2 PhDs" he was supposed to have. Both were from Bangalore University. It didn't take much to find their CS department website (which looked like it had been built by an elementary school kid) and the academic requirements necessary to get such a degree. To get a basic CS bachelor's degree you needed high school level math and 2 classes about CS. To get a PhD you needed a full year. As far as I could tell the school had a good medical program, and decided to open a Computer Science diploma mill on the side. I was stunned.
Some good came of it, though. After that, every prospective candidate to become a new professor had to give a presentation to upperclassmen on a topic of their own choosing and submit to being questioned by the upperclassmen. To replace the inept man with 2 PhDs we hired a guy who only had a Masters degree but who had several years experience in the industry, so he could bring some manner of "this is how its ACTUALLY done in the real world" to things. Worked out great, at least from a students perspective.
This is plain BS. I don't recall any CS department in India (and I know 100's) teaching, MS-word, Logo, Basic, Powerpoint, excel etc. However, I did TA'ed at Rice University, TX, Excel course for freshman.
Here school means elementary, middle school,high school etc. where they teach MS Word etc. In India, CS departments are in “colleges” also called “schools” in US so this may not be bullshit for the reason you stated.
COMP 100 teaches students how to use common software for organizing, searching, and computing on information, with an emphasis on business-related tasks. It introduces engineering design via a medium-sized team project. The course examines
databases — Microsoft Access
spreadsheets — Microsoft Excel
I truly believe offshore IT work was mostly a scam in the first place. The work they produced was of very low quality, and often was more expensive because you had to go back in and fix everything. The whole game was to overcharge western firms for cheap crap produced by shoddy programmers overseas. The IT outsourcing firms would pocket the difference. Come in and promise the world, overbill and underdeliver. Then the client is stuck with your crap and needs to pay you to maintain it.
It was on a matter of time before companies figured it out. Add to that advances in automation and the move to the cloud, and this was guaranteed to happen.
After 3 years of trying to cooperate with two of the larges Indian IT services companies for a large, corporate client, I find it hard to disagree with you.
The level of incompetence I have seen is absolutely mindblowing - to the point of me thinking, I must be part of a hidden camera prank...
I employ several Indian FTE developers, who are great, so it is not the "India"-sticker, that is the problem - it is the culture in the large, Indian IT-services companies, that is completely broken.
1. The likes of TCS, Wipro and Infosys. These have a huge workforce and literally hire in wholesale. Even this month, Wipro hired something like 50 students from a nearby college. They don't look for your programming skills or even CS theory knowledge. Nope. They hire based on marks, group discussion, English skills and even looks. Basically, anything that is not related to CS. Hell, they even hire mechanical engineers. In my college, students got placed this year because, a. They had good relations with faculty. b. Looks(for women) c. Acting "friendly" to a middleman(applies to women)
If you deal with these companies, I guarantee you, you'd get a poor product.
2. smaller outsourcing companies. Some of these are good, some of these are bad. Again, some manager might hire a student because she looks hot, while some other might genuinely look for skilled students. I'd suggest dealing with these companies, after getting good feedback about them from someone.
3. Startups. These are few, but the number is growing. I hope to get selected in one of these.
Are you in college? You will find that 3 is not all rosy as it seems to you right now, if you are not from a top tier or atleast decent tier college. I was like you back in college when I realized that heading to TCS etc was a dead career path from the start.
The better product startups all look for "IIT/NIT/whatever other brand college" students. Snapdeal, for eg, first switched the application engineer position that I applied for to other secondary positions, and then rejected me when I asked for the original position on this basis. There is no guarantee that you will find good things in other startups. I realize now that these companies have no better way of screening candidates, because the candidate pool quality in India errs on the side of less than decent. Doesn't justify the bait-and-switch but oh well.
If you do end up like I did, make sure that atleast the peer group in your startup is exceptionally talented, and that the startup is good with tech. The pay is shit in these kinds of startups (for eg those running as a small service company, but building their product behind the scenes), but the idea is to become really good at what you do and then jump ship to a good product startup.
