Indian outsourcing is killing IT
Posted by Arsenalist on August 14, 2007
The mailing lists were never easy to read through but if a man put his mind to it and used the delete button swiftly enough you could actually get something out of them and maybe even find a reason to stay on. But ever since everybody in North America cheaped out and started sending all the work to India the mailing lists of every major product have been polluted with the Sanjays and Prashants of this world asking questions that make me wonder why the hell we’re sending out our prized projects to these seemingly incompetent people.
Granted they come cheap but even so judging from their posts and having worked with them on a couple projects I still haven’t found a singular reason why I should trust them to write a simple POJO. Their unaccountability on their mailing list is appalling, I wouldn’t want my company being represented by some dude who’s asking the struts-user list questions like these and putting their company name and his title at the bottom. This just tells me you’re an idiot and have no clue what you’re doing.
I realize that I’m generalizing and that there are always exceptions, but if you Nabble through the Maven, IBatis, Struts etc user lists you’ll encounter posts which make it apparent that the author has the most rudimentary knowledge of the product and of software design and is just hoping to get by. This theme is prevalent across most mailing lists leading me to believe that this is a widespread disease which effects the outsourcing industry. Given the apparently skill level of the people working on these projects, one can only surmise that the quality of work being done in those countries is subpar. Also, posting your resumes and asking for H1 visas on peoples blogs does not help your credibility nor does it showcase your skills. Again, it just makes you look like an idiot.
Here’s an exercise: try posting an ad for a development project on Craiglist and ask for a quote. What you’ll end up getting is tin-canned emails from India that list Gupta Inc. as knowing EVERY SINGLE LANGUAGE AND DATABASE PLATFORM EVER MADE. Then follow up with a random one and actually talk to their “Project Manager” and you’ll notice that the email was just a bunch of bullshit and you’re dealing with a two-man operation run out of a basement on a Pentium II.
Lately I’ve met an increasing number of people who are “managing a team in India” and work for a company with an accent in it’s name. These are the new managers the IT industry is producing, usually they’re in their mid-20’s and consider their new “manager” role a promotion. But when you’re managing narrow-minded developers getting paid the minimum wage and communicating 95% of the time over MSN, the work that’ll get done will reflect the circumstances and talent of the people involved. Software development is an industry where geographic location hardly seems to matter but when we’re communicating requirements, design and expectations entirely over chat, things are bound to get lost in translation. My point? You can’t oversee a project if you’re thousands of miles away, especially if you’re dealing with a guy who’s trying to scrape by. This whole system is flawed and annoying, both from the manager’s and developer’s perspective.
As long as you can tolerate their nerdiness and smell you can generally have a conversation with another North American developer and talk about a wide range of languages and tools without too many awkward moments. Not the case with slave labor. I visited India a couple years ago and had a chance to speak with some developers working at India’s second richest bank. The first think you notice about these people is how specialized they are. If they have a Java job, that’s all they know. Nothing more. Java. Java. Java. If they have a Perl job, it’s all about Perl and they’ll write everything in Perl and not even consider anything else for any reason. The mentality seems to be to get the job done as the lowest price and as fast as possible, nothing else matters. Fair enough, but I just don’t see the price of the work making up for the lack of quality and the general fuckedupness of the process.
And yes, I’m an Indian.
August 14, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I don’t think that it’s a good thing to generalize about anyone. This is the global reality, instead of city or country of bad and or novice programmers, you now have a whole planet full. So buckle you safety belts kids, it’s going to be a wild ride.
August 14, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Nice article but I suspect you’re going to get flamed for it.
I agree that the quality of work coming from India has been disappointing. We save on costs but it takes longer to do the work and there are often missed use-cases. We use Basecamp which is ideal for online collaboration but it doesn’t come close to having someone in the same office. My peeve with Indian developers is the lack of testing that is done, it’s an afterthought to them.
August 14, 2007 at 8:32 pm
I have been working with outsourced programmers from India alot for the past few years. And I tell you, _everywhere_ I go I end up seeing absolute nightmarish craps produced by the programmers. From Infosys, Satyam and EDS, it’s the same.
August 14, 2007 at 8:35 pm
The mailing list clutter is annoying but I think there are as many bad and lazy devs in the US as there are in India. But it’s the standards that these developers are supposed to adhere to that is higher in the US. The problems I find managing my team in India is the difference in philosophy. The end justify the means to them which can be a killer.
August 14, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I hope u lose ur job to a seemingly incompetent indian, arsenalist :)
August 14, 2007 at 10:00 pm
The problem is not that India has some bad developers. They have some brilliant people, and some not so brilliant people.
Just like the US.
The difference is simply numbers. There are so many people in India, the sheer number of people means there will be more in the lower levels.
I would bet that the percentages hold up pretty well compared to the US. And maybe in the US, if you don’t know code you can work at McDonalds.
August 14, 2007 at 10:24 pm
I think you are one ignorant Indian to write a blog like this.
First of all, its very foolish to generalize about people, whether its Indian or not.
True, there are some issues of quality, but these are expected from freshers or starters. This does not mean all are incompetent.
You sound like an incompetent Indian, who lost out to another incompetent Indian.
August 14, 2007 at 11:07 pm
few points you have mentioned would be correct. as a whole you can’t blame. i am software developer working in india. i can see few developers more briliant, but they mostly interested in products development and moved to companies like Sun,Oracle,etc. only few talented people stay in IT Services company.others are scrap they just want to earn money and dream to get H1B to go USA. total scrap..proporation makes the difference.
August 14, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Me and my Indian coworker were hella laughing at the article. His argument is a gross over-simplification. During the dot boom, IT shops here hired any willing able body (some good, some philosophy majors). The ratio of good/bad engineers is close to the same here as it is there or any other country.
This has been a bad week for developers of color. From a recent Digg submission, “At the C4 Mac developer conference this weekend, Drunken Batman got on stage to discuss why black people don’t use Macs.”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rtmfd/1097058025
August 14, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I know that this is generalization (I hope that this is generalization!), by my personal experiences are very similar. I have already worked for two companies that were dealing with indians and now I work for a company who have outsorced half of it’s production to india. And it’s really disturbing to notice that everyone on their side (from base developers to some management staff) are totally ignorant. This is sad and on day-to-day basis very disturbing and annoying. Every day I am wasting half of my development time finding who screwed my previous day’s work, nevermind that for 4 years, people were unable to learn anything new (gosh, they are using Java but they don’t know how to implement interface, they don’t even know what interface is!). I really would like to work with someone from india that actually knows what hes/her doing…
regards everyone ;/
August 15, 2007 at 12:16 am
Great.. you have pointed out few good points.. but yes.. there are good Indian programmers some are bad.. but as India is a destination for business for MNCs not only for IT but also for non-IT. They are going to increase presence in India.. due to only few reasons.
India is a biggest democratic country in the world(no problems), India have 100 crore people(good business in future), Cheap labor for USA and Europe(because Rupee value is lower compared to dollar value), Liberal country(open to all the people of world to open shops here), but still there are many restrictions in USA to open its borders to other countries, its tough to work in USA, its tough to come there , need H1 visa , once you apply it will come by lottery.. sad.. but India is a free country.. its the company who is hiring has to decide on the candidate whether he is good or bad.. and also what you have given link there of a mail.. it is a Indian Company not American company..
