India's Silicon Valley Offers the Cheapest Engineers, But the Quality of Their Talent is Another Story (qz.com) 165
Ananya Bhattacharya, writing for Quartz: Bengaluru's startup ecosystem is what it is because of its engineers. With an average annual salary of $8,600, engineers in India's tech hub cost 13 times less than their Silicon Valley counterparts, according to the 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report. The city is home to the world's cheapest crop of engineers, with the average annual pay of a resident software engineer falling well below the global figure of $49,000. [...] However, the city's talent pool poses challenges in access and quality. For the most part, "engineers haven't been hired very quickly, experience is average, and visa success is low," the report says. "The quality and professionalism of resources is also questionable in many cases," Abhimanyu Godara, founder of US-based chatbot startup Bottr.me, which has a development team in Bangalore, said in the report.
Is other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Russians (Score:2)
Man, even those Indians hire Russians!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Is other news... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
try understanding them on the phone...not gonna happen.
Most Indian recruiters read from a checklist where all the answers are "yes" except for one question. Even if I don't understand what the person is saying, I can say "yes" until the recruiter sound confused, changed my answer to "no," and then keep answering "yes" to the remaining questions. Surprisingly, I've gotten a few interviews that way.
Re: (Score:1)
This. Six of the last seven companies I worked for hired engineers in India. Other than two guys that were great, the rest of them were just useless. Well, they were less than useless. They took more time from others to correct the problems they created. For example, where I work now we use Atlassian's Bitbucket. For the engineers in the US we have a 2% pull request deny rate. For our "engineers," in India there's an over 70% deny rate. The biggest problem is that they just refuse to do things like
Re: Skeptical (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It seems you aren't one of those 30%.
MSc from a regionally accredited U.S. University here.
And for the record, I was not trying to bash the U.S. I was merely trying to point out that it's an individual's intellect and skillset that matters, not where they are born.
Nobody controls where their mom was when they were born. Nobody controls what elementary school, and in most cases what middle/high school they went to. And not everyone was able to even go to college.
I was replying to an AC who effectively asserts that India is a third world c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've noticed a growing portion of slashdot articles are basically flamebait/choir preaching or things that are otherwise designed to cause maximum bandwagoning and outrage in the comments.
The stories might technically be relevant or "stuff that matters", but it's really starting to get blatantly obvious.
You must be new here! ;)
Re: (Score:2)
You can pay me now, or pay me more later. Your choice.
Re:IN 1...2....3.... (Score:4, Insightful)
....Waiting for the first chants of "Racist/Racism".....
These aren't a bunch of white guys...you can't take this way about them or their talents.....
What color is the skin on their code? It all looks the same on my IDE.
(and worse, it ain't the color brown that makes them attractive to megacorps - it's the color green.)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, the original article is alluding to the fact that indians (dot not feather) are so cheap over in India, but that their actual skill, professionalism and all is severely lacking.
In general if you say that about a race of people in general, you'll get immediately attacked.
Sure, one brush doesn't paint everyone, BUT...in my experience to date, in MANY years in IT...the indians that come to the US, while many can do rote coding, if t
Re: (Score:1)
All looks the same in _his_ IDE. He's confessing that he can't code ether.
Re: (Score:3)
It all looks the same on my IDE.
Spoken like someone who has never seen an H1b's code or just doesn't know what good code looks like.
I'm talking about the color of the text, not the quality of the code (which is variable).
PS: I've seen some mega-shit copypasta-outta-stack-exchange code come from guys paler than freshly-fallen snow, and I've seen code gorgeous enough to make a grown man cry come from guys who positively reek of curry, so that ain't it either.
Point is, race/culture has fuck-all to do with code - it's the quality that counts (and not just "holy shit it compiled!", either.) That's the metric you use when you decide who shoul
"Resources"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Resources"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Good point.
I had a very bad experience in the past. Five people attended the meeting from India, only one person was actually working on the code. That person had a very "unique" way of coding: no testing (at all!), no documentation, no version control, just piling up the code (of course no comments in the code). The manager was out of touch, except one week before the deadline, the manager was asking people to "lose the sleep in order to meet the deadline".
Re: (Score:2)
Five people attended the meeting from India, only one person was actually working on the code.
When I worked in construction with my father, we saw four union officials in $1,000 Italian suits watch one work smooth out the cement with a trowel.