Also, if you are still in college, it helps to have GSoC under your belt.
Yes, I'm still in college, although I'm in final year, so only 6 months left. What you said is true, I realize that most companies are ignoring my resume(as I am not from IIT/NIT, I am not even from a autonomous institute). But I hope I can at least get placed in small scale startups, or small product businesses.
Wish I had concentrated more on OSS contribution/ side projects rather than competitive programming. Let's see what happens now. But I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS. Worst case, I'll become a Uber driver.
You can still do OSS contributions and make small side projects to get noticed. The likes of us merely start X years behind the likes of those that go to a prestigious engineering college when it comes to work. X is as big a gulf as you let it be. Factor that into your growth and make of it what you will.
>I'm sure I won't join the likes of TCS
TCS is fine if you're fine with maintenance work and/or want to pivot into doing an MBA or something similar. However, even TCS etc are laying off a lot of people and will probably shrink their "bench" pools greatly in the near future, due to the death of outsourcing.
>I'll become an Uber driver
I'm sure it won't have to come to that, but yes, the job market slowdown is real.
What if the value add of off shore had nothing to do with the work done, but with the threat of replacement. Not that you could actually do the replacement, but the threat of it could result in reduction in wage growth that more than made up the waste of using off shore outsourcing.
Don't think I've seen this idea explored before. Maybe the numbers show it is completely idiotic (I did basically come up with it in the shower). Guess its my new conspiracy theory of the month.
This feels like your personal sentiment. You do know that there are good outsourcing firm out there right? I've been working at outsourcing firm for most of my career and I have to disagree. There are a full spectrum of good and bad developers out there even in the outsourcing world, not just bad ones. Do you think outsourcing as a practice can still survive if it doesn't bring value?
Yes, absolutely - plenty of decision makers face incentives structures that reward short term cost savings and don’t punish increased long term maintenance costs.
Mainly relatively unskilled is an understatement. I have a bit of contact with DXC (based in bulgaria, iirc) through a customer. We usually get someone with 'expert X' or 'senior Y' as a job title who lack the most basic skills in debugging and problem solving. It mostly ends in them 'taking a break' (during the call) and in the end we have to do their job.
I don't take an issue with doing their job, but I'm still baffled how DXC can function like that.
> These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students.
I guess the best interview should also add a touch-type test and the candidate should require at least 30wpm or so (if typing is very much required for the work).
When I was at college I have only seen less than 5 such students from the 250 total.
> I've never met a good, experienced developer who was a slow typist.
You will.
There is a reason "fast typist" was not a required skill in any software jobs I've ever applied for, and I doubt developer strength has any correlation with typing speed.
It's not that fast typist is an indicator of a good developer, but a slow typist is an indicator of someone who hasn't spent a whole lot of time in front of a keyboard.
Or they have some motor disabilities in their arm/hand, which you should check for before making a judgement. Some people have carpal tunnel, some people have tremors, some people might have other condition they might not have even know themselves or would like to talk about openly.
Depends what you mean by fast. Anecdotally, I learned to use a computer well before anyone thought to teach me to type. I still type "incorrectly" (basically use only a few fingers, with my hands moving more than they should). So I am definitely slower than someone who is trained to type correctly.
But, I would like to think that I am both good and experienced. I picked up my bad typing habits while learning to program, after all.
I taught myself how to type too just by doing it as a kid. My home key position is much more natural (hands slanted) and that probably saved me from carpel tunnel all these years.
By fast, I mean not two finger typing and can probably touch type. You know a slow typist when you see it. It's like being behind a slow person on the highway, it's excruciating.
>This can be seen from increase in placements in IITs this year.
That's probably because they are pushed by their families, "go and study IT, this is the best paid job at the moment". That doesn't mean that the value, skills, abilities of the new graduates will increase, I tend to believe the opposite.