I suggest only one thing.. do not be proud that you know english..english is just a 2-3% its 97% you have to show talent in Software Technology, Analitical, Maths, Business, Functional Knowledge..
India is growing, USA is lagging behind.. not only in IT, but also in science, space technology, research..
India have potential to scare all the world. Keep watching..news..!!
August 15, 2007 at 12:47 am
I dont want to generalize, so i wont, if you are reading this: kill yourself.
August 15, 2007 at 1:03 am
I agree with some of your observations. Most of the Indian developers these days hardly read, write or practice a technology-subject. For them Google is the mother of all code. And the moment, they have a bug in their code, they paste the exception over google and go hunting for answers over the forums. They don’t Think. Indians have an inherent quality to beg and to be over-courteous. They beg for answers. They lack context, and talk irrelevant stuff.
The Only aim in their life is to make money, marry off their sisters, get married for a huge dowry, then invest like a bee , become a team leader, project manager, Go On-site, live like a worm there, make stupid reporting/timesheet work (projet management). Most of them can only write a ‘hello world’ on the things they claimed in their resume. They are more interested in CMM and ‘processes’ and never understand a bit of it. Most of the team leaders or module managers or peers cannot even do a decent code-review. I can go on and on.. Sad state.
August 15, 2007 at 1:57 am
[...] Indian outsourcing is killing IT The mailing lists were never easy to read through but if a man put his mind to it and used the delete button swiftly […] [...]
August 15, 2007 at 3:02 am
In India, and in most other countries known as a resource for cheap coders, all the talented, competent people that can think for themselves work directly for major companies that have a local presence.
The ratio of good developers vs bad developers may be the same as in the west, but the bad ones are heavily concentrated in the companies working for western cheapskates…
August 15, 2007 at 3:09 am
Hi,
This is very bad to blame whole country just that you have seen few guys who may not be good enough.
Please Donot waste time writing these articles instead improve yourself further in all aspects.
Thanks
Prashant
August 15, 2007 at 4:11 am
Since I’m moving to India, and probably going to start one of those “smaller companies”, does anybody have some ideas on how to attract the “smart” people?
August 15, 2007 at 4:11 am
The glory of India are its Saint and Sages.
August 15, 2007 at 4:49 am
Funnee.
If you take two very different groups and get them to work together, this is only to be expected.
The market in India is, whether anyone likes it or not, immature. The industry is new, the people are new and there just isn’t the depth of understanding that is easier to find in the US or Yerp.
The mailing lists, quite honestly, are very much like the Flash mailing lists in 1999 - 2000, where the product was new and people were generally clueless on this new technology. In this instance, Indian developers are those guys from 1999, except no one else is, and so we have this whole issue of developers asking the most elementary questions and losing all credibility in the process…
But when it comes to Arsenalist’s point about, well, wide mouths with narrow minds…
Our IT department is located in Southern India too, and they are working on the rearchitecture of the whole company. While they are just fine as developers, I cannot have the level of discussion that I can with say my colleagues here in the UK.
Example - the IT director decided that the new architecture would be written with VB.net. We all asked, why not C#, since it is more familiar, syntax-wise - to those of us who write Javascript, ASP, ActionScript, Java etc.
And the head-bangingly-screamingly-unsatifactory answer was along the lines of, ‘Well, VB.net is not unfamiliar to those from a VB background, as C# would not be unfamiliar to those from a C++ background, so it really depends on your background’.
Yes, you dumb shmucks, we know that, but there is only one background for VB.net - VB. Why why why did you not go with the language with the more common syntax? There was no answer… Vague vague vague.
August 15, 2007 at 5:44 am
I agree. I know I am generalizing as well, but I can give you a gazillion examples of Indian stupidity. I am a forum manager at jguru.com, and it’s amazing what comes along every day. Judging by the names, I cannot conclude otherwise that 95% of the “weird” contributions are from India. Not strange, considering the number of (wanna-be) developers there are.
But the lack of insight, the lack of motivation, and the sheer lack of respect freak me out. Not even a thank you after helping them out with another Google-I-am-feeling-lucky- question.
August 15, 2007 at 5:53 am
Hi!
I’m from Ukraine. And I’ve work a lot with American, Indian and European developers. In my opinion, Indian code “smells” more then any other code. And the percentage of talent Indian developers are lot smaller. But I think there is a reason for that - smart people just migrating to better countries like US or to Europe. Education also matters a lot. India is too poor country to provide same level of education as more civilized countries.
If the author do not wish to work with incompetent developers he should just explain it to his boss…
August 15, 2007 at 6:51 am
I’m sorry to say but the article hit’s the nail on the head! I’ve experienced it from the other side, I’m a UK based developer and I had been in contact with an Indian client - I say client, they asked me to do some work, I agreed and when I try to contact them to follow up, they never got back to me - wasting my time I could be working on other client project, and therefor loosing me money.
August 15, 2007 at 7:38 am
We’re implementing a product from India here and almost everyday we have to visit the production environment to grab logs since almost everyday their software makes trouble.
August 15, 2007 at 7:40 am
The question is about incompetency - its not about Indian or North american or anything.In my last project,our business analyst was from North America and the quality of work was worse than what you can expect from a first standard student.There were North American Architects who could not set up a EJB Environment up and running and people had to be flown from India to get it done.
But this is not the entire picture.There are people who are quiet outstanding in their line of job.
However with the better developers I have noticed a common trend — they never point a finger at anyone or rebuke anybody. It is more the charecteristics of the first group, or the group mentioned by the Author and I am sure the author belongs to the previous group.
Also,I have serious doubts about the educational background or the depth of the knowledge of the author as he has got objections about people specializing in any particular language because the author himself is quiet certainly a jack(??I think that is also giving too much credit to the author) of all trades. And besides all his accustions,due to his limited knowledge he spends most of the time in the forums trying to getting an answer to every solution ,in the process eating away his employer’s money instead of exercising the grey matters which I am sure he doesnt have.
August 15, 2007 at 8:35 am
I am not sure that the problem only lies with the Indian population, but with the companies that provide the outsourcing in India. I have several Indian friends and I hear all of the time how competitive it is to live in India because of the sheer number of people that live there.
I worked at a company previously who, through stupid business decisions, needed to cut costs and decided to outsource much of their work to IBM, using teams from India. The problem wasn’t necessarily that the people there were ignorant (although some of them definately were) it was the lack of experience.
I think that the companies that are providing the outsourcing simply hire a bunch of people who are junior and some people that are talented and have some experience. I believe (although I have not witnessed this) that when these companies make their pitch, they show the results from their A team, but most companies get a D team.
The problem my old company had was simply that they were replacing a team of people who had been working on the products for, on average, 5 years (there were a few who had been there for 2 years, most had been there more) with a bunch of junior developers who just wanted to get the code done. They get paid for hitting milestones, not for producinq quality code.
