
India’s Reverse Diaspora - prakash
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=11690
======
plinkplonk
from the article.

"As Bangalore moves further up the technology ladder, this four centuries-old
city of nearly 6 million citizens has ambitions to challenge places like
Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, as
a world center for innovation."

I am Indian, live and work in Bangalore and have lived a few years in the
United States. This is just a rhetorical flourish on the part of the writer.
There are no such "ambitions" visible on the ground.

Of course the writer has conveniently made the subject of statement "the
city", and has given no supporting evidence.

There are many MNC research labs, but nothing like what the article implies.
And very often these Indian research labs don't produce high quality research.
Just ask someone in Microsoft or Yahoo Research how good the Indian "labs"
are.

Intel seems to have a more succesful offshore lab, but it is the exception,
not the rule.

It looks like the journalist took a couple of weeks tour of the city,
swallowed whatever Nandan Nilekani and other corporate CEO types told him
(Infosys Labs is a joke within Infosys. "Innovations" often have to do with
"process improvement" and so on, hardly cutting edge CS research) and wrote a
sloppy article, thin on logic and facts.

~~~
FraaJad
Being a native of Bengaluru and a current resident of US, I could not agree
more with plinkplonk.

These are fluff pieces written by visiting western journalists after visiting
the shiny campuses of SWITCH (satyam, wipro, infy, ..).

This piece is nothing different than the ones that gets printed often in local
english media (esp. ToI). It is tiring to listen to the "phoren" returnees
living in their gated communities, complaining daily about the traffic and
power-outages. Bah!

After having studied in what is arguably the best undergraduate tech campus in
Bangalore, I know what goes around for "research" and "high tech" in computer
science departments.

All the undergraduate schools are solely focussed on getting you into one of
the SWITCH companies. Woe be you if you had an independent mind and tried to
join a more hacker friendly company like Google/Thoughtworks etc.. The
immediate family will start distressing over you not making it to the holy
shrines of Infy, Wipro etc.,

Some interesting discussion here: [http://www.pluggd.in/entrepreneurship/why-
wipro-infosys-and-...](http://www.pluggd.in/entrepreneurship/why-wipro-
infosys-and-tcs-are-the-axis-of-evil-for-indian-startup-space-2439/)

Of course all is not doom and gloom. The hacker scene is quite vibrant with
Python/Ruby/FOSS communities being as active as anywhere in the world. Quite a
few youngsters are getting into the startup mode. Even if a lot of them are
testing the waters by attending startup events, reading and blogging about it,
being on HN and boot strapping their ideas while living with their parents
(not many basements in Bangalore, I'm afraid :).

Going forward, I strongly believe that these independent hackers will do more
for the startup scene than the "bill-by-the-hour" Goliaths.

~~~
netcan
Thanks for the link. To me, this is a very interesting topic area. You, the
linked post & the many follow up articles seem to rely on two quite different
reasons for this issue.

 _The big outsource companies making up such a large section of the IT market
have ugly business models. They get the kind of work where quality &
innovation are not actually real competitive advantages & the bill by the hour
on a cost+ basis. They're poisoning the industry everywhere from Universities
to corporate culture.

_Indian culture is creating problems. I've heard variations on this theme.
Mostly they centre around family expectations & such pushing young individuals
towards being risk averse.

The former, I think might not really be a 'problem' as it seems. The
availability of secure jobs (especially places where parents have a memory of
this not being the case) will bring in employees. They would have been
Accountants or hairdressers if that is where good solid careers lay.

But, maybe they also make this career path accessible to those that otherwise
would have been accountants or whatever.

Sure, these companies may not be the best possible for creating a thriving
startup/innovation city. Maybe a Lenova or a Google would have been better.
But that doesn't mean that these companies are a net loss.

