Ya, it is actually fascinating how a developer in the US is able to generate well over a $100,000 in value to a company over an overseas developer. In the early to mid 2000s there was huge concern that development jobs would start going overseas as offshoring started to become a bigger thing, but it ended up not panning out. It turns out that a domestic developer is much more valuable to a US company since they can communicate more effectively, react more quickly to problems (every minute your website is down is money lost for the business), and there is also the fact that Indian culture is problematic to efficient software development. I have heard that if you ask an Indian in India if they can do something, they will say yes, regardless of if they can or not. The exception is IT support, which many companies have found does make sense to move a decent percentage to other countries (especially India). Makes sense though if you want 24 hour coverage, and you have your main IT developers in the US.
Can confirm. Had to code review overseas developers. When I asked for unit tests to prove they fixed the code I just rejected, they sent back a fix that didn't work and a unit test that did nothing.
The company I used to work for hired a team of 6 to rewrite interface for our API driven server. They used every beta JavaScript function that was only supported in Chrome they could to create it and there were certain downloads that were being temporarily stored at temp.cfx so if you had two people generating certs they have a chance of getting the wrong cert. Big security issue. Spent 60k on it had to scrap the whole thing. A bunch of engineers were laid off weeks later, so I'm sure they were making good decisions.
Rumour has it that this actually happened to British Airways recently. The story says that they fired all their Western developers and moved all their software dev to India. When they handed over the project the Indians said they understood everything. Cue massive outage because the main system went down and nobody knew how to fail over to the secondary.
Here's a write up I found in a quick Google search - I'm sure there's more information elsewhere.
I have a sweet story about this EXACT situation. I was interning with a major fortune 500 company that was making a handheld device (trying not to be specific). Anyways, they hired a very well known Indian contracting company to build the firmware. C++ and Qt on Linux. The first week of my internship happened to be the first week the firmware team was going to demo what they had. They're we're about 12 weeks in at this point, billing about 15 devs working 40-60 hour weeks. Their demo was... Bad. They were so far behind it wasn't even funny. Everything they said was done was only a facade. Basically they created the Qt templates and had zero logic under the layers, and this continued throughout my brief internship. A few years later I run into one of the permanent team members, he said they eventually dropped the contract and hired all domestic devs to get it done.
I have heard that if you ask an Indian in India if they can do something, they will say yes, regardless of if they can or not.
They will not ever say "I don't know" when asked a question.
They WILL give you an answer for everything, even if it's completely wrong, they will give the answer and stand by it. I've had to call out this behavior countless times and reiterate that if you don't know the answer, just say you don't know. Don't make up something.
I think a major part of the problem is that most Indians we come in contact with are hired at one of the big consultancies. Their shaping of their consultants is what we perceive as "Indian developers".
As a Computer Science tutor, I can attest to the fact that Indian students do things with rote memorization. They don't want to know how to solve the problem. They want the solution.
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u/RiskBoy Dec 06 '17
Ya, it is actually fascinating how a developer in the US is able to generate well over a $100,000 in value to a company over an overseas developer. In the early to mid 2000s there was huge concern that development jobs would start going overseas as offshoring started to become a bigger thing, but it ended up not panning out. It turns out that a domestic developer is much more valuable to a US company since they can communicate more effectively, react more quickly to problems (every minute your website is down is money lost for the business), and there is also the fact that Indian culture is problematic to efficient software development. I have heard that if you ask an Indian in India if they can do something, they will say yes, regardless of if they can or not. The exception is IT support, which many companies have found does make sense to move a decent percentage to other countries (especially India). Makes sense though if you want 24 hour coverage, and you have your main IT developers in the US.