August 15, 2007 at 8:44 am
Ah.. so you want it cheap but you want the best too? Right!!
August 15, 2007 at 8:49 am
Also…. has anybody realised that India is still young in the game? One hopes all of you who are cribbing here are doing something about it.
August 15, 2007 at 9:18 am
We had to maintain a system written by some indian developers from India, oh boy, and it really smells. Lots of unclosed jdbc connections (repeated try catch finally and some don’t even have any, with ResultSet passed all over the place as arguments to methods in different objects). The dataSource is set to a public static variable of a Listener where every other class just grabs it from there and they don’t bother to close() the dbcp datasource when the listener shutsdown. Lots of code where reader are just read but not closed. They use plain servlet/jsp where most jsp basically just contains a big fat scriptlet in it.
August 15, 2007 at 9:22 am
Note: this is simply a couple of anecdotes from my personal experience.
First, I wonder about the quality of IT-related education over there. While I realize that U.S. schools also fail to fully prepare IT talent, I worked with two developers from India with Master’s degrees in Comp Sci. BOTH were less than useful. It seemed their master degree was granted as soon as they could use MS FrontPage and Word/Excel without drooling too much. They made serious elementary errors like confusing Java with JavaScript; hence, I got to work with one on an intense Java serverside project. Servlets/jsps/struts (at the time) was a total mystery to this dude. He constantly overwrote stuff in CVS…he kept thinking that THIS time the thing would “automatically” merge conflicts, even after dozens of times I stepped him through the process.
Another project I took over at another company had been done initially by a team from India. 64k JSPs. Source code control was a directory structure they copied stuff into/out of using Explorer. Someone over there decided they needed to build their own MVC framework…and at some point they must have had some concurrency issues, because EVERY method down in there was marked as ’synchronized’. The ‘controller’ was the 64k JSP…it consisted of an if/else structure that used arbitrary keys to decide which action to execute next. There was no datamodel to speak of, everything was just a bunch of Strings getting passed around (even for dates). Basically, it was a nightmare. I had to gently explain that they received virtually nothing of value; the thing was rife with bugs and the structure was unworkable.
Just my experience…I pass it along knowing that my experience does NOT implicate the whole of a group of developers. I just noticed that the people involved in the scenarios above ALL had (or claimed to have) Masters degrees.
August 15, 2007 at 9:44 am
During boom times, lots of incompetent people get hired. During busts, you have to be lucky and good to stay on. The U.S. has recently gotten over the biggest IT bust in its history. India has been enjoying an unprecedented boom. That may explain much of the author’s observations. It will even out when the dollar declines and/or the rupee rises sufficiently that workers are not automatically wealthier than others merely for being in America. It happened with European competition in the 1960s, with Japanese workers in the 1990s, and it will happen with Indian and Chinese workers.
When the Internet first made highly skilled developers in India available to the world, western businesses got a huge bargain. There’s a saying that you don’t get something for nothing; maybe you can occasionally when taking advantage of changing circumstances — but not for long.
The issue of lying about credentials and experience is another thing. I have heard of bright people who lie about their experience to get jobs, and then try to learn quickly enough to become skilled before the employer realizes he’d been taken. (I don’t do that, so I resent the unfair competition. But to be honest, I think smart people _should_ be hired even if they don’t already have experience with every tool the employer is using.)
August 15, 2007 at 10:54 am
India is a developing country & the incompetence of certain individuals shouldn’t be used as a scale in gauging the efficiency of a whole nation. The people who are lamenting here about the incompetence of Indian developers’ didn’t have the brains or the skill set to identify the right people who can do their job. Good developer’s don’t come cheap. You guyz don’t want to employ u’r own so called GOOD DEVELOPERS and want to save on money & out-source your work where it can be done at a lower rate & then you grumble ??? Clean up your act, before u criticize a whole nation.
August 15, 2007 at 11:59 am
Truer words have never been spoken
August 15, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Mr.,
THIS IS INTENTIONAL BLOG PUBLISHED ON 15TH AUGUST (INDIA INDEPENDENCE DAY) BY A VERY VERY FRUSTETED PERSON.
FROM HIS PROFILE, I GOT THE FOLLOWING LINE, WHICH SAYS EVERYTHING…….
“He originally hails from Kashmir and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.”
SO, GUYS IGNORE HIM AND ALL OTHERS. BETTER IMPROVE YOUR CAREER/SKILLS THAN WRITING ABOUT OTHERS.
August 15, 2007 at 12:23 pm
My Take.
I think it is or fault. By that I mean the fault of the domestic programmers /project managers/analysts who do not deliver on 50% of the projects that they tackle. Granted, the majority of outsourced projects fail. However, we don’t exactly make a compelling quality argument to counter it.
The other piece is that we have a bunch of incompetent CTOs who do not have the ability to judge to competence of an IT organization whether locally or abroad. In fact, I just finished doing an analysis of an it org at a fortune 500 company. They spent 2 years and many millions doing a site redesign. I could have made those changes in a couple of months by myself. Their rollout of those changes were ill timed, ill tested, and ill advised. Yet they still try to claim it as a success. Frankly, if I were at the top and saw those types of results, I would wonder why not outsource it. It can’t get much worse.
Clean up our own house and the problem will go away.
August 15, 2007 at 12:34 pm
You made yourself look like an idiot by mentioning the last point in you article.
I would like to say that, its not worth criticizing if someone wants to learn new technology and posts a question on the forums. That does not mean that he is a bad programmer. I am a development lead and i have seen that people very good theoretically are dumb at implementing the solutions, Whats the use?
Remember Google, Yahoo to name a few…. have evolved from a garage and where started by 2 men army. The computers where way slower then PII.
BTW did you loose your job with another Indian?
August 15, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Aresenalist,
Nice one. Another Indian in the UK who supports Arsenal (me too! me too!). Come on!
On a side note, I am one of those Indians you talk about and I will take you any day in a code contest and “talk about a wide range of languages and tools without too many awkward moments”.
But then again, I am an entrepreneur and not one of the desk jockeys.
August 15, 2007 at 1:20 pm
An excellent article, although I don’t like to generalize the problem to all the developers in India.
I am currently working in a company that outsourced its ERP project from India. And I got to say that the level of quality for this project VERY VERY POOR. I was able to interact with some of the developers and to be frank with you almost all of graduated from NON-IT collages. Till now I couldn’t understand how my company did trust a civil and electrical engineers to write their ERP. Here are some problems that I am facing whenever I need to modify the application:
1. Bad database design.
2. Bad designing and coding.
3. The language API is rarely used.
4. Lack of testing.
5. Insufficient documentation.
And much much more.
August 15, 2007 at 3:14 pm
None of the above discussion talks about how to help those who don’t write good code. I don’t like differenciating people based on their origin or any other demographic for that matter. Not to offend any one but it really helps if competent people come forward and use the blogs/websites to publish bad/good/best practices so that developers can learn lessions from bad practices and adapt good practices and try to improve their coding practices and techniques. Remember, if you teach 10 people, they will teach other 100 and they in turn will pass it to 1000 other people. Knowledge is there to share and not to keep it safe with us and secure our jobs, the more knowledgible you become, the more challenging oppertunities you get.