------
ShabbyDoo
A question to those here who have experienced both IT work in both the US and
in India:

Over the past year, I conducted well over thirty technical phone screens in
hope of finding a single, somewhat-skilled Java development contractor. The
majority of those interviewed were Indian people who were working in the US on
H1B visas. Interview results ranged from the mediocre down to the abysmal. The
resumes of all these candidates claimed several years of work exclusively in
Java, and many also purported to have had lead/architect roles.

My screening technique is an insult to a good developer. I ask questions that
anyone who has written any decent Java code should be able to answer without
pause. For example, I email a small snippet of code containing a try/catch
block and ask the candidate to trace through the flow of program execution if
the checked exception is thrown. Literally half of candidates think that
program execution terminates whenever a catch block is entered and the
contents of that block done executing. How could someone have written any
quality code and not know this? I'm not asking Java trivia.

What's going on here? If I was going to travel half way around the world to
work as a Java developer, I'd be sure to read a couple of Java books on the
plane. Is there something uniquely American/Western about expecting people to
"know their stuff"? I'd attribute my observations to general, world-wide
idiocy except that the rate of ineptitude relative to claimed experience was
far worse with Indian candidates. Perhaps a Mid-Western, Fortune 1000 company
isn't a compelling place to spend six months on a contract? The role was to do
back-end engineering work on a pretty large, well-know site -- something I
would think would be compelling compared to the average "maintain a crappy
legacy banking system" gig. If I claimed to be a Java developer and didn't
know much Java, I'd be so embarrassed that I'd study every night to achieve
competence.

I feel like such an Ugly American asking this question, but I can't discount
my observations. What am I missing? Is there some selection bias in my data
set that I'm unaware of? I also find a general lack of creativity in these
candidates, but I attribute that to the rote nature of Indian education (at
least that's what I've read about most schooling in India).

Note: I'm not trying to start a "Java sucks" language war here...When looking
at a candidate for the long term, I don't care if he/she knows Java at all.
However, when you claim to have done Java for five years and don't know basic
stuff, I have to question if you know anything at all.

~~~
FraaJad
Blaming "rote learning" for lack of technical capability of a considerable
majority of a "regular" Indian programmer is simplistic.

If I may list the issues that are possibly unique to Indian programmer, they
are, in no particular order:

* Money triumphs everything. Most Indian programmers don't care for the technology as long as money comes
    
    
       a) in ever increasing quantities
       b) from a reputed, brand-name company
       c) offers foreign travel, with US being first choice.
    

* Admissions to Engineering courses depends entirely on how "HOT" the market is for that degree. couple of years back it was CS. Now it is Electronics and Communcation Engg (ECE), just because it allows you to compete both for CS jobs and Electronics jobs.

* "Work Ethic" - that can be quantified as pride in one's individual contribution, quality of output, constant drive to improve one's skills and knowledge as a distant measure after social status, money for many Indian programmers.

* Enjoying Programming for the sake of it is considered trivial pursuit and not "serious". For instance, being a Python/Rails/Lisp/Haskell programmer of some capability is a matter of pride in US etc. Not so in India. If you are not working on "Enterprise" stuff, all you get is a "oh.. ok".

Of course generalising the above behaviour to ALL Indian programmers is a
disservice and wrong. As a hacker(if I may claim so myself) and a native of
Bangalore, I'm proud of many excellent programmers I have met in the last 10
years and I feel that many of us are on par with hackers from elsewhere in the
world.

To answer your "selection bias" question. There are many reasons why you will
not get a qualified hacker to appear on your radar. Getting a US visa is a
huge pain in the neck. If you want a H1B you will have go through a lot of
circus. Any self respecting hacker would balk at paying upto 60% of their
salaries to body shopping firms.

H1B applications are flooded on the first day of applications by big name
companies and body shoppers. This leaves no space for a hacker (who by nature
are content to be hacking on their own) to "hustle" to get into USA.

I wouldn't touch a lot of these H1B programmers myself. My own hiring
processes back home in India have been similar to yours. I would typically
give a programming test and a computer to the interviewees and ask them to
solve them for me. A significan percentage of candidates from large, brand
name companies would fail. Some of them wouldn't even know how to use command
line SQL query tools.

So, your sampling population is the one which is contaminated by people who
are largely motivated by the desire to work in US and not by technology.

