
The end of India’s ‘IT miracle’? - fourmii
https://story.californiasunday.com/infosys-india-tech
======
osrec
IT miracle? More like IT sham. The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at
best in my experience. Lack of understanding and innovation is rife across the
board, but they seem to be great at selling their service. This may be because
of the "yes" culture other comments have mentioned, but I would guess it's got
a lot to do with a massively undercut price. It is, however, a false economy,
because you often end up implementing things 4 times before they're fit for
purpose. Also, the attrition rate in Indian tech firms is crazy - I've often
seen 80% of a team change before the end of a 6 month project, which means
continual re-explanation of requirements etc etc. For me, developers in India
have always been a bad experience, and I'm genuinely surprised at the success
the Indian IT outsourcing companies have enjoyed over the decades.

~~~
commandlinefan
> The quality of engineers in India is sketchy at best

In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent
developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers
I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about
Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two
and a half decades, have been Indian.

~~~
tome
Were they _in_ India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about
Indians.

~~~
Alterlife
I am in India, and I can't help but feel insulted by this comment. Is there
some kind of magic that makes engineers better when you take them out of
India?

There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of
the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.

\----

edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with
are American as well.

~~~
varjag
It is common to see Chinese names in some top tier science publications coming
from America. At the same time, the bulk of science coming from mainland China
is junk. So there well can be some magic at work. That, or selection.

~~~
bhtru
If you can make it in the West you’ll leave your homeland typically. Tech is a
sector that often can is merit based so it’s not difficult for foreign
engineers to prove their worth and make the migration (relative to other
service sector industries).

~~~
commandlinefan
> merit based

Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...

------
niklasd
I studied in India 2012 for a short time. I met incredible smart and
hardworking people. However, one thing that I found quite unnerving was that
there is a tendency to always anwser yes if asked if one knows how to do
something, even if thats not true. Sometimes a plain "I don't know" can be
very helpful in achieving a goal.

I can't count how many times I asked a rickshaw driver if he knew a certain
place and he answered yes, and we just drove around for some time until I
found out he has no idea. From what I heard that sometimes remains a problem,
also in IT service.

That said, we all have our cultural qirks, and in most cases knowing them
solves half the problem.

~~~
chrisper
I believe it is similar in Vietnamese culture. When we work with them they
often say yes only for us to find out later that they had no clue what to do.

~~~
boubiyeah
Seems common in Asia. I had the same experience in cambodia.

One example:

\- I was very, very sick (Traveler's diarrhea) and we were about to embark for
a 5 hours minivan trip with a guy without a driving license.

\- 5 minutes before departure, I ask the organizer "do you have a vomit bag?"

\- "Yes"

\- I wait around a bit, but he carries on with his work and just ignore me

\- "Sorry, did you have a bag, any bag? maybe a plastic bag, as I'm sick"

\- "Yes"

\- Now it's 30s before departure and I get pretty stressed as I have nothing
should I need to throw up. So I ask him again, and he actually get pretty mad
(with that asian "must not lose face" style though) and ignore me because I
insisted and didn't just drop the issue (I didn't know what was going on at
the time ...)

~~~
est
Sounds like "yes" means "I heard ya" or "ACK"

------
sumanthvepa
While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the
impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech
sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true
that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a
whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a
massive domestic market demand and an ability to reach global markets easily.
There is a new breed of product startups out of Bangalore and other places
that are born global (e.g. Zoho). They build products (not services) for the
world, and not just India. Inward investment into the Indian tech sector was
the highest it ever was (though still dwarfed by investment into the US tech
sector and China's tech sector) [https://www.business-
standard.com/article/specials/2017-saw-...](https://www.business-
standard.com/article/specials/2017-saw-26-bn-of-pe-vc-investments-in-india-
the-highest-in-a-decade-118020800090_1.html) So the doom and gloom are not
quite accurate. Yes IT services may have plateaued after two decades of torrid
growth, but tech is doing fine thank you.

~~~
kumarvvr
Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to
cater to the new wave of startups.

The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity,
encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.

Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole
generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a
Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.

There are very few schools that actually teach creativity, problem solving
skills, etc.

A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools
have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their
creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches,
copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be
very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative
thinkers.