August 15, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I wrote a response to this article on my blog here:
http://www.geeksnotnerds.com/flyswat/indian-outsourcing-so-what
It offers my take on the situation, as well as advice on how to not lose your job to offshoring.
August 16, 2007 at 12:06 am
Well indeed a good post from a looser from the industry. It proves the industry is growing and when any industry grows some bane also comes along with it. Problem lies within the mindset/perspective of the investors not in the quality of the developers. if at all we consider it as a problem then the problem is ivestments are in wrong hands who don’t even know where to invest.
August 16, 2007 at 1:18 am
I 100% agree with arsenalist
August 16, 2007 at 2:11 am
Generally generalization is bad. But in this case - I totally agree. I have to “fight” with Indian programmers every single day. Some day I’ll get crazy or just leave my job. My Indian coworkers (that’s the group I want to generalize) use OO language like procedural one, preferred data type is string - it can handle anything - a number, a date or a whole record separated with comma or pipe. They don’t use basic language features like enums, inheritance, polimorphism, layer separation, DB transactions, etc…. I think they event have problem with ‘what an object instance is’ while all the stuff is made public static (in OO language).
The only thing they are doing efectivelly is code reuse - copy-paste code reuse.
Sad, but true :(
August 16, 2007 at 3:49 am
Hay Duede, you might have lost your job because of highly compitent and inteligent indian.
Do you know the fact work is migrated only because of Quality, lower prices is secound matter.
your talks seems to be unmatured.
you need to know few things bout India, and feel proud to be indian
FACTS TO MAKE EVERY Indian PROUD
Q. Who is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems?
A. Vinod Khosla
A. Who is the creator of Pentium chip (needs no introduction as 90% of the today’s computers run on it)?
A. Vend Dam
A. Who is the third richest man on the world?
A. According to the latest report on Fortune Magazine, it is Asia Premix, who is the CEO of Wiper Industries. The Sultan of Brunei is at 6 the position now.
A. Who is the founder and creator of Hotmail (Hotmail is world’s No.1 web based email program)?
A. Sabeer Bhatia
Q. Who is the president of AT & T-Bell Labs (AT & T-Bell Labs is the creator of program languages such as C, C++, Unix to name a few)?
A. Arun Netravalli
Q. Who is the GM of Hewlett Packard?
A. Rajiv Gupta
Q. Who is the new MTD (Microsoft Testing Director) of Windows 2000, responsible to iron out all initial problems?
A. Sanjay Tejwrika
Q. Who are the Chief Executives of CitiBank, Mckensey & Stanchart?
A. Victor Menezes, Rajat Gupta, and Rana Talwar.
Q. We Indians are the wealthiest among all ethnic groups in America, even faring better than the whites and the natives.
There are 3.22 millions of Indians in USA (1.5% of population). YET,
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are Indians.
Some of the following facts may be known to you. These facts were recently published in a German magazine, which deals with WORLD HISTORY FACTS ABOUT INDIA.
1. India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
2. India invented the Number system. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.
3. The world’s first University was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4 th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
4. According to the Forbes magazine, Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software.
5. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans.
6. Although western media portray modern images of India as poverty striken and underdeveloped through political corruption, India was once the richest empire on earth.
7. The art of navigation was born in the river Sindh 5000 years ago. The very word “Navigation” is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH.
8. The value of pi was first calculated by Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is now known as the Pythagorean Theorem. British scholars have last year (1999) officially published that Budhayan’s works dates to the 6 th Century which is long before the European mathematicians.
9. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India. Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11th Century; the largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Indians used numbers as big as 10 53.
10. According to the Gemmological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds to the world.
11. USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century-old suspicion amongst academics that the pioneer of wireless communication was Professor Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.
12. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.
13. Chess was invented in India.
14. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted surgeries like cesareans, cataract, fractures and urinary stones. Usage of anaesthesia was well known in ancient India.
15. When many cultures in the world were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu Valley (Indus Valley Civilisation).
16. The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100 BC.
Quotes about India.
We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.
Albert Einstein.
India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.
Mark Twain.
If there is one place on the face of earth where all dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.
French scholar Romain Rolland.
India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.
Hu Shih
(former Chinese ambassador to USA)
ALL OF THE ABOVE IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG, THE LIST COULD BE ENDLESS.
BUT, if we don’t see even a glimpse of that great India in the India that we see today, it clearly means that we are not working up to our potential; and that if we do, we could once again be an evershining and inspiring country setting a bright path for rest of the world to follow.
I hope you enjoyed it and work towards the welfare of INDIA.
Say proudly, I AM AN INDIAN.
August 16, 2007 at 3:55 am
The following are the Country skill Rankings (NASSCOM)
RDBMS Concepts
India 48%
United States 22%
Romania 4%
Russian Federation 3%
Ukraine 3%
SQL (ANSI) Fundamentals
India 60%
United States 14%
Russian Federation 5%
Ukraine 5%
Romania 3%
MS SQL Server 2000 Programming
India 33%
United States 32%
Romania 7%
Russian Federation 5%
Ukraine 4%
DB2 Programming
India 71%
United States 18%
Philippines 1%
Romania 1%
United Kingdom
( Great Britain ) 1%
Oracle PL/SQL
India 50%
it is just a little information
Be Proud to be an Indian
August 16, 2007 at 4:58 am
Every bad situation can be a silver lining to some people.
We had a SI who came to us 3 years ago to implement a large IT system on a turnkey basis.
We provided a price but the SI said it was too expensive. The SI got a group people from you know where because they quoted a much much lower price.
2 years later, the SI came back to us and wanted us to rebuilt the same IT system.
Because the project was seriously overdue and the SI was facing a huge LD (liquidated damages) suit, we got brought in at full price (we usually give huge discounts on our rates) on a 1 year basis. Huge bonuses!!!
So, thank you to the Sanjays and Prashants!
August 16, 2007 at 6:54 am
I agree!!! They smell very very bad!!!
August 16, 2007 at 7:19 am
Looks like this article was written with sour grapes on the mind..
Get real, there are good developers and bad developers everywhere.
You worked with bad developers ? so sad !! Who has’nt ?
You have to fight with indian programmers everyday ? Maybe you should ask your global sourcing VP why they did not do their homework.
An Infosys or a Satyam does not mean that you will get quality work, serious programmers in India dont work for the big fishes, maybe your company should stop being a cheapo, you just got what your company paid for !!
Accompany your global sourcing team the next time they decide to outsource something and see how the decision is made, do they give a shit about the firefighting you might have to do ? All they care about is the great billing rate they are getting…
If there is such a multitude of bad work then sit back and relax becuase the indian IT industry will be forced to shut down. Nobody can survive for long by proving a low cost but bad quality service
I’d like to see you compete with the best in North America and India before you think you are qualified to write such pretentious bullshit.