~~~
ajju
Your points are true for Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops.
Many don't.

Google probably has 10K+ H1B engineers from India working for them (and not
via an intermediary). There are thousands of H1B engineers from India with
graduate degrees from top US schools. A very large majority of these Indian
programmers care about technology, as do most programmers in India who work
for software (non outsourcing) companies.

By saying that "Most Indian engineers don't care for technology" you are
painting these guys with the same brush. Even with your qualification that
"not all are like this", it reeks of bias. A more accurate statement might be
"Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops don't care about
technology".

/An admittedly biased but more informed opinion from someone who has worked as
an H1B engineer, has a graduate degree from a top 5 CS school in the US

~~~
FraaJad
This was in reply to a question where the poster wanted to know why it is hard
to find good Indian programmers who currently live in India.

Someone who has studied in US does not really belong to the "Indian
Programmer" set I was talking about here.

If you read my comment elsewhere in the thread, I defended people working for
non-SWITCH companies including google for bucking the trend. I know that the
caliber of programmers working for Goog, Y!, MS, Adobe is much higher than the
typical Indian programmer who aspires to a H1B visa, whose primary motivation
for a US Visa is increased money and social status.

I'm not painting everybody who is on H1B as bad. But if you consider that
nearly 100,000 apply to H1B visas from India, it not hard to see that a vast
majority are not of the same caliber as potential GOOG/MS/Y! employees.

Well, I have worked in India for 8 years as a programmer and have interviewed
dozens of potential employees to work for startup companies that I worked for
AND I have had the opportunity to interact with a wide sample of H1Bs in the
USA. I stand by my measure of "most programmers" even if it is anecdotal.

And your paraphrasing "Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops
don't care about technology" carries the same bias that you try to dispel. I
personally know a lot of programmers who work/used to work for SWITCh
companies while also being excellent hackers and FOSS contributors.

------
azharcs
I am a person born in Bangalore and currently live in Bangalore. First i want
to make this clear, Bangalore is not a threat to Silicon Valley or any
Technology hub. With the way things are going on here, i would say pretty
soon, it won't be a threat to anyone's job either.

Most of the top-tier companies are not actually technology companies but
intermediateries between $5 Software or Electronics Engineers, $7 MBA's and
Clients in Developed Countries. If these companies existed in Ancient Egypt,
they would be in the business of supplying slaves to build Pyramids. There are
hardly any Technology companies here which are actually in the business of
creating and branding products. Most of them are sweatshops where you can buy
a Fresh Engineer whose expertise is Java, C, C++, VB, Python, Ruby ( add
languages as you hear them is the motto here).

------
zaatar
Unfortunately, India still does not recognize dual citizenship. For the gory
details, see: [1] <http://immihelp.com/nri/overseascitizenshipindia/> [2]
<http://immihelp.com/nri/pio-vs-oci.html>

The author's claim that "The Indian government extends dual citizenship" is
therefore incorrect.

------
braindead_in
unfortunately not many with startup experience are coming back who can
contribute to the nascent startup ecosystem here. not much reverse brain drain
for the startup/hacker community unfortunately.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
There are interesting exceptions. I have had the pleasure to visit
eGovernments Foundation, <http://www.egovernments.org/> , and Arghyam,
<http://arghyam.org/> the last week. Both are run by former Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs and are doing some really fantastic work with limited resources.

I think it is fair to say that what is currently needed in India is not the
same thing that is needed in California, which means that the work being done
will not be the same. There are also different challenges, including problems
finding the right kind of staff, power cuts and horrendous traffic.

To get some more impressions from our visit, check out our blog at:
<http://www.akvo.org/blog/>

