by fourmii on 6/7/18, 3:07 AM with 403 comments
by osrec on 6/7/18, 11:57 AM
by niklasd on 6/7/18, 8:28 AM
I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain place and he answered yes, and we just drove around for some time until I found out he has no idea. From what I heard that sometimes remains a problem, also in IT service.
That said, we all have our cultural qirks, and in most cases knowing them solves half the problem.
by sumanthvepa on 6/7/18, 8:09 AM
by code4tee on 6/7/18, 1:00 PM
The problem with the Indian outsourcers is that they’ve broadly failed to move up the technology value chain. These firms were quite good at the “just throw a bunch of people at it” solutions to brute force get work done but the tech sector has moved on.
Need a company to give you 1000 mechanical turks to perform some tasks you haven’t been able to automate yet? Go to an Indian outsourcing firm. Need some people to design technology to make the mechanical turks no longer required? That talent is generally not found within these Indian firms.
In that sense what McKinsey said in the article is probably true. Advances (largely built elsewhere) will probably make 80% of what these firms do irrelevant in the next few years.
by bane on 6/7/18, 1:57 PM
Many Indians who were legitimately good ended up in high paying jobs where they then used that money and skill to emigrate to countries with more comfortable standards of living. In my area, the Indian immigrant community has exploded, and almost entirely within the technology sector to start with, but now rapidly expanding to other areas as family members sponsor other family members and so on.
The wonderful halo effect is of course that family members who immigrated with the technical household head, but don't work in tech, are now employed at, opening and running all manner of businesses as well.
As a result I have a vast community of new, highly skilled and educated neighbors who are also ambitious and motivated.
by chvid on 6/7/18, 8:24 AM
As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of working and you as a country become more focused on internal demand.
by koolhead17 on 6/7/18, 12:31 PM
So a lot many comments in the thread is either generalization or a confirmation bias.
The India I know and software developers I know of are no less either in dream or dedication from peers in Silicon Valley or any other part of developed world. :)
by reacharavindh on 6/7/18, 6:32 AM
Source: myself, Indian CS engineer, now living in Europe.
Sure, the simple laborious IT tasks are going away with automation for good. But the labor force will pick the next best thing. As long as labor is cheaper than the west, Indian outsourcing companies will only thrive. In 10 years, the dynamics will slowly evolve such that outsourcing will slow down, and more original startups will rise up.
UPDATE: I over generalized my comment for my own good. I meant to say, many engineers that I know are .....
by kamaal on 6/7/18, 7:21 AM
Around 2008, there was a peak boom in offshore centers set up by most companies. These companies could afford to pay well because most of their revenue is either ad revenue or from companies like Microsoft which had a great sales pipeline going. These companies around 2014 - 2015 started to cut down heavily on offshore hiring, the reason was salaries were bonkers and most managers overpaid certain employees by several factors higher than others(Thanks to insane stock packages). The salary levels for many employees were on par with US salaries. Once you reach that point, it makes sense to hire people in US than in Bangalore. This plateau effected product based multinational companies more than services companies.
Another factor that has played into this whole thing is the number of H1B's and Green cards currently staying in US. The L1 A and EB-1 program was abused by most companies(ironically product companies) to award GCs in wholesale. As of now the peak services company head count around 2008 is now entirely working in the US. Of course if you have all the cheap labor you want in your home country, you don't outsource much to India.
The actual services company industry is going at the same pace as before. They are quite fiscally responsible companies so don't pay 4x higher as product companies do, they are perennially profitable though. Infosys is one of the most successful tech companies in the history of India ever. In fact the product company salaries are the biggest reason many fresher in the past few years have opted to be SREs/DBAs/PEs/QEs(non-dev roles) etc in product companies than be programmers in service companies. The irony today is people from small time colleges get to work a lot of good dev projects in service companies than people from top colleges who work on non-dev projects.
The third factor of course is homegrown start up ecosystem. Start ups in India payed quite well around 2014 when VC money was free and plenty. I guess they don't pay that well now. And they are also quite stingy with equity. Plus I hear they are bad with tech work too. Most of it is Spring + Java + Postgres stitching.
I remember in the peak of service companies I did far more quality work than any start up kid does today.
May be the next US recession will change things again. But like I said before, people are now used to MNC salaries and suffer through any bad project for just the salary.
by OliverJones on 6/7/18, 11:20 AM
In response to a question about turnover and preventing it, he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.
That was crazy. That was Sili-Valley crazy. There are limits to growth. It's too bad they're hitting good people.