What do you mean by pushed by their families? You don't seem to have a good understanding of educational institutions in India. IIT entrance exams are one of the toughest exams out there. Please read this page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A...
So even if families pressure their kids, they will not be able to get an admission in these institutes unless they demonstrate required skills.
> I think it comes from their culture, they are not used to work hard or to do something willingly.
Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything.
>They are doing it if they must, if someone tells them that they have to do it.
Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation?
I am part Indian (albeit ethnically, not culturally) and work in finance. I always had a great experience working with Indian bankers, investors and VCs. The stereotypes puzzled me.
Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies. It’s horrible. Starting sentences with “no” even when agreeing, jargon-laid bullshitting, lying about simple things, overt sexism (e.g. if my female colleague asks a question, the response is addressed to me), et cetera. I fully blame a small handful of firms for nurturing a toxic culture and then projecting it to the world.
(Indian tech start-ups have, in my experience, a wonderful culture.)
From the outside looking in ( and a handful of anecdotal encounters and work experiences) I feel like the educated Indian workforce is bifurcated between one cluster of brilliant hard working people and another cluster of... Bullshitters who try to project the visage of knowing what's going on.
But maybe that's because for better or for worse India does have an articulate culture of speaking up for yourself, and these two outlier groups just become memorable.
It depends on what one's career goals are. From what I understand (I'm not Indian, but I've worked with many over the years), for a sizable portion of the workforce, the goal isn't to be senior programmer but rather management.
The way you get to management is by having people report to you and then get a new job higher up on the ladder at another company (it is my understanding that promotions from within the company are difficult compared to hiring outsiders).
One puts in time in grade, switching projects frequently to build up the resume. Unfortunately, this makes institutional knowledge at the client companies not something that is preserved easily.
(anecdote: when I was laid off to be replaced by someone from India, the 12 years of how the system works was transferred in 4 weeks of 4h a day meetings, 5 days a week (that was painful)... keeping in touch with my old coworkers, the person who replaced me left 6 months later and explained everything about how my job worked and what they learned in just a few days... who left six months later and only did one day of information transfer)
So, switch companies, go from developer to sr. developer in a year (2x 6 month projects) to team lead (with 5 people reporting - another year or so) to architect (with 3 team leads reporting - another year or so)... and you've got a manager.
If someone is on the track "I want to be a manager", switching projects frequently and never actually diving too deeply into the project is probably the best approach.
The technical people are harder to find. They're not switching jobs quickly and so they're unlikely to get hired into the project that the client sees. Maybe they're tapped as a "work on this 25%" but I know how that goes... it means one week out of the month you're catching up on everything for that project and trying to fend off context switches before you're not thinking about it for another month.
For the technical people, many of them are able to find a visa and move to the US for some extended period of time. This contributes to a brain drain in India. Also the indentured servitude aspect of the H1B visa means that there is less mobility and again, its harder to meet these people in random places. They do exist - and I've worked with a number of them... but I've worked with far more people who are in a position for six months to a year and then moving on to another contract at another contracting company.
Most people in India don't seem to be bothered by a brain drain and don't treat it as a problem as such.
You have to remember that India has more than a billion people and struggles to find work for all of them.
I was surprised to see (in contrast to other countries trying to stem brain drain) that its a stated goal by the Indian prime minister that they want to see some 50 million (more than the population of many countries?!?) workers sent abroad in the coming decade. Whether it eases their unemployment issues or if they see it as a genuinely beneficial strategy is not clear to me. A bit of both I guess.
This plays into another very interesting phenomenon. Indians tend to look up to the western world a lot and I think it shows in their approach to tech.
For example, if you ask most Indians who the top tech people in their country are they'd probably mention Indian CEOs of western tech companies in the US. This is in very stark contrast to say, China, where their own entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma are most influential.
That is to say, rather than build their own ecosystem or companies most Indians aspire to work for Western firms and deeply synthesize their economy to them.
Absolutely correct. The brain drain for a small fraction of a percent that get visas to work in other countries is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It's a mere trickle compared to the reservoir of people behind it.