Re: (Score:2)
Only 4? Caltrans is much worse. Granting they don't wear suits, but eight watching, one working is the normal ratio.
Re:"Resources"? How about "Inventory"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mike Nefkens, of HP Enterprise, soon to be DXC Technology, responded to a question about layoffs by referring to employees as "inventory" and stating, "well, you have to rotate inventory, right? Get rid of the old, obsolete stuff in favor of the new, fresh stuff"
Fact of the matter is, in a services company like HPE's ES, people are your assets, and knowledge, skill, and talent are valuable things not worth flushing away. Same goes for those customer-facing employees who have built relationships, or SMEs who build and maintain customer-facing applications.
I'd rather be called a "Resource" than "Inventory". HP/HPE/DXC has spent the last few years trashing morale and blissfully opening the floodgates wide open for brain drain, to replace experienced (but higher paid) people with warm bodies to satisfy existing contracts. IBM is following suit.
Re:"Resources"? How about "Inventory"? (Score:5, Interesting)
HP Enterprise...formerly known as EDS?
They have a 30+ year history of employing C student, recent college graduate, idiots as programmers, former non-technical military as managers. Only skills are in marketing to Fortune 500s and government, using one competent 'prop worker', who will never be seen again, once the contract is signed.
As I said elsewhere on the tread: EDS _taught_ Tata, Infosys etc how this game is gamed.
Re: (Score:2)
If somebody called me a "resource", my professionalism would also be less than stellar.
If you do not want to be known as a "useful resource" you have no place on any team. Branch out on your own. You'll do better for yourself, and the team you would have been on wouldn't suffer from your need to be known as a "special snowflake"
I'd rather been known as a useful employee, or a useful expert, or even a useful human.
Nonsense! (Score:3, Informative)
Visa Success? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Visa Success? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed in my dealings with Indian shops that they usually have one guy, per project, that knows his shit, and then you have 10 people underneath him that couldn't code their way out of an if statement. Any work that those 10 people produce is mostly garbage and if it functions it seems to be mostly down to luck. Most of that group seems to code cargo-cult style, haphazardly pasting together stackoverflow posts until something close to the asked output is achieved. Once you complain enough you start to get more in touch with their lead who guides the people under him in the more right direction. Code quality is still garbage but the output is closer to what is expected. The problem that I see is that lead is usually on more than one project and you have to fight for his time. To your point I notice that the lead is usually stationed someplace in the US.
Re: (Score:2)
I've noticed in my dealings with Indian shops that they usually have one guy, per project, that knows his shit, and then you have 10 people underneath him that couldn't code their way out of an if statement.
The first time I've ran into an Indian shop was at a Fortune 500 company in 2005. they had 21 Indians inside a small conference room. While 20 sat at tables that faced the wall, one guy sat at the center and screamed at the top of his lungs to be heard over the chatter for a conference call.
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds exactly like EDS.
The indian consultants are only able to do it because the big American consultancies led the way. Expectations were already very low.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. And even the guy who knows his shit will often do things on the UI side that make absolutely no sense to a westerner. Their cultural background is so different that they just don't know what's acceptable and what isn't. My company's IT support division has a group somewhere in India and it's very frustrating trying to get anything useful out of them.
Re: (Score:3)
The question is, what are you going to do about it? Clamping down on H1-B will help in the short term, but in the medium to long term the quality of talent in India is only going to get better. Long term you need a strategy.
Re: (Score:2)
Long term you need a strategy.
I read a study after the dot com bust that the IT industry will have a shortage of 1M skilled workers by 2030, when all the baby boomers are retired and foreign workers return home to build a middle class lifestyle. A more recent study put the shortage at 1M+ by 2030. I went back to school after the dot com bust to get into IT support. Best career choice I ever made.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet you're frequently complaining about how underpaid you are while living in Silicon Valley.
I'm frequently pointing out that I can live in Silicon Valley on $50K per year by living a modest lifestyle. Most people who want big cars, big house, big wife and big kids will find Silicon Valley very expensive. Some people think I'm underpaid relative to everyone else who want the American Dream of having it all. BTW, in my blue-collar family, I'm the highest wage earner.
Re: (Score:2)
The only way to win is not to play.