But the business model of Infosys and other outsource IT services giants has always been arbitrage: buying something where and when it's cheap and selling it where and when it's expensive. Arbitrage is a risky game in the long run. And when the commodity being traded is people, people are bound to get hurt. It's just reality.
by pipio21 on 6/7/18, 2:43 PM
We do not want overworked and burn out slaves, thank you very much.
Making more than 6 hours of real deep work every day is extremely challenging. Someone who tells me he is working 18...
We have some Indians that work for us, on similar terms than Europeans or Americans, living in Europe. Good workers and have earned their place, like the rest.
by mwarcholinski on 6/7/18, 2:34 PM
#1 Lack of my experience in dev area - how to work with dev teams (mainly external)
#2 Pricing - I was price sensitive, and in the long term, it caused that the code was not usable while scaling the business.
I hated it so much that after those two startups I've built my own software dev company focused on one technology and a quite small team of tech-savvy colleagues.
Below my checklist that I'm using to evaluate the outsourcing companies with who I would like to work -> http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A
by debarshri on 6/7/18, 1:07 PM
I remember back when I graduated, only options I had was to work for these outsourcing companies. That is no longer true. India has a rich ecosystem of startups that definitely pay better than the outsourcing companies. I often compare the indian IT eco system to multi-level marketing, where older generation of employees would recruit newer generation to keep the costs low. Now, with rich startup ecosystem, talented younger generation have become expensive and scarce for these outsourcing companies.
Secondly, most of these outsourcing company's ethics and principle were derived from IBM, which led to creation of long chain of hierarchical management. I remember when I worked in one of these companies, an approval of procuring a server (not the server itself) would take months. There would be unwarranted politics. Lot of these manager are essentially skill-less. This has led to a problem where attracting talent to these organisation is very difficult. Furthermore, to keep the costs low, these outsourcing companies would go to third tier colleges and cities. Talent from colleges and universities are basically unemployable, resulting in a poor client experience.
Thirdly, major clients have started realizing the cost of outsourcing and benefits of owning your own technology. In my opinion, these outsourcing companies were basically sweatshops masqueraded as technology companies. Attrition rate in outsourcing companies are really high. If these outsourcing companies would have controlled the attrition rates and built technology products, these companies would have been relevant. Before the financial crisis, these companies did have resources and talent to do so. Companies like TCS did try to build their products and did get sued [1]. However, you would be suprised how many banks use their banking product [2].
Having said that, most of the outsourcing companies have very cash rich. I wouldn't be surprise if they start acquire smaller product companies to stay relevant.
[1]https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
by enlightenedfool on 6/7/18, 2:27 PM
by mkovji on 6/7/18, 4:09 PM
Why did 350 posters cost $80000, i am sure it would have cost lot less if they have been made outside US.
by amriksohata on 6/7/18, 7:44 PM
by Apocryphon on 6/7/18, 7:13 AM
* http://time.com/3978175/india-population-worlds-most-populou...
by ilarum on 6/7/18, 8:01 AM
I bring this up because while Trump may attempt to target visa abusers, some smart people are also trapped in the crossfire which I feel affects the country negatively.
by techresearch on 6/8/18, 5:35 PM
by jmartrican on 6/7/18, 3:16 PM
by known on 6/8/18, 9:17 AM
by eric24234 on 6/8/18, 9:44 PM
by starpilot on 6/7/18, 4:27 PM
by thisisit on 6/7/18, 6:56 AM
There was an amazing answer to this "bloodbath" fallacy during an AI/ML conference in Bangalore.
One of the panelists talked about "Manure" - During the Victorian era there used to be lot of horse carriages. More horses meant more manure. So when automobiles were introduced there was a fear that lot of people relying on manure related jobs. But that never happened as automobile related jobs took over. Same is expected to happen during the so-called "bloodbath".
> The level of offshoring of IT services has taken a massive dip since Trump got in
If this is true then the headline about "plateauing" doesn't make sense. It is more of a blip. Next elections when there is a non-Trump President things might get better.
That said, the article reads more like a history of Infosys than actual headline content. Major points are simply - Trump and AI.
by calif on 6/7/18, 3:15 PM
by intrasight on 6/7/18, 5:10 PM
by aphextron on 6/7/18, 3:45 PM
by mkovji on 6/7/18, 4:16 PM
by crb002 on 6/7/18, 1:55 PM
by erikb on 6/7/18, 8:24 AM
by theyinwhy on 6/7/18, 4:36 PM
by RandomCSGeek on 6/8/18, 6:19 AM
Here's how Indian engineers get jobs.
The very top(maybe 0.01%) get directly hired by US MNCs. This gives some people the "Indians are smart" stereotype.
The next top(0.01% - 1%) work for US MNCs in India, or the few top homebred companies. Foreigners will rarely deal with them, as they are working on products, not services.