Geez, what a loser
August 16, 2007 at 9:25 am
Well much has been said but as someone working in India’s Top 5 I have seen much of bad code myself - though the one being outsourced is to share the blame equally with the outsourcer going by what Bjarne Stroustrup has to say
People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now. They don’t want inconvenience, don’t want to learn new ways of interacting with their computers, don’t want delays in delivery, and don’t want to pay extra for quality (unless it’s obvious up front–and often not even then). And without real changes in user behavior, software suppliers are unlikely to change.
August 17, 2007 at 4:00 am
My friend, for an Indian you sure don’t know much about the IT industry. I have been outsourcing all my IT business to India for more than 5 years and as a result I have built a very successful IT company that delivers projects that exceed my client’s expectations.
Sure, I have to work hard as the Project Manager to keep my teams on track, but that’s why I get paid the big bucks, isn’t it? Even so, my fees to my clients are on average one third to half what my competitors can offer. In just 5 years I have become one of the dominant IT companies in Thailand.
Why don’t I use Thai coders and designers? Because they are just not as good as the Indians. The Thais are difficult to deal with and manage. They also think they are very good, when the truth is many of them are rank amateurs.
Outsourcing is not easy. Finding professional partners in India takes time. Then you have to build up a good relationship of trust and competence. And I ALWAYS have to watch their work very carefully and steer them in the right path or they will just do what they THINK is right, instead of what the client wants.
Despite this, outsourcing can be very profitable. Sure, some local coders and designers might lose their jobs, but in the long run the IT business is better as a result of outsourcing. I wouldn’t employ a team in my office again. Far better to let the Indian partners take care of staffing and the grunt work.
August 17, 2007 at 11:33 am
Wow, someone actually said what I was thinking. My only problem with outsourcing overseas is that we are sacrificing our economy (read jobs, money) overseas, just to save a couple bucks. I have worked with developers in Canada, US, Ukraine, Israel and India, and found that there are good and bad developers.
Outsourcing overseas requires added level of project management, brown dollars (no pun intended), that adds costs to the development cycle in terms of your time spent. When you have a team of guys sitting in the same office in North York, there isn’t that day delay in getting shit done.
Keep jobs and money here in Canada!!
August 18, 2007 at 7:21 am
I’m an Indian-American developer-turned-manager and I agree in part with what you’ve written. (I note here that I’ve set up and managed outsourced software groups in Vancouver, Bangalore, Shanghai, and Budapest–but that the majority of my groups are still in the US.)
By the way, I tend to strongly discourage the firms that I work in from simply buying offshore labor resources because they can. I despise companies that think labor is merely a commodity–all too often they find that capital and management (the other two members of the standard triumvirate) can also be commodified.
First, a shared annoyance: the pollution of advanced newsgroups with newbie posts. As others have noted, this has happened since time immemorial. What makes it unusually annoying _to me_ nowadays, is the poorly written questions, typified by the AOL-speak (eg. “need u 2 help urself”) that has no place outside of an SMS conversation.
Most of the responses to this post that you’re seeing from other Indians are instinctively defensive–that’s completely understandable.
The responses that you won’t see in writing, but that you _will_ hear if you talk to capable Indian developers in person, is that larger and larger numbers of their colleagues perform at below-average levels. This is _not_ due to some innate inability to perform, but due rather to the failure of management in their companies to devote the time and money to building their skills.
I conclude that the flooding of the Indian market with fast-buck artists will continue for some time, and that non-Indian firms who choose an Indian outsourcing partner based largely on price will be burned over and over again because of this. After being burnt once or twice, they will wrongly conclude that Indian outsourcing is crap, and will
As other posters have noted, if you plan well, choose well, and pay well, you are going to find excellent value in your Indian outsourcing partner.
August 19, 2007 at 1:34 am
There is a saying that if you pay peanuts you will only get monkeys.There are good Indian programmers and bad Indian programmers. To pay peanuts and expect the supermen to come and do the job for you is ridiculous. You will get excellent Indian programmers, you just have to pay higher.
ps:You may be an Indian, just that I doubt that.
August 19, 2007 at 1:35 am
It’s funny to me to see people like you complain about outsourced Indian developers because at the end of the day, you get what you pay for. You paid for cheap Indian labor. You didn’t pay for the good kind, nor the high-quality kind. You, or your employer (who I think might have replaced you with another Indian) decided to be cheap and thought you could save money by outsourcing.
People buy cheap cars, food, furniture, guitars, televisions, computers etc. and if it turns out bad, well, “You get what you paid for.” Make it about Indians, and India sucks and Indians are horrible.
I don’t care if you are an Indian or not, this is racism.
August 19, 2007 at 1:56 am
There are good and bad Indian developers. A lot of them are really good. SlideShare (www.slideshare.net) is a good product that was _developed_ in India recently. I’d be willing to bet anything that the quality of the code and products would increase exponentially in the years to come. It’d be India that produces the next Google, Amazon and Skype.
August 19, 2007 at 2:13 am
Everybody complains. And then they complain some more. Why not actually do something about it ? You are an Indian. So why not start a company of your own that only hires the “smart” people ? Or maybe collect a group of people who you think are smart and start a company with them. I have no idea as to what the scene is in the so called tech powerhouses of India because I am a student. But I do have one complaint of my own actually. Why is it that none of these behemoths have a product of their own that they market all over the world ?
August 19, 2007 at 2:50 am
As an Indian, don’t you feel that part of the traditional Indian culture is an inbuilt desire to speak up the moment something is not quite right? Having read that sample mailing list post, thats the sense I get from it. Its not so much that the developer is incompentent as that they ran into a stumbling block that they felt should have been addressed in some way either by more accessible documentation on the road towards installation, of the important points, or a better structure/layout or design architecture. In this sense, tagging along the IT company shows he is taking a stand, driving a stake in the ground and improving the situation by making noise about it.
I agree with your overall sentiments though about the lack of a general computing understanding and ability to dig deep into details, on ones own. As another side observation I’ve noticed that the Windows platform + visual basic way of doing things, which I consider surface level compared to the Platform SDK / C Language and GNU/Linux, is very prevalent amongst developers from India, perhaps reflecting the schooling they go through there. This is just a hunch but perhaps MSFT marketing promotos the office suite so much globally, that Windows is seen as a godsend and the way towards business success.
August 19, 2007 at 10:13 am
Rogers Communications has recently started outsourcing IT development to TCS and I happened to do a code review and was surprised to poor coding standards all the way from the generated HTML to SQL queries. What did we expect at $20/hour?
August 19, 2007 at 11:34 am
The onus is on the *buyer* to ensure that they are getting quality work from their vendors. Incentive is cheap in India => it’s easy to get highly qualified developers for salaries comparable to that in the US *if* you know where to look.
August 19, 2007 at 11:34 am
myself have worked in infosys and hated it for lot of similar things…but hey picture is not that bad…I don’t agree with author at all..There are issues..competition..business..recruitment..so you always have some “sanjays and prashnaths” {as someone said}in your team…the smarter guys move out from such firms to niche companies or move onsite and relax :) and become onsite coordinators….after getting to know all this picture you must think now…how much more work some good offshore programmer has to do save lot of peer’s and managers faces ..and leave the company eventually
August 19, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Some companies are grabbing every graduate they can get from India’s IIT, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology, and putting them to work as programmers regardless of their major. As a side effect many workers are not natural programmers, and thus take time to re-tool their skill set. The author’s frustration should not stem from cultural or educational differences of Indian workers, but from these companies who have locked themselves into a workforce arms race. As engineering and biotech firms grow in India they should hire away these non-programmers an the quality of programming should improve.