The only way to win is become rich or stay poor. The middle class pays for the rich (tax breaks) and the poor (tax credits).
Re: (Score:1)
It hasn't gotten better in the 30 years I have been in development. I often wonder where they all go after 10 years.
must be maintaining the new slashdot (Score:2, Troll)
Typical of America. It always belittles... (Score:5, Insightful)
As mentioned in the story, quality is this or that...(I am paraphrasing...)
You know what, I had a young software engineer from Africa (a new graduate from one of their schools), who shrank a 301 line of code into 83!
It also ran faster if I could mention that. Before he took on the task, folks in my office (myself included), [quietly] belittled him, questioning his abilities.
He did the job. Before quitting for GM, this man had re-written manuals in English, a language he had to learn. Needless to say, he returned to our company as a consultant on some project that had incurred budgetary overruns and incompetency.
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
So where are the best engineers?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
So where are the best engineers?
1) You can find single geniuses anywhere. This is an article about averages.
2) This is an article about the low quality of India, not the high quality of America, so your story is non-relevant. For example, it could be that India America Africa.
3) If you assert that somebody being paid 13x less is "just as skilled or better," then make a company to take advantage of this and become an easy billionaire. I admit that markets are imperfect, but I would suggest they aren't *THAT* imperfect.
Re: (Score:1)
Needless to say, he returned to our company as a consultant on some project that had incurred budgetary overruns and incompetency.
All at the hands of our so-called American trained "engineers."
I can't speak to the specifics of this situation but I have seen others where the desires of in-house personnel were ignored but when the same initiatives are suggested by a consultant, they're followed with gusto.
Don't blame the engineers, blame the management.
LK
Re: (Score:3)
That's here not there (Score:2)
You know what, I had a young software engineer from Africa (a new graduate from one of their schools)
So that was here then.
I've also worked with some fellow programmers from India who were excellent. In America.
But that is totally irrelevant to the story, about the workers *IN INDIA* being quite horrible - which was also my experience when working with any team that dealt with coding outsourced there.
It's almost like the really good developers don't stay where they are, and go to first world countries to d
Re: (Score:1)
In other words, regression to the mean (Score:3, Interesting)
In aggregate, Indian engineers begin to mirror the differences between the India and the US/Europe generally.
India isn't just US or Europe with a sanitation problem, it's a civilization with its own inherent problems that have kept it that way. You can give people degrees, but that doesn't immediately resolve the other externalities that prevent them from being parts-interchangeable with their Western counterparts.
Maybe at some very elite level (very wealthy, educated abroad, etc) some small subset of Indians are interchangeable, but at the bulk level they tend to be on par with the rest of India at the same level.
If they were the same as Westerners, then India would be much more like the West and they would be employed at home in their own globally competitive industries and not clamoring for visas to work in the US.
Re: (Score:2)
Exceptions exist...not enough to make it worth interviewing them.
Growing up outside India, she might have escaped 'the stupid'. Would she have bragged on her family wealth, given the trap I laid out?
Another Story (Score:2)
You don't say "another story" when it's the logical conclusion of the same fucking story.
Cheap labor with phony degrees and no skills beyond following a script, from a country with a culture of scheming, scamming, and cheating will yield terrible quality of work and behavior. I don't know who's scamming who here. The tech industry for hiring Indian labor at "fuck you" prices and treating them like shit, or the Indian labor force getting bogus degrees and cheating their way to a job in an outsourcing firm
More news out of India! (Score:2)
Water has been discovered to be Wet, and the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West!
More on this breaking news later!
The good ones (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. If you're shopping for the cheapest engineers, no matter where they're from, you're not going to get the top talent.
But what is the cost of living? (Score:2)
Without that, or to have these numbers normalized in some way, it is meaningless to just compare salaries.
Fast - good - cheap. Pick 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time a customer starts lamenting about cost and how everything has to be done right now and perfectly, I draw an equilateral triangle on a sheet of paper, label the corners accordingly (fast, cheap, good) and tell him to make a point at the spot where he puts his focus.
Most get the hint.
I forgot who said it, but it's true: Paying too much isn't very wise, but paying too little is a catastrophe. Paying too much means you lose a little money. Paying too little, though, means that you can lose it all. Because you'll always find someone who will make whatever you're asking for cheaper, but at the cost of quality and speed. Which can in the end mean that the product is not up to your requirements, rendering the whole item you bought useless and all the money spent on it wasted.