Though, its more of a next generation thing that will be interesting - the changing demographics. The US has birthright citizenship - all the children born in the US to visa holders will be US citizens. That will do some interesting things in a few places when they start needing to pay taxes in the US if they are overseas and haven't given up their citizenships (n.b. I'm not an expat and so am not completely versed in the associated tax law).
Sending workers abroad and having them send money home to family outsources the social support structures needed in India and reduces the pressure for unemployment. This feeds into the growing nationalism and xenophobia in many western countries. In other countries it allows people with fewer scruples to take advantage of this labor force and essentially turn them into slaves (confiscation of passports and financial trickery).
I'm not sure where this is going to come back and where the ultimate costs with this policy are going to be paid - but they're going to be paid somewhere.
The Indian tech industry is certainly going for a synergy approach with western markets rather than... say, Japan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome ) or China (copy and maintain behind the Great Firewall).
Its going to be interesting to see how this all plays out over the years to come.
This is spot on. The incentive system so much more promotes management careers that anybody who wishes to go down the tech path comes across as stupid.
Its very common in services companies to treat tech people as somebody who don't have the chops to do prestigious management work.
Do this for sufficient number of years and eventually you will have very few people who want to do any real work and most will want to be managers.
> Then I spoke to a few IT outsourcing/consulting companies
You get what you pay for. The quality of low level employees in IT outsourcing companies (not just the Indian ones) is at par with (or lower than) American minimum wage workers
>Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough, which in turn causes demotivation?
This. I had the same complaint about the India based team I had to work with, until one of them came on rotation to the states, we had a beer together, and he told me all about the working environment they have there. Nightmarish commutes, extremely nitpicky and punitive performance management, no commitment to career development, limited benefits, brutal hours, and meagre pay even adjusted for Indian CoL.
Under those conditions, it's no wonder people were hard to work with. They were overworked, held to stupid performance metrics that demoralized them, and were under the boot of a "beatings will continue until morale improves" management style.
If you hire based only on cost, nickel and dime each other to maximize your value for money in the short term, and generally treat your workforce like chattel, it shouldn't be surprising when they're disengaged and unable to be as forward leaning as you would like.
Yup. First company I worked for had a team in India and they couldn't do a damn thing. The next company had some REALLY great talent in India. Having local managers helped. Paying market rate instead of bottom dollar helped.
Another problem with outsourcing to India is now so many companies do it just because XYZ other company does it -- no regard for quality. Just copying the moves someone else does isn't enough. You need to understand WHY and HOW to do it well.
Managers at the level that makes that decision get bonuses for cost cutting. The cheaper the firm, the bigger the bonus. By the time the house of cards crashed, it either wasn't their crash (sales problem) or they've jumped ship to cost-cut at another company.
> Cut the crap. India is a country of 1.3 billion people, don't peddle bullshit stereotypes. Not working hard doesn't come from the culture; it's quite the opposite if anything.
Actually, I know this is anecdote but my buddy was an manager type position moved up from software and he had to deal with Indians. He had to go over cultural slides to how to deal with Indians and the slide explicitly talk about their world ethnics and how their culture view time.
The time slide was super interesting and the few thing I recall from it. It was talking about setting time line for the offshore team. And when they say they will have it done, it can mean anything, and that you have to have them to explicitly state a real date.
I'm not trying to shoot ya down or anything, just wanted to point out another experience in culture. The slides he showed me was suppose to be on the downlow too >___<. But the whole thing is about how to manage Indian programmers and many aspect of it was dealing with culture or how culture affects their actions.
What makes you say this? Don't stereotypes come from something? Do you think it's a coincidence that a stereotypical Asian American is reserved, disciplined, and good at math, and that Asian Americans in America make considerably more than any other race[1]?
Btw, "Cut the crap" is an unprofessional, unproductive way to start a conversation.
