

The reason India doesn’t have enough awesome developers - raghuHack
http://blog.hackerearth.com/2013/12/reason-india-doesnt-awesome-developers.html

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nickynix
In my experience, this article seems to be accurate. To clarify, I've been
working in India as a lead developer for around nine months now. I will be
here another three months at the least before returning to the US.

The hiring practices around here for developers is standard for most jobs in
the US (from what I'm told). Students from top schools get recruited right
from the university if they have good grades.

However, as you may guess, grades aren't always an indicator of quality. Of
the seven developers that had been hired since the time I was hired, only
around three have any code quality. I've seen front-end developers struggle
writing simple Javascript. A backend developer with supposedly three years of
experience as a lead can barely write coherent Java, always scouring
stackoverflow to find snippets. That same developer also had tried to steal
code from me and claim it as his own. It was a git-deployment tool, and given
that he never learned to use Git, I was immediately suspicious. Looking
through the repository he had created, most of it was copy-and-pasted code
with the author attribution overwritten with his name. Thank god for the logs
at that moment!

To clarify, I have also seen some excellent developers here. They work
extremely fast, and so their work-ethic is enviable; exceed expectations and
then work at east on the next features given. They rapidly implement changes
in UI and features at a pace I no doubt could not do.

Overall, I agree with this article's point. Maybe myself and the author are
wrong, and I just have a bias based on my experience.

~~~
raghuHack
Hey, thanks for the comment. We are in the business of helping companies hire
good developers and I can tell you that our experience has been the same as
well.

As you've pointed out, there are some exceptional coders in India as well, but
given the number of developers that we supposedly have on the whole, we should
have a lot more of them.

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mathattack
When you hire en-masse, it's virtually impossible to test for quality. A lot
of these large firms (and major US consultancies follow this too) wind up
waving 1000s of people in, and then relentlessly culling those who don't
perform. The industry winds up with a lot of turnover too.

The strange thing about this system is that while individual people can
underperform, if there's a lot of weeding out (let's say 1 of 5 makes manager,
1 of 25 makes partner) you can wind up with some exceptional people at the
end. That's part of why the partners at many consulting firms can achieve so
much relatively early in their careers.

Of course this type of arrangement requires a lot of process, and is better
for well defined tasks without algorithmic complexity (say building a custom
telecom billing system) but it does work in some places.