I'd rather pay too much than too little.
Re: (Score:2)
Talent is never cheap. Or rather, it isn't for long. For a simple reason: Talent that gets discovered is quickly drowning in work, leading to either sloppier work, less availability or higher prices.
In the end, you're back at square one: Want it good, cheap or quick?
Re: (Score:2)
Even right and fast is possible. The question is only whether you're willing and able to afford it.
Re: (Score:2)
I have colleagues who have seen it first hand. One just got back from Chennai and said that the hotel was nice en
Re: (Score:2)
Friend of mine saw the same thing first hand in Paris. But then, it wasn't the native population. In the US the same happens in some cities, but it's the homeless in our case.
Re: (Score:2)
I think part of the problem is cultural. I know they've had PSAs about not pooping in the streets (the whole 'Take your poo to the loo' thing), but when you see it happening so often you stop thinking that there's something wrong with it. Then again, it's not like there are a bunch of public toilets for the dirt poor in India to use either.
Re:15 years working with them (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest issue I ran into when dealing with Indian teams is the complete lack of problem solving. If something didn't go exactly according to script, they were lost. We once lost a whole week's worth of work because the India team ran into a text prompt that wasn't 100% the same as the one in the instructions and instead of either contacting us immediately or putting two and two together and figuring out that the gist of the prompt was the same, they sat there twiddling their thumbs until the next weekly status meeting so they could ask us about it. Sadly this is a reoccurring theme with most of our Indian people.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like a poorly designed system to me. Then again you could as well be describing Oracle DB.
Sounds about right (Score:3)
There's a range of intelligence and skill no matter where you go. The high end there is like the high end in the US -- there will always be very smart people. However, we do get exposed to a lot of the low end. The body shops (IBM, CSC/HP/EDS, Accenture, Wipro, etc.) are a revolving door for training new graduates...you might get one or two people who have a good grasp on the work they're doing, but the good ones tend to leave quickly. Body shop H-1Bs are a step beyond that, since they were able to do well enough to be sent to interact directly with the customer...but still not ideal. Direct hires (i.e. opening and running the Bangalore division of the company) tend to produce the best results, but there's still the turnover problem, time difference and communications issues.
Of course, this is assuming you're dealing with the typical offshore services customer. Most have no clue about IT or software dev, don't want to know about it since "it's not their core competency" and don't have the ability to objectively evaluate work quality. I can definitely see this being a problem if someone wants true Silicon Valley engineer material for $8600 a year. When I think of that, I think of someone building large chunks of functionality from scratch, not a run of the mill DBA or sysadmin or .NET/Java developer. Just because of a massive economic imbalance, you don't get to change the "Fast, good or cheap, pick 2" classic engineering adage.
The interesting thing will be what happens long-term. Wages in the US and Europe are probably going to continue to stagnate or collapse altogether, and costs will only go up in developing countries. There's going to have to be some equilibrium established...it's not sustainable for someone in Silicon Valley to command $250K+ for what amounts to routine work, and it's not good for either country when companies (whether or not they know better) see the ability to hire for less than minimum wage and just dump all domestic employees.
Professional Engineering (Score:3)
Where are the various state licensing boards when people or companies offer their services without the requisite PE license? It's time to plug the "industrial exemption" loophole and see to it that those who offer themselves as 'engineers' actually meet some minimal educational and professional standards.
13 times less? (Score:1)
engineers in India's tech hub cost 13 times less than their Silicon Valley counterparts
So, the engineers in Silicon Valley cost less than somewhere else, but the ones in India are thirteen times MORE less expensive than the ones in SV? Or are we supposed to gather that the SV engineers cost something that we should all consider a good baseline, but that the Indian engineers cost roughly 8% of that amount?
Lazy writers, being lazy.
No wonder (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Engineers have a thing for underage girls....go figure.
FTFY
Re: (Score:2)
Are you speaking from personal experience?
Nope. I'm not an engineer. I do IT support work instead.
Re: (Score:1)
Don't need to save up much to build a mansion in Mexico. The fulltime complement of guards, however, will eventually take a toll.
As well as kidnapping insurance for you and your family.
Re: (Score:2)
They move to the Philippines.
If you're ex-military.