August 19, 2007 at 7:00 pm
[...] Indian outsourcing is killing IT The mailing lists were never easy to read through but if a man put his mind to it and used the delete button swiftly […] [...]
August 19, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Hmmm… interesting post. Maybe you should have done some grammar and spell checking prior to posting the blog. While I agree with main arguments of your rant, I cannot but feel a bit irritated by the apparent racist taunts inherent in the language that you have used. Just because you are an Indian does not give you any divine, irrevocable right to lambaste Indians in such a crude manner. The blog would have achieved its target of presenting the true facts of the I.T. industry much better without the distracting anti-Indian-ness theme of your tirade.
And yeah, I am an Indian.
August 19, 2007 at 10:01 pm
#44 sounds like complete bullshit to me. Is there a source for those figures other than your ass?
August 19, 2007 at 10:16 pm
TaTa Consultancy is going to ruin you. They do software engineering right.
August 19, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I fully agree with Arsenalist. I had my first encounter with Indian engineers when I worked for a very reputable US company four years ago on a joint embedded software project, and even though their resumes are very impressive: double-digit years of coding experience, ‘expert-level’ in multiple programming languages, and mathematics is ‘nothing’ to them, but curious enough their real worth are roughly 50% of what they claim they are in the resumes: For example some of them just couldn’t write a damn sub 5-KLoc C program without blatant errors. Basic defensive coding skills like checking for NULL pointer when malloc’ing are mostly absent. The consequences are now we have stopped all outsourcings to India and moved everything back in-house again, there is practically no cost savings in view of the shit that we need to take care of. I need to point out that definitely there are competent and bright programmers in India, but they demand salaries that are on-par and more than equivalent programmers from north America, which completely defeats the point of outsourcing the projects.
Btw, Re: Vijay Bhasker Reddy CH
Almost ALL the persons you mentioned are NOT in India (except possibly ‘the world’s third richest man’, fine). What to be proud of when all of them are helping other countries to grow? That further proves Arsenalist’s point: There are not many competent programmers back in the country.
August 19, 2007 at 11:08 pm
I agree for the most part to what you say. I myself manage few programming forums, and even I see the same kind of questions that you’re talking about.
The problem I think is because the Indians are very new to the Internet forums, and they lack basic forum etiquettes. They never bother to quote to what they are replying, they use txt speak in forum postings and Emails as they do in their cellphones! This has been same since a couple of years that I have been around in online forums, and I don’t think its going to change in near future either(unless the education system and IT companies in India evolves to become more mature).
Most of the engineering graduates in India just dream of getting a job in one of the well known IT companies. The Indian IT companies hire people regardless of their branch of engineering. Some of the so called ‘Top IT companies’ in India even hire mechanical engineers for software jobs! All they require is a 60 or 70% aggregate in their graduation. So you can imagine the kind of work they could deliver.
In my opinion, the Indian software industry is pretty immature. There are good companies and developers in India too, but thats still a very small portion of the whole Indian outsourcing market. So, you need to be smart enough in finding the right people to outsource your work.
By the way, I’m an Indain too.
August 20, 2007 at 12:27 am
Maybe you should just watch football matches, because I can clearly see thats the only thing you are good at other than mindless rantings.
> I realize that I’m generalizing
So why generalize, why stereotype?
> try posting an ad for a development project on Craiglist and ask for
> a quote
I thought you said you were smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.
> but if you Nabble through the Maven, IBatis, Struts etc user lists
> you’ll encounter posts
Do you see only Indian names? You see what you want to see. You decided on having a mudslinging session with India and picked up those posts which had Indian OP’s.
BS is everywhere and you have just made an ass claiming that it exists only in India.
And don’t you dare call yourself an Indian; because you are _NOT_.India does not need suckers like you…
Regards,
STS.
August 20, 2007 at 12:50 am
The incompetent people asking silly questions on mailing lists are not limited to any particular country. A lot of English-speaking “grunt” workers come from India, and therefore it’s natural that the country contributes a significant number of noobs. At the same time, some of the most competent workers and entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) are of Indian origin. The Indian IT industry didn’t rise just because of lower wages and English-language skills; these two were important factors, but another important factor is that India has many competent, knowledgeable people
Of course, there are a number of idiots, too — but these (like competent people) are not limited to India. Search around, and you’ll find an equal number of Chinese and Americans asking RTFMworthy questions.
If you think all Indian IT workers are “narrow-minded developers getting paid the minimum wage and communicating 95% of the time over MSN”, you seriously need to get out of your cabin and have a look around.
> And yes, I’m an Indian.
That doesn’t give you any more credibility. The post still classifies as gross, under-researched generalization. It’s like saying that all Americans are stupid because many of them support Bush or find Conservapedia useful.
P.S. I am an American working in India.
August 20, 2007 at 1:21 am
I can see why the taste left by this post due to it’s generalization is a little bitter for many people but that doesn’t negate the author’s correct observations. Indian devs just don’t appear to be of quality when working with them on outsourced projects. I’ve heard this complaint from many people in various industries and where there’s smoke there’s fire. Peronally, I once worked with a veteran Indian developer with 6 years of experience who didn’t know what a switch statement was.
“Black people like rap music”. Is it a generalization? Yes. Is it true? Generally. Is it racist? Definitely not.
August 20, 2007 at 7:15 am
Its an open economy and you can’t blame this kind of behaviour. People are always looking to make money. What is needed is better control over posts to sites such as craiglist. A simple rating system would help to root out these replies. Also anyone who wants a competitive team of people shouldn’t be looking at such replies at all.
PS-MANU rules.
August 20, 2007 at 9:42 am
Well, there are problems every where.. What is important is can we make the problem as our opportunity and get the things done.. May be a new industry or business may emerge. It is easy to comment and generalize.
August 22, 2007 at 11:32 pm
what is a POJO?
August 23, 2007 at 12:24 am
The last comment has summed up the post. lol
But I guess it has got a lot to do with the population. In india you will find high number of bad developers as compared to any other country in the world. But the no. of good ones will also exceed any country in the world.
August 23, 2007 at 12:45 am
“Since I’m moving to India, and probably going to start one of those ’smaller companies’, does anybody have some ideas on how to attract the ’smart’ people?”
I am not from India I am from Sri Lanka (Small Island just below India). Here is what I think you should do. By the way I am no business men. just a developer and a student.
Create a good image for your company in local job market. Pay them well. Invest on training (Don’t assume that universities teach everything because they don’t). Give good working environments. Create good career development path within company (Good developers don’t want to be code monkeys in their entire life time).
Encourage them to spend more time on planning, designing and testing instead of coding, coding and coding. Consider planning, designing, testing, and research time when creating time budget. When schedules are too tight you can’t deliver quality and good developers who care about quality will not stay with you.
