
Are Indian Programmers not Programmers but just coders? - Brajeshwar
http://brajeshwar.com/2007/are-you-a-programmer-or-a-coder/
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kamaal
This post is from 2007. And things have changed drastically since then.

Ok, I am from Bangalore. And let me tell you. Technical skills are in heavy
demand now.

To understand what the problem actually is. You need to understand this. Just
like the web boom in US, there was an IT boom in India. IT companies witnessed
a 100% year on year growth. Their workforce head count was doubling every
year. And they really had no other option but to hire people from every
engineering back ground. They were forced to promote people regardless whether
or not they deserved it.

People became managers within 5-6 years of joining industry. And that is when
the meme spread _"Being a programmer doesn't help in IT you have to be a
manager"_. We are long past those days now.

The growth has stabilized and I would rather say its completely normalized
now. Companies are no longer feeling the need to promote people rapidly. In
fact they now have a excess bench strength of managers. And many of them did
get laid off in the past few years. Word has it that its going to very
difficult for the managers from now on. As they bring little value to the
table.

On the other hand the Indian IT industry is plagued by the disease of Job
hopping. Absolute utter idiots who can't write a 10 line script now hop every
year pocket a 30% raise get a promotion. You will see people who never wrote
probably 1000 lines of code are now architects.

Given the scenario the operational efficiency of big IT companies has fallen
like a pack of leaves. They are not taking high risk premium projects anymore.
As they simply don't have the kind of good people to execute them.

The demand for good people is growing by the day. Most of them I know work at
start up's or product firms or they are into consulting/freelancing. There is
a lot of money there and there are a lot of tough good problems to be solved.

IT Industry in India is pretty much alive and rewarding, except that those
rewards are no longer in big companies. They are else where. And hey, there is
a lot of money being a programmer. More than managerial jobs.

You just have to come out of the big IT giants and get into smaller places.

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subiet
I am not sure if the post was troll bait or not. Denying the possibility of
truth within the massive generalization in the topic wouldn't be best idea,
having said that one has too look at companies like Gluster [Acquired by
RedHat] and InMobi to look at some high technology being produced from this
part of the world. Given the population of India, there are actually more
english speaking people over here than the whole of Britain, similarly even a
high number of brilliant programmers would get drowned the chorus of massive
coders working for huge outsourcing firms. Since you come from India itself as
your blog suggest, and are from computer science related field, and hence
would be very well verse with what I have mentioned above, I find digging a
five year old post, combining with the topic headline 'Are Indian Programmers
not Programmers but just Coders' not in the very best spirits.

~~~
aravindc
InMobi is not high technology. It is just another Ad Platform you can buy and
install off the shelf. Their business skills can be considered "high".

~~~
subiet
It would be nice to have a look at the ads they server per second. I am coming
from the perspective that saying Facebook isn't high technology cause it is
merely a social network, would be highly inaccurate. Working at such scale
requires its own set of challenges.

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minhajuddin
The post might be old and filled with link bait content.But it has a few valid
points. Big companies like TCS, Infosys etc, are destroying the lives of
thousands of software engineers. I used to work in TCS about 3 years ago and I
knew a guy who had done his Masters from IIT (which has the brightest minds in
India). He was hired from IIT for a good pay and he was put on a maintenance
project for GE. It was a dumb job where he used to monitor some stuff and call
up the responsible guys if he saw something wrong. And he was a mechanical
engineer.

So, TCS effectively took a guy who might have done a lot of good in the
mechanical field and just wasted him. I am really pained by things like these.

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ashishgandhi
I'm from BITS Pilani (yeah, yeah, the BITS and IIT rivalry, yada yada) and we
tactically try to keep these companies off the placement process as well.

I'm just glad that there's someone who does see the difference and is willing
to talk about it.

~~~
kamaal
Which all companies will you try to keep out?

Nearly every big company is plagued by these problems. The problem is even if
they take you through tough algo and DS quizzes(Which are irrelevant anyways)
most of the work is maintenance.

Whether you do that work in a product company or a outsourced firm. It makes
little difference.

This is more of a large company problem, this is not a problem restricted only
to outsourcing firms.

~~~
ashishgandhi
Where I work now, I do a lot of engineering. By that I would mean designing
non-trivial stuff and using technology best suited for the job. (E.g. for
async stuff we are using node.js.) Whereas what I would do at these
"outsourcing" companies is be forced to work on the MS stack and do basic
store in DB, retrive from DB and update the DB stuff. CRUD with no real
optimization. The only "optimization" these places offer are not writing bad
SQL.

~~~
pm90
or worse, maintenance. I've known guys who's only job is to eyeball a system
and if there are any problems, then call up the developer in the US.