The next few go into startups and some good service companies. These service companies are costly, after all, they have to pay much higher than what Infosys or TCS would do, to maintain these people. I don't know how many american tech workers come across these people, but a few must be. These people are probably the source of few comments saying that "some Indian workers I worked with were good".
Now, the lower ones, will get into likes of TCS, Infosys and hundreds of small service companies that work on basis of "hire enmasse, at cheap, and sell at little higher cost". Now if you are paying peanuts, it is very foolish to expect people like Linus Torvalds. This gives people the, "Indian engineers are shit" stereotype.
by techresearch on 6/8/18, 5:14 PM
by senthil_rajasek on 6/7/18, 12:31 PM
by aws_ls on 6/8/18, 10:56 AM
I can offer so much on the topic, that it gets overwhelming as I type. So I am just writing my thoughts, some of them on the article and some based on the comments on this page.
- Not all engineers are of low quality. In my experience about 10% of them are as good as SV engineers.
- Infosys founder NRN is a socialist at heart. He pioneered sharing of wealth via stocks (ESOPs). And he did it so well, that all employees got it - drivers to janitors to sys admins to coders. So very unlike the shocking Amazon shop floor stories we hear.
- It has resulted in an ecosystem of Startups in India. Many of the ex-employees who benefitted from the Infosys shares, are doing their own startups (many of them product startups, as a result of getting bored with IT services). So it has acted like a YCombinator of sorts. There even was a ex-Infoscion startup group. And the best part is they can do their own angel funding. So no running for VCs atleast in the early stages.
- For the above reason, I revere him as much as may be a Gandhi or a MLK. The other two I read, only in a book. Very rarely do you get a chance to interact with truly great people IRL.
- Jugaad. This a word I hate with a vengeance. That's what gives a bad impression to Indians. And admittedly it happens a lot. Although Infosys founders, in how they ran their company, serve largely as a counter example. Minus of course some things like H1B visa issue. Just as a contrast read the story of Satyam (another IT company) whose founder Raju did wholesale jugaad and landed in jail in 2009, because the real estate leverage built on fake salaries of fictitous employees, his jugaad, failed.
- Product engineer skills. This is an area, where Infosys/others lack. And thats not only for aptitude or potential, but the culture. Because the Industry grew so fast - 100% YOY in early decades and 50% YOY in the last one - people were pushed to being managers & leads, after just two years of coding experience. And as such bulk of the work is very low quality coding.
- But the numbers in India are so big. Whether its the population of a billion+ or no. of engineers. That there is both quality and quantity. Just look at any coding site (HackerRank, TopCoder et al) and you will see Indian programmers dominating in numbers as well as few performing at a world class quality level.
- Regarding the bad experience, with Indian IT engineers. I wonder how many of them were with a company like Infosys and how many of them were with sites like UpWork/etc? Please note because of the overwhelming quantity of Indian engineers. Its not easy to find the quality engineers, which are also significant in number, but you have to be lucky or have to work hard. (Heck, may be there is a scope to do a TopTal like site, but just for India.)
by stealthmodeclan on 6/7/18, 8:57 AM
Those companies are massively profitable but they come across as American. Indian CEOs (somtimes even CEO is American but not having complete control over the corporation) of those companies send American employees for delivering keynotes. There is lots of this perception of being an American firm. But you'll be amazed there are many Russian,Chinese,Indian etc... As an American LLC.
There is no stripe or Braintree in India.
The day these are launched in India, you'll see boom in product companies operating entirely out of India till then....
Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG.
And they do not like putting their lives on stake for startups. So if you'll not find them begging for jobs at small companies.
by megaman22 on 6/7/18, 7:19 AM
I tend to get drawn in because I'm working for an ISV that makes a product. The Indian third-parties get drawn in because the real customwr has outsourced a function to them. I now have to deal with the incompetent pm on the $outsourced side, instead of the competent, reasonable pm on the real customer. And eight layers of red tape aroind simple config changes arise
by gaius on 6/7/18, 7:59 AM
So here’s the new competition: outsourcer who can do the job for 1/10th the cost, or In-house engineers with advanced automation who can do 100x the work at the same cost.
It’s not about West vs India, it’s about business models.
by buvanshak on 6/7/18, 9:21 AM
That should tell you something in lines of answering this question...
by Karishma1234 on 6/7/18, 6:48 AM
India can take a big lead in AI and other things if it managed to reform its higher education and get rid of government controls in that space. If India opens up higher education sector much higher quality talent can be bred there.
by patrickg_zill on 6/7/18, 8:09 AM
by onecooldev24 on 6/7/18, 8:29 AM
by whatyoucantsay on 6/7/18, 7:51 AM
India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.