But if you do all that your costs will be higher than other cheap outsourcing companies. Your projects will take longer. So you will have to find other ways to compete with other service companies instead just time and price. May be marketing and branding.
August 23, 2007 at 1:07 am
Interesting article!! Only to a certain extent it might be true!!
Indian outsourcing is NOT killing IT!!! No WaY!!
August 23, 2007 at 2:13 am
Honestly, I tend to agree with the author’s opinions. I don’t agree with the generalizations though. I think the opinions can also be applied to the testing (QA) field.
I work for a software product company in India and have been on several interview panels for recruitement to both the quality and development roles. Over the years, I have realised that
1. Getting a good quality guy who has the enthusiasm to delve deep into his work and to learn the unexplored technologies is extremely tough. They simply are not available out there. It is these kind of people that software development requires.
2. There is a general perception in the indian public that software jobs are extremely easy, and comfortable; that software jobs pay highly for very little effort; that they can be entered into by any crap-mind that does not distinguish even a certification exam from another as long as it is from microsoft alone or sun alone. People think that getting trained in a testing tool can fetch them a Rs 20K per month job. There are very many street-end coaching shops coming up that are cashing in on this gullibility. These shops teach just the syntax and button pressing. They do not bother about frameworks or concept-orientation (such as test-driven development, pattern design, usability).
3. Project based companies need to show people on their rolls even to be able to tout their capacity to convince prospects that they can complete a give target. They need numbers (of heads on their roll).
Combine facts 2 and 3 and you end up seeing questions that the author has seen on some xyz website. A vast section of the programmers out there are in this unfortunate category. This section of the plebe hates to learn by doing-it-yourselves or by experimentation of by self reading. To them a coaching institute is the ultimate destination. Give them time and you can see social/commerce/art graduates without any technical bent of mind turning ‘managers’. With all due respect to those streams of study, my strong feeling has been that their entry into the technical sector must happen only if they are found to be thinking competently well, on par with their technical counterparts.
As an Indian, what I am afraid is about the state of this section of people when the times get more challenging. It is not wrong to ask questions on the web. Neither is placing one’s identity. But looking for easy answers must be done away with and people must use facilities like google as the last resource. Can anyone ever imagine a person operating on his patients after referring the web to learn about basic surgical terminology? If people want easy answers, they can always get those from the web. But whether one will have a chance or whether one will be in a position to acccess the web at all times of crisis is the question.
Coming to the author’s basic arguement: IMHO, Indian courtesy must be not equated with begging. One entices an entire nation into the debate if its very cultural pillars are questioned.
If I were the author, I would’ve contributed my little to restore the honor taken away by these bloggers. I would have taken pride in informing those that I can and need, that they are potraying the country in a bad shape by blogging basic questions and by pretentious behaviors at work. More so if I were an Indian. If I cannot, I will leave them to their fate. If I noticed a few natives of another country doing this, I would’nt blame the entire country. We did not have merely one country working for the betterment of this planet. Every country including mine contributed to the larger well being of the race.
August 23, 2007 at 3:39 am
I actually think the problem are not indians or any incompetent person from any nationality. The problem are managers or stake-holders that have no clue of what they want, nor what they are talking about. These people will only care for money. They would buy shit if someone told them that was hot. Since they have no knowledge of their field, they won’t see that they are paying for crap (at a low price, though).
I have this problem in web development. My (soon to by ex-)boss makes me treat with incompetent “graphic designers” that say that can make websites. What they mean is that they know how to press the export button in photoshop or imageready. Don’t tell them anything about CSS, usability, information architecture, standards, etc. Actually, don’t even ask them for “graphic design”, since what they simply know is how to play with photoshop; they have no idea about colors, type fonts, etc.
They are from latin america and for my boss they are great because they are cheap… The problem is, I get a chunk of spaguetti HTML with almost no functionality and my boss thinks that I just need to minutes to put it online because they built the website for me, when I actually have to almost rebuild that crap to split HTML and CSS, add PHP, and cry because the organisation of the screen is crap and there are typos in those texts embedded in .gif’s and .jpg’s.
August 23, 2007 at 3:50 am
Just one example (it is not generalization)
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=499980
August 23, 2007 at 4:54 am
Hi..
The points you have specified , though seem rough but they are bitter truths. I myself saw many people who don’t want to welcome or at least look for another probabilities except the language or platform they are working on. And coming to the whole IT people in India.. it’s common like every part of the world you will be finding a mixed cream of people.
Any way.. I feel it will be flaming the people moods.. :)
Have a nice time!
August 23, 2007 at 7:16 am
Arsenalist believe’s in the ‘whine & dine’ culture. Whine all the time (its just the moaning that pisses people off) and dine with the money saved because of cheap Indian labor.
(In very Indian voice/tone) - Thank you, please come again.
Cheers folks, ignore the Arsenalist fool.
August 23, 2007 at 7:28 am
Well the reality is, the US business milieu is one of hating labor so much that they’re willing to run the risk of sacrificing their businesses to these outsourcing companies rather than do any of the following:
1) pay a gainful wage that places people solidly in the middle class.
2) instantiate incentives which reward deriving profit by creating value for the market, rather than through a cost reduction that destroys the long-term health of the company-i.e. dealing with these companies.
3) develop a culture of craftsmanship and apprenticeship where talent is cultivated within a company over years, and knowledge is transfered from master to newbie in an context of long-term trust, fair-dealing, good-will, and an assurance that the company believes even one sentence of it’s own HR-generated “you’re family” bullshit.
But that’s never going to happen in the US. Ever.
And the reason for that is, in the US (in case you don’t live here) business people are , in a nutshell, drunk blind with a strain of greed that is indistinguishable from sociopathy, and the government isn’t going to punish any of this. Illegal aliens, Enron, Anderson-Arthur, Global Crossing, falsification of unemployment data, concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, the destruction of the middle class, it’s all one thing- greed.
One of the roles of government is supposedly to redirect and rectify bad behaviour through incentives so the vices (remember them?) don’t destroy the nation.
Fat chance.
It’s the culture here to get ahead by screwing everyone and everything in an orgy of valueless and lawlessness. It’s expected and it’s approved of. That’s exactly how business is done in America.
So we have the spectacle of Bill Gates getting up in front of Congress and swearing that he can’t find educated Americans to work for M$, while the real unemployment rate of American programmers - including those who have simply been driven from the industry forever - is double digit.
The reality is, Sun, IBM, MS and all the rest systematically drive out and deny jobs to tens of thousands of perfectly qualified programmers each year, forcing them out of their profession. They collude with the government to keep their victims numbers off the unemployment index by conveniently ceasing to count them as unemployed after their first 6 months of joblessness.
In the mean time, as was joked about the movie Office Space as early as 1999, they hire 1st year graduates to take their places (incompetently and with predictable results) and outsource everything else the bullshit degree graduates that populate the outsourcing companies.
Work in America is a scam, overseen by the likes of Elaine Chao, and everyone here knows it. Your company’s management would rather fire everyone, pocket their 2 million “cost reduction” bonus, like Home Depot, then get fired by the board when things start falling apart than even THINK about developing value. IN fact, all that stuff I talked about above, those readers in management immediately started sneering as soon as they read those words.