For some background, the 'model minority' myth that you're perpetuating here is being increasingly rejected by the Asian-American community because its both reductive and dehumanizing in its characterization ('Asians are all inscrutable math wizards that get straight A's but are essentially invisible in any romantic or leadership capability') and most often trotted out by race supremacists in some twisted form of concern trolling as a way to attack other minority groups who are seen as less subservient. Asian-americans are often seen in america as the "perpetual foreigner"[1] no matter how far they go to integrate, and the 'model minority' myth just makes integration and the freedom to be treated as an 'American' _individual_ so much harder - unlike Caucasians in the US who in their virtue as the majority demographic do not have each and every one of their actions/behaviors scrutinized as being representative of "white people."
> Or are we to believe that stereotypes all come from nothing?
This is a false dilemma. Stereotypes come from something, sure - but they don't necessarily come from accurate characteristics of the race. They may come from one of the many cultures that makes up the race. (As a child of immigrants from south India whose family has been Christian longer than Europe has been Christian, I have some opinions on your conflation of race and culture.) They may come from some particular subculture that happens to be interacting with the people forming the stereotype. They may come from what is essentially propaganda - national myths, folklore, religious traditions, etc. that reflected an older culture that people find useful to claim an identification with, but may not accurately represent any people. They may come from propaganda by the people forming the stereotype, as in the case of the "model minority" stereotype in the US. They may come from the reaction of the culture or the race to living under oppression by the people forming the stereotype, and not reflect the natural tendencies of the people if given their freedom. (For instance, the stereotype of Jews as greedy can be traced pretty directly to the old Christian prohibition - now seemingly forgotten - on lending money with interest, which left the profitable and necessary job of banking essentially reserved for whatever visible non-Christian cultural minority happened to be in Europe, regardless of any traits of that culture other than happening not to have such a prohibition.) They may come from accurate traits of the race or culture from a generation or two ago that are no longer accurate. There are lots of options here that you seem to be dismissing.
I'm not dismissing what you're saying, and the fact that you're assuming that I'm just dismissing you is ridiculous. You're just assuming that because I don't immediately reject the discussion of stereotypes, that I'm some racist. It's just not true.
I'm really sad about the state of HN nowadays. Anyone not PC is downvoted incessantly. This is just another example of a vocal minority drowning out the silent majority on the internet sites that is contributing to our cultural extremism in our country. Not everyone with differing opinions from you is a racist.
I did not downvote you, nor have I called you racist. I attempted to engage you in reasoned argument, and you are unwilling to engage in debate. Other people are not downvoting you because you're "not PC", they're downvoting you because you're not making cogent arguments, and anyone not making cogent arguments should be drowned out by cogent arguments.
>Do you think it's a coincidence that a stereotypical Asian American is reserved, disciplined, and good at math, and that Asian Americans in America make considerably more than any other race[1]?
You are stating a set of what you believe as stereotypes of "Asian American[s]" and then citing a wage survey. There seem to be a lot of assumptions you are making.
What would you define as "Asian" in this scenario? Do you consider all people living in America having some form of roots in the entire continent of Asia, Asian?
Next, are you attributing personal traits listed by you as: reserved, disciplined, and good at math, which equates to "make[ing] more than any other race". Do those traits really do that?
The comment that you posted, from my own personal experience, is disheartening because it attributes qualities to a broad set of peoples and cultures which may or may not be related. Even if you might consider some things like being disciplined as positive, it's disempowering because it removes each "Asian" person's ability to achieve based on their own merit.
Stereotypes typically don't come from anything. The "stereotype" of an Asian male is someone who
* can't talk to women
* doesn't understand social skills
* has poor hygiene / manners
* values STEM above softer skills
* values hard work and effort
It's pointless to make these claims because such broad generalizations immediately break down the second you meet an Asian man. There's no way to know which (if any) of these stereotypes they uphold.
