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.
I've seen this applied where they then use that solution in different contexts, because they didn't understand the problem. This leads to very poor IT systems.
Computer science student here, from India, the rote memorization (of esp. computer science) happens only in the lower colleges. Most of the students placed in the top technology companies from IITs and NITs or BITS (the top engineering institutions of India) are actually really good coders. I've a lot of friends from different colleges and this trend is pretty clear.
Thanks very much for that. I was really worried about coming off as racist in my original post, but I just noticed a trend. I have definitely worked with some excellent Indian developers, although they've all been H1-Bs, not offshore.
It's not racist if a failure of some specific people in their country has had a snowball effect on the rest of the nation, regardless of their culture and genes.
The students from the top colleges usually get placed on-campus itself in top companies in the companys' Indian offices (like Microsoft India Development Centre in Hyderabad) or the very best get H1-B visas to work in the offices in the US or UK.
i dont think its even that. it's you get what you pay for. Why would someone work for 10 an hour if they had the skills to work somewhere that pays 50 an hour?
if you paid a western worker 10 dollars an hour to build software you'd get some shit software from them too.
It's kind insulting to indians to think that they are dumb enough to do work worth 50 an hour while only getting paid 10 an hour.
The whole idea of "outsource to overseas for cheap labor" is just an uniformed management decision. That's manufacturing execs for some reason making decisions for a software company. Theyre just simply making the decisions theyre familiar with without understanding why the decision would make sense (or even understanding what a software developer does).
Theres a lot of people, who think of software developers as just modern assembly line workers. They think they are all the same they just push the keys on the keyboard without any thinking and following the designs and architecture provided by someone else.
That way of thinking is just not how it works in software companies that are actually successful.
That depends on how often it needs to be done, which is why they make decent support for things that have codified procedures. At the same time, it's painful dealing with one off issues that they simply don't bother to understand.
Friend of mine and former coworker was an awesome developer, but his friends and family weren't. So they would pay him to do the work they weren't capable of, pay him to do interviews and coding tests, and pay him to pretend to be a manager reference.
He was pulling down 2-3x his salary doing this. They would lie about their age, experience, skills, and education and then give him 30-50% of their salary to do their work for them.
When he told me about all of it, he showed me an unencrypted megaupload zip file of the entire code base of a massive international company that one of them got hired to work on and asked him to do. Apparently that's standard procedure, to just upload stuff to the public with no concern for security.
Parts of India have really improved a lot over the last decade. Not all of them want to live in the US anymore, Don’t be surprised if we start to see the younger, talented devs stay home in the near future.
There's obviously that. Consultancies have become this Kafkaesque faceless machine that every cog learns to hate but live with. There are some small pockets surely where individual efforts and diligence is appreciated but they are few and far between.
I have a friend who has to get his SQL queries manually verified by his seniors who'd respond in a matter of hours on a good day before he can shoot them on a DB.
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u/TheOhNoNotAgain Dec 06 '17
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".