America is run by coke-snorting egomaniacs aided and abetted by constitutionally amoral ideologues in the government who really believe that the best possible world in one in which a tiny minority own and control everything and profit is derived the way Haliburton derives it- from monopoly and forced payment from taxpayers to the governmentally well connected .
That’s business!
But there’s a thing called reality, and the reality is- America will lose its leadership under this regime. Go ahead and fuck over everyone so you can keep your trophy wife in shopping sprees. Go ahead and disincentivize advanced learning and the pursuit of excellence and the creation of value- all that’s going to happen is what happened to Rome. And no, you won’t be able to ignore that by snorting another line of coke.
Dirtbags.
Isn’t that clever?
Have you ever noticed that, while America drug-tests its baseball players, who hold no-one’s 401 stock, they refuse to instantiate mandatory drug testing for the CXOs, boards and corporate officers of their publicly traded companies, who hold the entire nation’s
The overarching reality is,
August 23, 2007 at 8:59 am
You are a person with disturbed mind. Why you are in the field of IT I don’t know.But I am sure 100% that you do not have any knowledge about Indian IT.
August 23, 2007 at 9:02 am
[...] Arsenalist make a blanket statement about the programmers from India in his article on outsourcing . Need not get offended by the issue raised. Instead one should ponder if he makes a good [...]
August 23, 2007 at 9:41 am
ha ha, i think there are a few things at work here -
1. outsourcing is usually a nightmare, especially when you have cultural differences with people you don’t know.
2. it would seem that the way of learning something in india is different from what we do in the US. i haven’t quite pinned it down but it seems more methodical, (and to us) at the expense of the big picture.
3. good point about too many freshers. experience matters more than origin.
4. indian english can sound too formal or totally informal, or sometimes broken.
5. software projects are messy anyway; at least all the interesting ones are. developers aren’t the only ones who lose focus on quality control.
6. requirements change all the time and you really need to maintain communication
7. it’s contradictory to want to move very quickly with your product and also keep your remote team up to date. there are too many barriers - time zone, layers of managers, phone/IM limitations.
the best experience i’ve had with working remotely has been in hiring on permanent staff that lives overseas. the paperwork is minimal and they report directly to you.
August 23, 2007 at 11:15 am
I think you are absolutely right and someone said about percentage that indians are more in number but percentage of incompetent developers is the same, I think this means to say since we have in india more people so we are allowed to create more garbage.
August 23, 2007 at 11:20 am
Hey dudes,
I guess… max of you people doesnt understand business and how it works.
Anyways, generalising any issue is not a good thing. (it shows your own narrow mindedness).
So guys.. stop replying to this blog…. and get onto your work.
Cheers
August 23, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hi Guys ,
I am also from India and I admit that some people are crap and doing crap and most of them are from project based BIG Giant…
But the practical thing is that ….if we going to develop this kind of projects and our slaries will rise like this then sooner or later the work will again go back to USA…
so please guys do work hard and put your best efforts .
Manish
August 23, 2007 at 4:58 pm
The programmers I describe below, are white American - so what does that say?
In my day job, I am maintaining (and enhancing) a distributed system that was written by apparently Cobol programmers who switched to Java rather suddenly last year.
- apparently did not hear of functional programming, so 600-800 line sub routines with if-else-while nesting up to 7-8 levels deep. very hard to follow the logic.
- no knowledge of exceptions, so return codes were used.
- hand rolled socket server because application EJB servers were not on their radar.
- a pseudo “object-oriented” database layer with all sorts of design problems and takes 5-10 times the LOC (that I have written in a simple database access class to show them a better way).
Their output in terms of Lines Of Code is phenomenal but it is a maintainence nightmare.
August 23, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I have had several experiences with Indian outsourcing companies over the fast few years, none of them positive. You are generalizing, but you aren’t far off the mark. Indian developers are usually hard working and well meaning, but just don’t have the experience.
Incompetence is everywhere (including North America) - but the root problem is that companies are handing over the development of critical applications to these overseas shops in order to save on initial development costs. The outsourcing shops promise to deliver a great application at low cost, but often the result is frequently of extremely low quality, if not a complete disaster.
Recently one of my coworkers was forced to “oversee” a major offshore development effort; he comes to me nearly every other day with another scary story about something he found while reviewing the code that was handed over (code that has already been reviewed internally). Really basic mistakes that show a fundamental misunderstanding of basic concepts. Like a base class that refers directly to its own subclasses (instead of via polymorphism). A recent code handover did not even compile. This is how we’re supposed to save money? If they can’t get the basics right, how are they supposed to get the subtle details like making software easy to monitor in production?
The main problem is that the “senior” people in charge at these overseas shops usually lack the real-world experience necessary to produce lasting software - not just software that works, but that will be easily maintained and operated over the long run. It takes experience to know how to develop robust software, not just a few months of training or certification. Furthermore, because these shops are new, relatively inexperienced people are promoted to higher positions with greater influence much more quickly than they would in a mature software development organization. (the same things apply to the ex-COBOL developers mentioned above)
And to those who think that the outsourcing companies will improve as they gain experience over the years; while this may be true to a degree, there is a difference between good experience and bad experience.
August 23, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Just to clarify my previous comment - this isn’t a matter of race; these aren’t problems characteristic only of Indian offshore companies, just problems with the offshore development model in general.
August 24, 2007 at 8:58 am
‘thatconfusedindian’ got it right. Probably the only reason you came to India was for cheap labor. So you got to see only the cheap stuff! Surprised? Back home, if you were looking for a $2000 car, what would you expect; a Porche?
Besides if you just happened by chance to bump into a quality company with top class people (purely accidental, since you were only looking for cheap), would you pay US rates for them as you would a US company? I think you are just all confused and a bit of a Hypocrite as well! Well, you are Indian after all!!!! I’m an Indian too :)
August 24, 2007 at 11:30 am
Hey CRB(#60), I didn’t know IITians work as programmer. Are you in your minds?? DO you have any bloody idea what IITS/IITians are and what kind of work they do? This shows your knowledge about India and Indian IT. YOU JUST WANT TO CRITICISE THATS IT.
August 24, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Height is measued from top to bottom not from bottom to bottom . WHat are you trying to prove by picking up few bad examples.WHen there are good comments from people like Bill Gates they are interpreted the way (see comments 4m whatever (#80)) that serves your purpose of criticising.
Some of these even don’t have correct facts/knowledge about IT in India and thinaks that IITians from India work for offshore service provider shops(#44).Please before hating find a good reason to hate.
I have 5 years of experience in IT. I work for one of the top most companies in India.And I don’t only provide services I provide solutions(and so my company) to my client. My code doesn’t have such basic flaws as not cheking for null or not using suitable patterns whereever applicable.My client can’t imagine to live without us.
It seems the incompetency is not the issue, outsourcing is not the issues, issue is India?? right? And if this is the case than outsourcing is no yardstick.
Who are you to criticise Indian people, you are no one.DO you know more than Albert Einstein???
Albert Einstein: “We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!” </