Some of these sterotypes have a positive bend: Poor social skills imply that they are reserved. Valuing hard work makes you a disciplined person. etc. But these stereotypes are still bad. They lead people to make unfair assumptions about Asian men because they are Asian. There's plenty of literature out there about stereotypes and prejudice and especially about the "model minority" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority
From there you may see why folks are downvoting you:
> A common misconception is that the affected communities usually hold pride in their labeling as the model minority. The model minority stereotype is considered detrimental to relevant minority communities because it is used to justify the exclusion of minorities in the distribution of assistance programs, both public and private, as well as to understate or slight the achievements of individuals within that minority. Furthermore, the idea of the model minority pits minority groups against each other by implying that non-model groups are at fault for falling short of the model minority level of achievement and assimilation
EDIT: And as a bonus (since that Wikipedia article is DAMN good) "Scientific studies have revealed that positive stereotypes have many negative and damaging consequences both socially and psychologically." The citations are in the article.
Since you are an Indian too, I think your remarks are kind of subjective and your reply a bit harsh, but I'll add more facts that sustain my point of view.
>Not working hard doesn't come from the culture
Yes it truly does. Since every individual has inherited from the environment and has been cultured that he needs to do just what he is told (the minimum), this is how he grows.
>Maybe the firm you are dealing with doesn't pay the employees well enough
You can't hide behind your finger with this excuse. If you want a raise you tend to work harder, do the extra mile, you defenly don't get a raise by doing the minimum. Also, if you are good at what you are doing but you are not happy with the salary then why accept the job in first place?
Assigning attributes to an entire country based on experience with a few people is poor logic.
It is the same if someone worked with a few people at Google India or one of the IITs, and claimed all Indians are super smart and it comes from their culture.
how do you explain the anamoly of indians in virtually all top jobs from ceo's of microsoft,google,pepsi etc. to pulitzer winners? while i agree with you that culture does impacts work but may be its not "indian" culture and more of a "company"culture.
Having said that i don't see any contribution of india in sports, i don't know why.
That said, the Indians I have worked with were diligent workers who all but ignored instructions. They produced lots of work but most of it was not to spec. It was only a few groups though so I really can't speak with any scale backing me up.
Especially a country as particularly large and diverse as India. Each state is nearly it's own country from a linguistic, historical, and cultural standpoint. It's almost as overgeneralized as referring to all Africans, or Europeans as some sort of collective. I'd almost consider India along the same lines as the entire EU.
>These people are mainly relatively unskilled. These companies are notorious for hiring entire batches of graduating students.
Please follow the discussion, I was talking only about the fresh graduates and entry-level employees, I was not at all stereotyping the whole country. On the contrary I find them a pretty impressive nation with outstanding potential in the next century.
>Yes it truly does. Since every individual has inherited from the environment and has been cultured that he needs to do just what he is told (the minimum), this is how he grows.
Just curious -- were the two team (Romania vs India) working on the same project? Were you paying them the same money? Did the team members have the same number of years in experience (in absence of a better comparitive metric)?
I might be able to provide some insight. In my MSc program, we had a number of Indian students.
The students who were expected by their parents to become computer scientists had much worse attitudes and were much harder to work with than the ones who were doing it on their own initiative.
I was told becoming a computer professional is something parents pressure their offspring to do, and this could be the root cause of this phenomenon.
A fun fact, if you may. Every company doing actual, industrial field work has huge problems finding people who are willing to do field work at Indian plants (and are qualified, obviously). If you know a field guy, ask him if he has had any experience there. Industry doesn't really matter...
Google and Microsoft and even trading firms like DE Shaw for example have hundreds of engineers in India. Hiring talent is difficult at smaller outsourcing shops, the economics demands that you hire at low wages. Your perspective is severely limited.
american people who judge indians is pathetic,
and the fact the they feel "superior" is really funny.
i bet that with the same education an indian is way more smart than an american.
The India firms haven’t really moved up the value chain much and thus there’s just less work there. They put fancy marketing on the front but their main product is still cheap labor for low value IT work. While there’s certainly advanced stuff happening in India, at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore.