Ask HN: Are developers in India highly over-rated? - kumartanmay
======
theshadowmonkey
Ok, here's the thing. Indian developers are not overrated. The developers that
you are trying to hire might be overrated. Very good developers in India
mostly work for big product companies or startups. Most good developers do not
freelance. And coming to technology consulting companies like TCS, Infosys
etc.., hire a lot of new college grads at cheap salaries who have no clue
about the work and make them slog.

So, if you want good freelance developers it might be difficult to find good
one in India. But, if you are a startup that gained some traction in the US or
elsewhere and want to start an office in India, you'll find good developers if
you pay well.

~~~
jaddison
This is the honest truth.

I've dealt with outsourcing to India before and share many of the same
headaches mentioned in these comments.

I know it's a generalization, but I believe it's fairer to generalize about
Indian outsourcing businesses than about Indian individuals: these businesses
are doing their best to maximize profits, like any business does. They hire
very low, mark up quite a bit and (in my experience) misrepresent their talent
pool.

Conversely, I've worked with a number of brilliant Indians at a large corp
here in North America.

The good individuals leave after a couple of years or less. The turnover is
really high. They leave for the same reasons anyone would: better
opportunities, mentorship, culture, money, etc.

In reality, it's a smoke and mirrors game where the outsourcers mostly win.
Indian individuals get a bad rap.

~~~
aaronchall
Offshoring is no panacea, it's become a fairly efficient market, and whatever
free lunch was there is no longer. Companies that were trying to outsource to
save on wages or capitalize on increased productivity are not getting those
results: "We find no significant change in average wages or in total factor
productivity measures for offshoring firms."
([http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2014/files/if...](http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2014/files/ifdp1124.pdf))

It's increasingly obvious there are no gains from offshoring unless you have
other more compelling reasons (e.g. 24 hour/global support, shortage of local
talent pool, global availability, etc...)

~~~
jaddison
I completely agree.

------
fredkbloggs
By whom?

Most Western engineers I have worked with don't think much of their Indian
counterparts. While no single assessment will ever properly fit everyone in
such a large group of people, the quip goes "the Chinese will do exactly what
you tell them to do, but nothing else; the Indians will do exactly nothing you
tell them to do but a whole lot besides." This seems about right to me, so I
don't think anyone is being over- (or under-) rated. If you hand a project to
India you will get something that mostly works, is three times as complex as
it needs to be, took five times too long to produce, and is completely
unmaintainable. Despite some very impressive individual results, the education
system in India is atrocious, on the job education nonexistent, and technical
leadership and independence completely lacking, so this result isn't
surprising. Americans or Brits sent through the same system and given the same
management would produce similar results.

By the people who decide that work should be done by Indian engineers instead
of those in the company's home country? The answer is more complicated. Most
corporate management is extremely short-sighted; the incentives of the role
demand it. Their primary incentive (handed down by their superiors) is
typically lowering home-country head count, average salary (and in the US,
especially those oh-so-costly medical and insurance plans), and other coarse
personnel cost metrics. By these metrics, Indian engineers are not overrated.
By the metrics the company will actually be judged by the competitive
marketplace, which include time to market, total development cost, and product
quality, they are overrated. Managers who think about these things will
conclude that the cost of Indian engineers relative to what they produce has
been bid up beyond fair value; i.e., they're overrated. But few do.

~~~
lingua_franca
very well said.

------
aprdm
I think there are good and bad developers in every nation of the world. If you
are looking for Indian developers in a place where the price is a race to the
bottom, well, that's what you are going to get regardless of the nationality.

I made an interview with Jack Ganssle[0], which is one of the most known
embedded engineers in the world, and I made a question to him about devs skill
around the globe:

I have spent my life traveling all over the world and am finding great
developers in all sorts of places.

\-- [0] [http://www.embarcados.com.br/embarcados-interview-jack-
ganss...](http://www.embarcados.com.br/embarcados-interview-jack-ganssle/)

------
sqldba
It depends if we are talking local or outsourced.

From a coworker, he says what you save in money up front you will lose in time
trying to communicate what you want with them, getting the result, smacking
yourself in the head while finding it makes zero logical sense, having to send
it back, get the results, find more problems, etc, all with massive delays due
to time zones.

His company laid off a lot of good staff and outsourced with him as the
manager. He said it has not been worth it and makes his life dealing very
unhappy. Like herding cats.

I don't deal with Indian programmers but I deal with DBAs and others that look
after data centre infrastructure. They are more than worthless - they are
dangerously incompetent. The massive company I work for has spent a lot of
money insourcing to get away from these idiots after years of letting all
their infrastructure decay and rolling outages. When you scale up all those
incidental costs add up (but the contractual SLAs are rarely enforced because
you're afraid to anger the people who are running your whole business).

That's not to say Indians as people are stupid. Far from it. Actually our
company has a lot of Indian staff who are integrated locally and are excellent
and intelligent, I consider them good friends. And some of them plain suck.

Most also recognise these outsourced people as scum. Though I feel that's a
little unfair except for how they make dealing with them a living hell. Every
part of the model is broken from their parent company contracts, managers,
processes on both sides, communication and cultural differences (Indians as a
rule always say yes whether they will do it or not because it's considered
polite; they also won't action anything or even respond unless a higher
manager is included in the mail). Technical work becomes impossible when you
can't clearly get an answer about what is going on.

We don't outsourced to China but have a very multicultural staff. I would
hesitate to say any race was "better" than the others. I only know outsourcing
to India will eventually kill your business.

So that's our experience.

~~~
soft_dev_person
This was my exact same experience where I used to work, where large parts of
the company's code base maintenance was moved to India. It decayed really
quickly.

The culture we were met with was tragic to say the least. The only thing that
mattered to the Indian managers were error reports and statistics, to the
point where I was confronted for reporting an error without consulting with
them directly first, so they could spoof the numbers...

And some of the developers I had to interface with literally needed to be
told, character by character, what to do to fix even the most basic stuff.

And yes, on the other hand, we had Indian colleagues integrated locally which
were some of the best people around.

Outsourcing is hard. You will likely not get any top talent unless you really
know how to work the market, and then it will likely not be particularly
cheap.

------
throwaway43
Indian developers are not over-rated. Infact noone outsources India because
they think they think that Indian coders are geniuses.

They know that Indian developers are mediocre but management believes that
mediocre is "good enough" at half the price , and guess what , it might hurt
your ego , but in many cases mediocre developers + long working hours can
solve most problems that typical devs encounter. You just need a good dev
overseeing the efforts if the project is complex.

~~~
DamnYuppie
Often what they leave behind is nearly unmanageable code that cost's 2x as
much to maintain and support.

~~~
throwaway43
Then you need to review the code once in a while and also put some code
quality related clauses in the contract.

If you do that you'll find that outsourcing to India is actually not such a
bad idea and guess what , we're cheap :D.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Contracted code quality becomes a standard to be gamed. They'll have plenty of
comments, but how many add useful information? It may pass a lint, but the
architecture will look horrible. The database may be normalized, but the
people and accounts will both own money, but there will be no way to link
people straight to accounts.

------
calhoun137
I recently had a contract job where I worked on code written by indian dev's.
My main reaction was that they were actually quite capable and knew more than
a few tricks, but these particular dev's were also making a large number of
amatuer mistakes. There was a lot of copy/pasting of large blocks of code, for
example.

My impression was that if they knew more high level theory, and did things in
a more organized way, that they could be even more lazy and make even more
money.

------
kokey
There's some top talent in and from India, but they will be as hard to find or
expensive to pay as anywhere else. It may have been slightly different in the
past, but it settled quickly at a point where you get what you pay for.
Developers below the top talent in India can often be worse than bad
developers locally, between the distance, language, managerial and cultural
differences you can end up with a mess that would have been easier to diverge
away from with local developers. However, if you can manage that well it can
work out and you may be able to build bigger teams over time.

~~~
fullwedgewhale
I think top talent competes globally so it's able to either move to where it
makes more money or demand higher rates. It's the anonymous guy in the cube
whose skills may range from incompetence to excellent, but you don't know what
you're getting at first.

------
abhishm
They suck. I am one. But here's why our kind get's jobs.

(Skill/Pay) of Indian >= (Skill/Pay) of most top hackers.

It's all about optimization! :P

~~~
lingua_franca
isn't it this kind of attitude makes u suck?

~~~
abhishm
The answer above is mostly a joke. But most Indian developers aren't from
illustrious backgrounds, so they are simple, hardworking and will make do with
peanuts. But yeah they aren't always innovative.

But that's changing rapidly. Indian startups have finally begun pushing back
many of the SV startups which have operations in India.

~~~
throwaway43
Yeah. These folks questioning our ability are in for a rude shock in a few
years . There's a whole eco system of mid tier firms + startups which are
shaping up really well .:D

------
justaman
Working in IT I often work with people who remote from India. Its all the
same. You have those who are gifted and have a passion for what they do, and
those who don't.

I think the most important thing to consider here is communication. Often it
can be difficult to speak with foreigners in common terms.

~~~
fullwedgewhale
I think one difference that I've seen is that the US has a very different
attitude toward computer programming. In the US it's more glamorous? That's
not the right word, but it seems like when I talk to a number of foreign
developers who emigrated to the US, it's more about being a good job than it
is about being a genius hacker, rich by 25, or being a technical tour de
force. I see a lot more women overseas who become programmers. Maybe because
the culture is different, and becoming a programmer is like becoming an
architect or engineer?

I think that different culture might self-select US developers the same way
top schools produce highly motivated, successful people because they recruit
highly motivated, successful kids. Not to say every US developer wants to
climb to the top of some technical or economic mountain, but it seems like
maybe there's a smudge more passion among US developers. Also, intelligent,
math oriented individuals have other avenues in the US, like finance, (and
unlike the rest of the world) dentistry and medicine are lucrative careers.
Meaning you choose programming more because you want to program, but in other
countries it's because it's a better paying job.

I've also noticed that in some countries, once you've done a few years writing
code, you quickly want to join management ranks and develop a coding allergy.
More so than in the US, where it seems like 50 year old developers still want
to write code. I get the sense that, in some countries, if you don't get into
management then you are a failure at some level. So in the US you can find
someone with 10+ years experience developing software, but in other countries
you just have people who've stagnated and never moved up.

I dunno.

~~~
throwaway43
I am an Indian developer and I feel that you're onto something there. This
needs more discussion.

For eg: An executive an HCL , a leading Indian outsourcing firm called
American developers "unemployable" :

>> He says students from countries like India, China, and Brazil are more
willing to put the effort into "boring" details of tech process and
methodology, such as ITIL, Six Sigma, etc.

[http://www.dailytech.com/CEO+of+Microsofts+Indian+Partner+Co...](http://www.dailytech.com/CEO+of+Microsofts+Indian+Partner+Complains+American+Grads+Are+Unemployable/article15486.htm)

So basically , American devs want challenging work and technical growth ,
while Indian devs are happy to even have a job.

~~~
justaman
There is definitely something to this. From my experience(American), nobody
writes their specs.

------
lordnacho
I've worked with Indians in a number of counterparty firms. The key isn't
whether they're Indian, the key is how they are organised. The Indians who
worked in a western firm in permanent roles were pretty much the same as
everyone else at those firms. The guys who were working outsourcing roles were
problematic.

Sometimes it's just plainly obvious a guy has been hired because he's cheap.
And since it's a money-saving exercise, the employer will also skimp on such
things as documentation, communication, availability, etc. This only makes the
guy's life harder, and makes him look worse than he really is.

------
Joeri
I've worked with developers in 4 countries so far, including India, and I've
learned two things. (1) you have good developers everywhere, the challenge is
finding and hiring them, and (2) there are only two efficient org structures
for developing a codebase, everyone in the same location (optimizing for face
to face) or everyone remote (optimizing for online communication). Most shops
end up setting up a remote unit outsourcing a particular set of tasks (e.g.
maintenance, or a particular module), and that's a recipe for disaster because
you end up with an extremely inefficient communication structure (blend of
face to face and online, no one actually knows what's going on, yet everyone
spends the whole day communicating).

The thing I've noticed about hiring in India is that due to the economic
circumstances a lot more people go into software development who have no
business being there. You can find good developers, but you have to weed out
many more bad candidates to get to them.

------
known
India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality. The whole country's economy is based
on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a
pioneer in the field. The most recent example of this ideology is the
"Business Process Outsourcing" industry. New BPO units are propping up here
and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final
deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and
then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum. Till then
India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes
place. [http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-
show-1-the-w...](http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-the-
worlds-biggest-shoplifters-india-ranks-no-1/20111114.htm)

------
kumartanmay
There are many across the world especially fallen for Indian freelancers for
their "price" and "quality". However, their experience has been unforgettable.
Do you know Indian developers/ freelancers who actually meet gold standards?

------
bruceb
In the US most of those who graduate with a CS degree did so because they are
interested in CS. In India you have a lot of students who are taking CS
because they are expected to not because of a passion for it. Combine that
with lack of accountability at some schools you get a lot of half prepared
graduates.

So there are good and great programmers but you also have a lot of mediocre
ones. The other problem is a lot of what is taught at these schools is dated.

~~~
reboog711
Do you have a source for that claim?

I know a few US based developers who I feel went into computer science because
they saw dollar signs.

------
JohnnyDouglas
Dunno.

But there are a ton of unscrupulous individuals that represent inadequate
developers (maybe in general, maybe only for a specific project) and flat out
lie about their skill sets and experience. People thinking of outsourcing in
this manner should interview those doing the work, and follow up later to make
sure those are the _actual_ people doing the work a few weeks down the road.

------
neotrinity
Please add Ask HN: if you are intention is to "ask HN".

I clicked the link a couple of times before i released what you have done.

------
agjmills
I am starting at a UK company where most of the developers are based in
Bangalore, however, as I understand it, they are not freelance but employees

------
twunde
One factor that increases the difficulty of working with Indian teams is that
there is little time overlap between India and the US working day.

~~~
bediger4000
This is _far_ more important than upper management believes. It's almost
impossible to overlap workdays in an effective way with people 11.5 hours off
of your clock. Night shifts don't work for various reasons, either in the USA
or India, so every communication is via email, and can take a day or two
longer just due to no schedule overlap.

------
peterwwillis
You get what you pay for. And sometimes not even then...

------
rainhacker
Follow the posting etiquette. Prepend 'Ask HN:' to your question.

------
snarfy
The good developers move here.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Out of curiosity, to which parochial center of the Universe are you referring
to by "here"?

~~~
snarfy
Here = not India.

