
India’s Snapdeal Says the Country Doesn’t Have the Programmers It Needs - devnonymous
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/05/28/snapdeal-says-india-doesnt-have-the-programmers-it-needs
======
andrewstuart
All this says to me is Snapdeal doesn't know how to recruit. There are LOTS of
companies that are actually finding a sense of validation and satisfaction in
not being able to find people - it makes them feel elite and special. It's a
sort of non-recruiting that boosts the corporate ego. "We are so awesome that
we just can't even find ANYONE as awesome as us."

There's no shortage of programming talent. Only a shortage of recruiting
talent.

[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/theres-no-
shor...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/theres-no-shortage-of-
programming.html)

I sent one of the best developers I know to a job interview, he was rejected.

[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-
of-...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-of-best-
developers-i-have.html)

Employers don't want great developers, they want what they want.

[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-
dont...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-dont-want-
great-great.html)

~~~
gandharv90
Well they are not talking about developer. They are talking about technology
specialist, which India severely lack. One of the reason is where in India
would you study enough to become a specialist. You will have to go to a
foreign University and hence India will have to hire people from outside
India.

~~~
sridca
As someone born and raised in India, I find attitudes like this quite
annoying. Programmers tend to be passionate and self-learners; you want an
university to teach you? Look at what some programmers from Tamil Nadu came up
with: [http://hasura.io/](http://hasura.io/)

------
tamaatar
click-bait article really. Its like saying Google doesn't have the programmers
in US it needs. my points: 1) Snapdeal is in Delhi- Not really a hub of
software engineers. Most of them are in south of India and very few people
really want to move to Delhi. Also, people from south India almost never like
to move to Delhi. Even people from North like to stay in Bangalore because it
offers many career opportunities.

2) Snapdeal is really no big deal in India- With flipkart,google,microsoft and
a bunch of awesome new startups in south, and Snapdeal having no presence in
bangalore/Chennai/hyderabad etc- Programmers have a lot of options.

3) I know very very few people who use snapdeal. with amazon,flipkart and ebay
i don't see why snapdeal is relevant. Why would a good programmer move to join
this company? its not one of the big ones. Its not a cool startup and equity
will be low.

~~~
akhatri_aus
Its funny you say that because everyone I meet knows flipkart but don't really
use them but use snapdeal all too often.

From foreign news articles it does seem like flipkart & amazon are the big
deal which is why I find it confusing why in india snapdeal is a bigger deal.

~~~
ameen
Snapdeal has better prices on a few products, but the overall experience isn't
any better (wrong products being shipped, customers cheated by soaps/bricks in
product cases). Flipkart/Amazon prices are a little higher but the overall
experience is better. Both offer pretty good support as well.

Flipkart is technically more impressive than Snapdeal. (Flash sales/in-house
hardware, etc). It has it's own brand similar to Amazon basics - DigiFlip,
some of which are of decent quality - cables, chargers, etc.

------
littletimmy
In general, a company complaining about there not being enough programmers is
saying that there aren't enough programmers _at the price level they are
willing to pay_.

Just raise the salary. Watch as programmers magically materialize.

~~~
M8
My favourite analogy is property. I cannot find any nice houses selling for
£100K in London. Surely it means that nobody is selling any. Or maybe they
just cost more and that's a reality.

------
muktabh
Some interview anecdotes from India (Not all mine) :

For an SDE interview obsessed with binary trees after around 4 possible
traversals, the fifth one was: "Can you write code to traverse Binary-Tree in
a zigzag manner ?" "seriously ?" Rejected.

Questions asked in a PHP dev interview: "Can you write code to invert this
link list ?" "Yeah I could in college, but I haven't touched C for last 5
years. I can explain the logic though" "Being a Php developer doesn't mean you
forget how C looks like" Rejected.

Salary negotitation "My current salary is 50k, I am hoping for 10% increase"
"We will give you 30k, dont you want to work for a world class technology
product company " "Ok, can you still match my current salary ? I might join in
that case" "Do you want to work for a world class technology product company
or not ?" "Sorry" Rejected. candidate too demanding, lacks passion.

"Do you know Node JS ?" "No I am interviewing for a frontend developer post"
Rejected.

As these interviews point out, most of us are bad engineers.

Yes we Indian developers are shit. We are expected to work 24 hours a day,
taking orders* from product managers, who many times just become PMs because
they did not want to (or never understood how to) code and are expected to
feel oblige to take the smallest cuts from the bonus pie, not paid
for/encouraged to take any courses (one of my bosses actually suggested me to
unlearn all the "cool shit" as I was increasing expectations of good work of
other employees ) , and we are inefficient at that.

But even after this, it is not at all fair to compare us to the foreign
recruited people who earn twice, generally have more experience (as every
experienced person in India becomes a manager), and could do all cool github
coding in their career (try telling about Github to one of my previous PMs, he
will point you to know more about scrum) . After all its only in foreign
developers one can find "10 years of big data" (Hadoop recently turned 10 btw)
and "15 years of building scalable applications in Golang" type of experience.

There are a few Indian startups which are changing the scene. For the rest,
its better they hire from outside the country. If someone can make a bold
statement like this, he should have done his homework.

~~~
bovermyer
This makes me very curious about the culture around the Indian tech industry.
Why does there appear to be no encouragement for exploration or
experimentation? Further, why does there seem to be a strong emphasis on
prestige? For example, I know full well how powerful and prestigious Google
is, but that doesn't make me want to work there. I get the sense that that
kind of attitude is not common in India.

~~~
sridca
Indian society has traditionally enforced collectivistic values.

From a young age, be they a male or female, one is conditioned to unwittingly
absorb the various rules and responsibilities of a narrow lifestyle (get
married at ~25; have babies; earn a living; stay married till death; have
grandbabies) that there is little space and time for creative pursuits.

It is all thankfully changing now of course.

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ouroborosidiots
TLDR; What exactly do they expect if they openly advertise "B.Tech from
premier institutes. IIT’s, REC’s, BITS, etc" as a job requirement for almost
all of their engineering roles?

[https://careers.snapdeal.com/careersection/ex/jobdetail.ftl](https://careers.snapdeal.com/careersection/ex/jobdetail.ftl)

I am guessing, this is some kind of cheap publicity stunt.

~~~
gnufied
I would have partly agreed with Snapdeal since finding good engineer has
always been hard.

But this filtering by IITs/NITs/BITs shows - how out of touch they are. I know
some of the most brilliant programmers in Bangalore/Pune and they are not from
these "premier institutes". In fact, being from NIT Trichy myself, I have
concluded that - most engineers from these colleges are risk averse and likely
stick to a well trodden path of B.Tech + MBA or head to US for MS.

~~~
ouroborosidiots
Anecdotally speaking most of my _good_ IIT/NIT/BITs folks moved out of the
country/went for MBAs after graduation.

The average ones got hired locally by multinationals like EBay / Amazon /
Google etc..

So the ones who were actually applying to companies like Snapdeal etc.. were
the 4 point someones who really have nothing but an "IIT degree" on their
Resume.

I interviewed a couple of those for our startup. Honestly speaking, we found
more interesting people via Employee referrals - even if they didn't graduate
from these universities.

------
codeN
Snapdeal happens to be looking for people with 10+ years of experience in Big
Data/Cloud , while in India 10 years ago, even product companies were hard to
find, and I am not sure cloud focussed and big-data companies existed anywhere
other than places like SV. In such a case it seems only reasonable that they
are finding it hard to find the programmers they need in India.

------
_ati
They could consider opening development center in Bangalore or Hyderabad
instead of US. If there are good enough developers in India for Google and
Microsoft Snapdeal should not have problem finding the right people.

------
trowaway
Neither does it have the ethics to hire good ones. Recently, someone created
an account using my email address. Now I get all kinds of spam from that
account. Although it's easy to fix that by blocking their domains, I went
ahead and contacted them about the issue. The standard reply was, "someone
will get back to you..". After a while I simply asked them to close the
account, here's the reply:

\------------

Greetings from Snapdeal!

We are writing to inform you that we are unable to close your snapdeal
account,however if you wish to unsubscribe the same,kindly confirm
accordingly.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience you have experienced.

In case of any further assistance or clarification on this issue, please reply
back to this email.

Assuring you of our best services always,

Yours sincerely, Team Snapdeal

\--------

What the hell does "unable to close" mean. Account killer rightly calls them
"deeply blacklisted" [https://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-snapdeal-
account](https://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-snapdeal-account)

Fortunately, I have the time and resources to legally force them to close my
account. I never agreed to their terms or privacy policy, yet it's been shoved
down my throat. This is not an isolated incident though. I know numerous
people who had bad experiences shopping with them. You often don't get your
refund easily if the product is defective. I can imagine that a company with
such a smug attitude towards customers would be a class A shitty employer.

------
estefan
10 years experience with big data and cloud? That doesn't really say much
about the quality of a coder.

These arbitrary metrics are pretty pointless IMHO. You can learn what you need
to generally in around 1-3 years. Someone with 10 years experience could
easily have been doing a job that gave them about 1 year's worth of experience
but for 10 years, rather than having 10 years of varied experience.

------
izolate
I'm a bit out of touch. How are the salaries for software developers in India
these days? A few years ago it was pathetic. Could be a factor, though.

Sometimes I really feel like going back to India and starting a development
bootcamp in my hometown of Chandigarh. Reading articles like these brings me a
few steps closer to actualising that desire.

~~~
kalyan02
I left India 3 years back and from what I gather, salaries at reasonably good
places have pretty much doubled and in few places tripled. Am not even talking
about Google/Fb.

~~~
rockyj
I agree, but you also have to consider the crazy inflation rate there. Not to
mention cost of housing and no decent public infrastructure. You need a lot of
money just to get a reasonable standard of living there.

------
kamaal
These start ups don't get the talent they need, because they purposefully
don't hire the talent they need. Atleast three times in the past I've had
recruiters tell me these yet to be named start up's can't hire me because they
hire from the IIT's only. In short don't bother to apply if you don't belong
to our self congratulatory crowd. One time I was told this in an onsite
interview, I had to tell them on their face if such was the case they need to
tell me before hand, instead of wasting my time having me travel to their
place.

And the interview methods are so badly broken, you are only likely to hire
mugpots who memorize math theorems and repeat them in interviews. Don't get me
wrong I'm not saying algorithm knowledge isn't important, but these people
aren't test your algorithm skills, they are testing your skills to repeat the
algorithms you memorized. Honestly I don't know of any serious math problem
worth solving can be solved in minutes, unless you already know about it(Or
you are Terrence Tao or Gregori Perelman). Which in case your are not testing
problem solving skills, you are testing how many problem solution sets the
candidate has memorized.

Now guess how people get around these interviews. Most people who ace these
interviews are from so called elite colleges nearly spend all the time in the
day on interview forums. Instead of actually working. And since they spend so
much time there, they feel obligated to use that effort in switching jobs more
often for better pay. This leads to a big crowd of people who abandon projects
mid way only to hop from one company to another. All the while day
productivity at offices being very low.

Now if you are hiring such people why should you complain? You are getting
exactly what you wanted.

Hire for productivity and for people's commitment to make your projects and
company successful. The results will follow.

------
johanneskanybal
other requirements: 10 year plus experience with Deep Learning and Azure
DocumentDB

~~~
thewarrior
Has deep learning been around for 10 years ?

~~~
M8
Also 10 years of _practical_ use of any quantum programming languages. Also 10
years of experience of using all mainstream frameworks that will be released
in 5 years.

------
anticipation
Investors should first hire a bunch of auditors and financial analysts before
engineers to go through their books of accounts. All their books are cooked.

------
bliti
How come foreign companies seem to find the ones they need? You never hear
about a lack of Indian talent. Never have experienced it. I have always been
able to find knowledgeable indian programmers to work with remotely.

------
vjdhama
I think there's a lot of talent in india. Just need to search deep enough.

~~~
M8
Best talent in India is to be found in USA.