Those Indians who are famous or are talented, are that way because they fought
against the system or ignored it completely or have had good mentors.

~~~
sho
> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on
> numbers on report cards

You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and
they seem to be doing OK.

I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright
suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think
entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.

~~~
kumarvvr
I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing
sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being
innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem,
borrowing their IP.

Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this
path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.

~~~
baybal2
As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing
sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with
first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011.

The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city
center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for
entrepreneurship.

Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon
valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few
hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and
hookers?

~~~
dx034
Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help
lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it
probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.

------
bane
I think another way to look at it:

Many Indians who were legitimately good ended up in high paying jobs where
they then used that money and skill to emigrate to countries with more
comfortable standards of living. In my area, the Indian immigrant community
has exploded, and almost entirely within the technology sector to start with,
but now rapidly expanding to other areas as family members sponsor other
family members and so on.

The wonderful halo effect is of course that family members who immigrated with
the technical household head, but don't work in tech, are now employed at,
opening and running all manner of businesses as well.

As a result I have a vast community of new, highly skilled and educated
neighbors who are also ambitious and motivated.

~~~
abakker
This exactly. Someone in another thread mentioned worker turnover. Turnover is
a result not just management challenges, but incredible job mobility that
comes with the demonstration of skill.

------
code4tee
If you’ve ever been to India you see that clearly the general approach to
things is just throw people at the problem. Why have one person inspecting
your ticket when you can have four?

The problem with the Indian outsourcers is that they’ve broadly failed to move
up the technology value chain. These firms were quite good at the “just throw
a bunch of people at it” solutions to brute force get work done but the tech
sector has moved on.

Need a company to give you 1000 mechanical turks to perform some tasks you
haven’t been able to automate yet? Go to an Indian outsourcing firm. Need some
people to design technology to make the mechanical turks no longer required?
That talent is generally not found within these Indian firms.

In that sense what McKinsey said in the article is probably true. Advances
(largely built elsewhere) will probably make 80% of what these firms do
irrelevant in the next few years.

~~~
ksec
It seems to me, time and time again, India, ( actually pretty much all the
other BRIC ) are trying to copy China without actually understanding how and
why China got there in the first place.

10 to 15 years ago one would have thought India to be better in programming,
largely due to English for Chinese are not as common. Turns out with a whole
Ecosystem, China has been able to adopt and produce some very decent
engineers.

There is nothing wrong with throwing people at the problem. You create jobs
and employment, there are still industries and area in China continue to do
this. But you must also acknowledge how this is a temporary solution and what
needs to be done afterwards.

~~~
thewhitetulip
This doesn't happen because Indian politicians still fight elections based on
religion

------
chvid
In my own observation the use of outsourcing to India (in terms of market
share) has been declining for years. Either being replaced by work done here
in Copenhagen or in countries nearer by - Poland in particular.

As a practioner; I cannot say that I miss working with projects outsourced to
India. I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical
way of working and you as a country become more focused on internal demand.

~~~
plinkplonk
"I really hope that you guys learn a less bureaucratic and hierarical way of
working"

These generalizations make as much sense as me telling a random American HN
user "I really hope that you guys stop indulging your blood lust by invading
other countries and killing millions of innocents to make profits for your
munitions industry and you as a country become less bloodthirsty"

Most Americans are not killers, though the subset someone from an invaded
country has encountered maybe. All Indians don't have a "bureaucratic and
heirarchical" way of working, though the subset encountered by someone seeking
cheap outsourcing may be.

If you try outsourcing dev to China you'll encounter the same 'bureaucratic
and hierarchical' ways of working, but they have massive product companies
that are on par with anything in America. So the reason why India doesn't yet
have dominant software product companies lie elsewhere.

Meanwhile these 'hopes' that "you guys learn to be less bureaucratic" are just
sneers and stereotyping in disguise.

 _As a stereotype_ "bureaucratic ways of working" can be applied to Germany
(for example) or Japan, or Korea, and while I'm sure there are bureaucratic
Germans, they seem to doing fine economically.

But,carry on. This is the internet.

~~~
chvid
Yeah.

We should be careful with generalizations; and it is easy to go overboard in a
short general sentence (like I did).

However there is such a thing as differences in work culture. And it is very
reasonable to talk about differences amongst countries. And on the mentioned
scales (bureaucracies and hierarchies) Denmark and India sit on each their
extremes.

That India's IT-industry has been driven by external demand is just a fact as
far as I know.

~~~
abakker
Well, India's industry has been driven by _market demand_.The market for large
scale app dev work has been more profitable and better outside of India
because there was more money chasing those projects outside of India. If you
want to be a successful business, sell what people are buying.

------
koolhead17
We have a saying here in India: "You pay peanuts, you hire donkeys".

So a lot many comments in the thread is either generalization or a
confirmation bias.

The India I know and software developers I know of are no less either in dream
or dedication from peers in Silicon Valley or any other part of developed
world. :)

~~~
Clubber
Yes, this is essentially what I've witnessed. I went to a very exclusive
private high school in the US and the students from India there were top
notch. Same in college. This was in the 90s. In the 2000s, our 2nd DBA at a
very well known company was from India and he was top notch as well.

I think what happened is some not so ethical business people in India decided
to make money off the good reputations of the Indians already working for US
companies and built their companies off that. Instead of finding good Indian
developers, they hired whomever they could find to take the job and presented
them as top talent. US MBA's not knowing any better (what's new) couldn't
resist the low cost and jumped all over it. Of course not being able or
willing to admit a mistake, this ruse went on for two decades.

The aftermath is the good Indian talent now has a tarnished (severely)
reputation, and businesses now have no strong internal systems development
teams; nor have no idea how to recreate one.

Greedy capitalism is a global phenomenon. The greedy US companies got duped by
the greedy Indian companies, and everyone lost. Good US teams lost by getting
severely thinned out. Good Indian developers lost their reputation. US
businesses lost their ability to develop even basic quality internal software.
Indian companies seem to be losing out on the market as well.

~~~
koolhead17
Indeed. With a bias and FUD, it is too easy to generalize anything.

------
reacharavindh
If anything, Indian engineers are street smart, and pick up new tech and tools
very quickly. Of course, everybody can, I mean to say that there is a cultural
attitude to quick adaptation to changing conditions.

Source: myself, Indian CS engineer, now living in Europe.

Sure, the simple laborious IT tasks are going away with automation for good.
But the labor force will pick the next best thing. As long as labor is cheaper
than the west, Indian outsourcing companies will only thrive. In 10 years, the
dynamics will slowly evolve such that outsourcing will slow down, and more
original startups will rise up.

UPDATE: I over generalized my comment for my own good. I meant to say, many
engineers that I know are .....

~~~
ramblerman
> Indian engineers are street smart

If we are going to generalize, I would have to say the exact opposite. In my
experience they are definitely smart and capable, but usually extremely naive
and somewhat sheltered by western standards.

~~~
reacharavindh
Yeah. My generalization is of no use in a discussion. I only meant to say a
lot of them(that I know) are. I can't vouch for billions of us :-)

Could you elaborate "sheltered by western standards"?

~~~
jacobush
I feel like a horrible person for this - but in an outsourcing scenario:
listening a LOT to direction and not explore solutions very much themselves.
This is probably amplified by their management giving them hell if they spend
too much on exploring instead of ticking off the boxes that they can bill for.

I.e. not only "you get what you pay for" in the sense that cheap labour might
not be the most skilled labour, but in the deeper sense in that if the
outsourcing scenario is such that the western company orders a bunch of stuff
from a checklist done, well, that's what's going to get done.

This is the same problem a large organization has locally too, but it gets
amplified when you try to outsource things and increase turn-around time.

~~~
reacharavindh
You hit a vein of deep true thought. I can share my personal experience that
can help exemplify your point.

Disclaimer: Personal experience. Not saying this is the case foe everyone.

My first job was to work for one of the biggest Indian outsourcing companies.
Soon after joining, I realized that their business model has nothing to do
with real engineering work or genuine solutions to problems. They were
essentially looking for people to tick the boxes, sit around and do stuff that
could easily be automated, or maintain software that should have been
rewritten decades ago. Their goal is to bill the western clients and prolong
the maintenance work as much as they could.

Now, there is no need for creative thought or engineering prowess here. It is
not surprising that someone doing this task is not passionate or creative.
This is what translates to "Listen to western managers, and do just what they
ask for, and the infamous never say NO". Saying No is not the engineer's
prerogative here.

On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for
product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a
good product) show the true passion and creativity. I have friends who work
for both categories of companies and I can clearly see this distinction.

Personal experience - I worked for Bank of America - Merill Lynch development
center in India, maintaining a COBOL application. I once received an email
from a senior team member(from Florida) to just translate his logic from the
attached Word document to COBOL and not to do anything more. You get what you
pay for. I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my
graduate studies soon after.

TLDR; Dont expect passion from cheap outsourced labor. Many people do those
jobs because they do not have access to a better alternative.

Sorry for the rant. I know some friends of mine in the industry shared my
experience. It does not mean everyone does/feels the same way. I apologize if
I unintentionally belittled anyone's serious effort.

~~~
kamaal
>>Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here.

Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to doing
something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody else to
do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing anything
ever again.

Its not as simple as you make it to be. In this age and era, quitting is a
sure sign of a loser.

>>On the other hand, several Engineers from the same country who work for
product companies with the right incentives(you get paid and recognised for a
good product) show the true passion and creativity.

For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and
creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?

>>I once received an email from a senior team member(from Florida) to just
translate his logic from the attached Word document to COBOL and not to do
anything more.

These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to
code what the requirements say.

>>I quit that job a week after, and flew to the states to do my graduate
studies soon after.

Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing
your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying
other reasons to move out of the country.

~~~
reacharavindh
I'm amazed by the negativity and prejudice in your response.

>> Outsourcing or no outsourcing, if someone walked up to me and said no to
doing something in software team setting, I will likely be finding somebody
else to do the job. And yes, I will likely never ask that person for doing
anything ever again.

Precisely why I said - "Saying No is not the engineer's prerogative here." in
the context of a developing world. You just explained my words :-)

>> For saying NO? Doing nothing and saying NO requires 'true passion and
creativity', while doing what it takes to achieve the task doesn't?

I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and
recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion
and creativity." Somehow you connect it to saying NO?

>> These things are called requirements documents, and yes you are supposed to
code what the requirements say.

Although I could have explicitly said it was not a requirements doc, I hoped
that you'd give me the benefit of doubt that I wouldn't ramble about a basic
software engineering artefact. In this case, it was a Word doc with variable
names(not variable naming conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the
entire code within quotes. That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed -
"I don't want you to think, just be a monkey and do this."

>> Please. Passport tourism among Indians is now well known. Also bad mouthing
your former employers and colleagues isn't exactly how you go about justifying
other reasons to move out of the country.

So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? I sure
am very happy that I'm not as close-minded to think like that. I pursued what
I wanted to study, and what I wanted to do with my career. For the record, I
still proudly hold my Indian passport.

Living outside your home country, and exploring other cultures opens one's
mind like no other. Please give it some thought.

>> Bad mouthing former employers...

Seriously? I was contextually explaining my personal case about what I didn't
like, to provide an example of things that happen at an outsourcing setup. So,
you think one should never speak of what happens at work and be "loyal" to
companies? Welcome to the open world of discussions and improving for the
better.

~~~
kamaal
>>I said - "Engineers working for product companies where they get paid and
recognised for good product instead of outsourcing companies show true passion
and creativity."

How does this change in a service company? Programmers who write code in a
service company show none of these traits, same programmer writes code in a
product company and magically becomes passionate and creative.

>>In this case, it was a Word doc with variable names(not variable naming
conventions), loop variables, and pretty much the entire code within quotes.
That is what I was pissed about. The doc screamed - "I don't want you to
think, just be a monkey and do this."

This is how CMM levels worked. You'd also be interested in looking at the
engineering practices at NASA.

>>So, you call going to another country for studies "Passport tourism"? ....

None of this wrong. But you wrote you served notice and moved as soon as you
saw the requirements doc, and how that killed your creativity.

~~~
pwneduser
"How does this change in a service company?"

You need to work for a good product company to understand that. From your
other comments, clearly you work for a non-FANG, perhaps for a services
company or another non-services company that do not seem to have the kind of
work and expertise Google or Amazon has. You are also too biased to be
completely blind to the possibility that must be some factors other than money
because of which so many people want to work for the big product companies
even though they are not the highest payers anymore. No amount of answering
your questions is going to convince you how services companies and product
companies are world apart unless you have seen both sides. And by product
companies I don't mean companies like Cisco or Juniper (although they are
technically) but they are now like dinosaurs moving slowly and are only
marginally better than the services company. I mean the types of Amazon or
Facebook or Google or LinkedIn in their India offices or the types of Directi
or Flipkart (now Walmart Labs -- another great workplace) or Ola.

Any responses to you in this thread seems futile because you come with a very
negative outlook about other companies and you are not ready to look back and
question your assumptions.

Sorry, not everyone shares this pessimistic view and try to understand many of
us have enjoy very productive and happy careers in these big product companies
that you seem to believe are no better than the services company.

~~~
kamaal
And no amount of writing going to convince you that a programmers job at
cognizant is better than being sysadmin at Google.

------
kamaal
Multinational companies took the wind out of the sails for most IT companies's
ability to hire talent.

Around 2008, there was a peak boom in offshore centers set up by most
companies. These companies could afford to pay well because most of their
revenue is either ad revenue or from companies like Microsoft which had a
great sales pipeline going. These companies around 2014 - 2015 started to cut
down heavily on offshore hiring, the reason was salaries were bonkers and most
managers overpaid certain employees by several factors higher than
others(Thanks to insane stock packages). The salary levels for many employees
were on par with US salaries. Once you reach that point, it makes sense to
hire people in US than in Bangalore. This plateau effected product based
multinational companies more than services companies.

Another factor that has played into this whole thing is the number of H1B's
and Green cards currently staying in US. The L1 A and EB-1 program was abused
by most companies(ironically product companies) to award GCs in wholesale. As
of now the peak services company head count around 2008 is now entirely
working in the US. Of course if you have all the cheap labor you want in your
home country, you don't outsource much to India.

The actual services company industry is going at the same pace as before. They
are quite fiscally responsible companies so don't pay 4x higher as product
companies do, they are perennially profitable though. Infosys is one of the
most successful tech companies in the history of India ever. In fact the
product company salaries are the biggest reason many fresher in the past few
years have opted to be SREs/DBAs/PEs/QEs(non-dev roles) etc in product
companies than be programmers in service companies. The irony today is people
from small time colleges get to work a lot of good dev projects in service
companies than people from top colleges who work on non-dev projects.

The third factor of course is homegrown start up ecosystem. Start ups in India
payed quite well around 2014 when VC money was free and plenty. I guess they
don't pay that well now. And they are also quite stingy with equity. Plus I
hear they are bad with tech work too. Most of it is Spring + Java + Postgres
stitching.

I remember in the peak of service companies I did far more quality work than
any start up kid does today.

May be the next US recession will change things again. But like I said before,
people are now used to MNC salaries and suffer through any bad project for
just the salary.

~~~
megaman22
Almost univesally, during that period the response I received from our
customers was that outsourcing was cheaper, but quality was so bad they hired
stateside as soon as the contracts were up.

~~~
rorykoehler
That is not necessarily the case though. That just shows they don't know how
to hire.

------
OliverJones
In 2004, I heard a sales pitch from a VP of a big outsourcing outfit in
Bengaluru (fka Bangalore).

In response to a question about turnover and preventing it, he said they were
giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a year.

That was crazy. That was Sili-Valley crazy. There are limits to growth. It's
too bad they're hitting good people.

But the business model of Infosys and other outsource IT services giants has
always been arbitrage: buying something where and when it's cheap and selling
it where and when it's expensive. Arbitrage is a risky game in the long run.
And when the commodity being traded is people, people are bound to get hurt.
It's just reality.

~~~
sumedh
> he said they were giving raises of about 7% to their developers twice a
> year.

Inflation in India is pretty high as well compared to developed countries.

------
pipio21
If someone works for me 18 hours instead of 8 consistently I will fire him
immediately.

We do not want overworked and burn out slaves, thank you very much.

Making more than 6 hours of real deep work every day is extremely challenging.
Someone who tells me he is working 18...

We have some Indians that work for us, on similar terms than Europeans or
Americans, living in Europe. Good workers and have earned their place, like
the rest.

------
mwarcholinski
I've worked before with my two startups with teams from India, and this was a
disaster, but I think the reasons why were:

#1 Lack of my experience in dev area - how to work with dev teams (mainly
external)

#2 Pricing - I was price sensitive, and in the long term, it caused that the
code was not usable while scaling the business.

I hated it so much that after those two startups I've built my own software
dev company focused on one technology and a quite small team of tech-savvy
colleagues.

Below my checklist that I'm using to evaluate the outsourcing companies with
who I would like to work -> [http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A](http://bit.ly/2Hthv5A)

------
debarshri
There are few hidden aspects that are in my opinion affecting the Indian IT
eco system. Everybody talks about automation making the jobs redundant, I
think there are more factors affecting it.

I remember back when I graduated, only options I had was to work for these
outsourcing companies. That is no longer true. India has a rich ecosystem of
startups that definitely pay better than the outsourcing companies. I often
compare the indian IT eco system to multi-level marketing, where older
generation of employees would recruit newer generation to keep the costs low.
Now, with rich startup ecosystem, talented younger generation have become
expensive and scarce for these outsourcing companies.

Secondly, most of these outsourcing company's ethics and principle were
derived from IBM, which led to creation of long chain of hierarchical
management. I remember when I worked in one of these companies, an approval of
procuring a server (not the server itself) would take months. There would be
unwarranted politics. Lot of these manager are essentially skill-less. This
has led to a problem where attracting talent to these organisation is very
difficult. Furthermore, to keep the costs low, these outsourcing companies
would go to third tier colleges and cities. Talent from colleges and
universities are basically unemployable, resulting in a poor client
experience.

Thirdly, major clients have started realizing the cost of outsourcing and
benefits of owning your own technology. In my opinion, these outsourcing
companies were basically sweatshops masqueraded as technology companies.
Attrition rate in outsourcing companies are really high. If these outsourcing
companies would have controlled the attrition rates and built technology
products, these companies would have been relevant. Before the financial
crisis, these companies did have resources and talent to do so. Companies like
TCS did try to build their products and did get sued [1]. However, you would
be suprised how many banks use their banking product [2].

Having said that, most of the outsourcing companies have very cash rich. I
wouldn't be surprise if they start acquire smaller product companies to stay
relevant.

[1][https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-
business/...](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/TCS-
fined-940m-in-US-for-stealing-healthcare-software/articleshow/51853815.cms)

[2][http://sites.tcs.com/tcsbancs/](http://sites.tcs.com/tcsbancs/)

------
enlightenedfool
A bunch of crappy generalizations here driven by emotions - "quality of
engineers in India is sketchy at best". I can say the same about the American
engineers around me right now. There are good and bad engineers everywhere.
Same about culture. And companies like Google, Amazon won't hire sketchy
people to save money. Think before you talk. The system is driven by basic
economics and what's allowed by law. Companies take advantage of that. USA is
now turning protective and hire its citizens. Good for them. The world will
chug on either way.

------
mkovji
>>There were 350 posters in all, bought for $80,000 by an organization called
Progressives for Immigration Reform.

Why did 350 posters cost $80000, i am sure it would have cost lot less if they
have been made outside US.

------
amriksohata
Indian origin here working in the UK. I have met good and bad developers from
India and the UK. I agree the attitude in India is to get the job done but
thats because they are contracting for companies here. Its the same attitude I
get from UK contracting companies, they write terrible code and just get the
job done. However I found the best developers working in smaller private
companies. I've found various contracting companies in the UK just as bad as
Indian companies, poor coding standards, lies and fob offs.

------
Apocryphon
Regardless of some of the pessimistic takes in this thread of the quality of
engineering or institutions in India, the nation is still poised to be the
world's most populous nation within five years* - surely a large free market,
unhemmed by a giant firewall, would be a great incentive for innovation and
enterprise?

* [http://time.com/3978175/india-population-worlds-most-populou...](http://time.com/3978175/india-population-worlds-most-populous-country/)

~~~
denzil_correa
> surely a large free market, unhemmed by a giant firewall, would be a great
> incentive for innovation and enterprise?

A critical component of free markets is "contract enforcements". India has
poor law enforcement.

------
ilarum
I personally know someone really smart who was on an H1B visa in the US with
his family. Recently, when hit with an RFE (request for evidence) during a
routine renewal of his visa, he decided that it just wasn't worth the trouble
of living in perpetual fear (settled status wait time is about 15 years) and
shifted his entire family to Canada.

I bring this up because while Trump may attempt to target visa abusers, some
smart people are also trapped in the crossfire which I feel affects the
country negatively.

~~~
sus_007
When you say _settled status wait time is about 15 years_ , is it just for
Indians or other nationalities too ?

------
techresearch
I am against indiscriminately awarding H1B visas and shipping American jobs
overseas or using cheap foreign tech labor to undercut American workers.
American workers need jobs, to pay bills, to live, fair enough! Then force
your American companies to stop hiring foreign workers, stop undercutting and
outsourcing. But don't use racism, supposed Indian incompetence in tech work,
stereotyping brown people as somehow stupid and not good workers and so on to
create your fight.

------
jmartrican
I have a theory that a certain percentage of any given population can do good
engineering or IT in general. The US and India are pushing up against those
limits. This leads to recruiting people without the lust or mental
capabilities to do said work. This leads to shoddy output for the customers
hiring the tail end of the bunch... a very long tail because the demand is so
high.

------
known
India is producing Low cost - Low quality services and China is producing Low
cost - High quality goods [http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21716630-not-goo...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21716630-not-good-argument-against-them-h-1b-visas-do-mainly-go-indian-
outsourcing)

------
eric24234
I have worked as a backend developer in product company for about 8 years. I
honestly never came across an US/foreign developer who is > 1.1X my ability. I
guess except the big four companies all developers (US/indian) have same level
of programming competence on average. The only variation is the cultural
comfort.

------
starpilot
Is it just me or do Indians greatly prefer to communicate and delegate tasks
over phone versus email? I'm working with subcontractors right now, and it
makes it a pain when it means doing daily calls late at night or early in the
morning to talk to them in India.

~~~
RandomCSGeek
Never heard of any bias towards phone. If anything, people prefer email as it
leaves a trail.

------
thisisit
> The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that new tech could make two-thirds
> of the Indian IT workforce “irrelevant” by 2020. Indian newspaper headlines
> warned of an IT jobs “bloodbath,”

There was an amazing answer to this "bloodbath" fallacy during an AI/ML
conference in Bangalore.

One of the panelists talked about "Manure" \- During the Victorian era there
used to be lot of horse carriages. More horses meant more manure. So when
automobiles were introduced there was a fear that lot of people relying on
manure related jobs. But that never happened as automobile related jobs took
over. Same is expected to happen during the so-called "bloodbath".

> The level of offshoring of IT services has taken a massive dip since Trump
> got in

If this is true then the headline about "plateauing" doesn't make sense. It is
more of a blip. Next elections when there is a non-Trump President things
might get better.

That said, the article reads more like a history of Infosys than actual
headline content. Major points are simply - Trump and AI.

~~~
Apocryphon
What came first, that conference or this scene?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM1YWl9-ZG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM1YWl9-ZG0)

~~~
thisisit
The conference was back in April. And the conclusion of the conference is
different from the video.

------
calif
wow, most of the photos in the article are so bad. certainly stressing the
point that "oh, this is bad, low quality, cheap and poor, and so are the
Indians we talk about in this article"...

------
intrasight
I read that article expecting it to say something about "the end" but found
nothing. Poor article and a waste of 5 minutes of my life. Seemed to be an ad
for Infosys.

------
mkovji
Doesn't making things where it costs the least and guarantees best quality
contribute to the overall efficiency and economy of the world.

------
crb002
Remote work in the US and great talent from the same time zones in South and
Central Americas has a lot to do with it.

------
erikb
Hasn't there been an article like 12 months ago that described how it's
already moving into a downswing?

------
theyinwhy
Imho both US-americans and Indians tend to oversell themselves to a degree of
perversion.

------
RandomCSGeek
TLDR: The best go to US, the next best to MNCs and startups, the rest are the
ones you get when you pay peanuts.

Here's how Indian engineers get jobs.

The very top(maybe 0.01%) get directly hired by US MNCs. This gives some
people the "Indians are smart" stereotype.

The next top(0.01% - 1%) work for US MNCs in India, or the few top homebred
companies. Foreigners will rarely deal with them, as they are working on
products, not services.

The next few go into startups and some good service companies. These service
companies are costly, after all, they have to pay much higher than what
Infosys or TCS would do, to maintain these people. I don't know how many
american tech workers come across these people, but a few must be. These
people are probably the source of few comments saying that "some Indian
workers I worked with were good".

Now, the lower ones, will get into likes of TCS, Infosys and hundreds of small
service companies that work on basis of "hire enmasse, at cheap, and sell at
little higher cost". Now if you are paying peanuts, it is very foolish to
expect people like Linus Torvalds. This gives people the, "Indian engineers
are shit" stereotype.

------
techresearch
Yeah man! Indian software work is pretty shoddy. That's why 80 percent of
American software and IT outsourcing goes to India. And this has been going on
for last 2 decades. Maybe you Americans don't care about quality as long as
its done cheaply!!!

------
aphextron
Turns out paying people low wages is not really miraculous.

------
senthil_rajasek
"Just make an 8 with your nose. :-)" I have lived in the states for 20 yrs.
The comments in this thread are unbelievably culturally insensitive.

------
aws_ls
I worked for Infosys for over 10 years. This article gets all the key facts
right, but doesn't capture the _soul_ of Infosys or the Indian IT Industry.

I can offer so much on the topic, that it gets overwhelming as I type. So I am
just writing my thoughts, some of them on the article and some based on the
comments on this page.

\- Not all engineers are of low quality. In my experience about 10% of them
are as good as SV engineers.

\- Infosys founder NRN is a socialist at heart. He pioneered sharing of wealth
via stocks (ESOPs). And he did it so well, that _all_ employees got it -
drivers to janitors to sys admins to coders. So very unlike the shocking
Amazon shop floor stories we hear.

\- It has resulted in an ecosystem of Startups in India. Many of the ex-
employees who benefitted from the Infosys shares, are doing their own startups
(many of them product startups, as a result of getting bored with IT
services). So it has acted like a YCombinator of sorts. There even was a ex-
Infoscion startup group. And the best part is they can do their own angel
funding. So no running for VCs atleast in the early stages.

\- For the above reason, I revere him as much as may be a Gandhi or a MLK. The
other two I read, only in a book. Very rarely do you get a chance to interact
with truly great people IRL.

\- Jugaad. This a word I hate with a vengeance. That's what gives a bad
impression to Indians. And admittedly it happens a lot. Although Infosys
founders, in how they ran their company, serve largely as a counter example.
Minus of course some things like H1B visa issue. Just as a contrast read the
story of Satyam (another IT company) whose founder Raju did wholesale _jugaad_
and landed in jail in 2009, because the real estate leverage built on fake
salaries of fictitous employees, his jugaad, failed.

\- Product engineer skills. This is an area, where Infosys/others lack. And
thats not only for aptitude or potential, but the culture. Because the
Industry grew so fast - 100% YOY in early decades and 50% YOY in the last one
- people were pushed to being managers & leads, after just two years of coding
experience. And as such bulk of the work is very low quality coding.

\- But the numbers in India are so big. Whether its the population of a
billion+ or no. of engineers. That there is both quality and quantity. Just
look at any coding site (HackerRank, TopCoder et al) and you will see Indian
programmers dominating in numbers as well as few performing at a world class
quality level.

\- Regarding the bad experience, with Indian IT engineers. I wonder how many
of them were with a company like Infosys and how many of them were with sites
like UpWork/etc? Please note because of the overwhelming quantity of Indian
engineers. Its not easy to find the quality engineers, which are also
significant in number, but you have to be lucky or have to work hard. (Heck,
may be there is a scope to do a TopTal like site, but just for India.)

------
stealthmodeclan
What people don't realize is that there are tons of American companies which
have offices in Banglore and one in texas or california and nearly all
employees are Indian except a few.

Those companies are massively profitable but they come across as American.
Indian CEOs (somtimes even CEO is American but not having complete control
over the corporation) of those companies send American employees for
delivering keynotes. There is lots of this perception of being an American
firm. But you'll be amazed there are many Russian,Chinese,Indian etc... As an
American LLC.

There is no stripe or Braintree in India.

The day these are launched in India, you'll see boom in product companies
operating entirely out of India till then....

Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG.

And they do not like putting their lives on stake for startups. So if you'll
not find them begging for jobs at small companies.

~~~
kamaal
>>Also the best Indian engineers end up working for big companies like FANG.

Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area. If
people throwing away coding work in services to these non-dev work in FANG
companies I wouldn't consider them too smart.

Even the other product companies like NetApp largely make engineers work on
some internal php tool.

Product companies pay well, but the average quality of work isn't necessarily
better than services firms.

~~~
throwaway1414
> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area.

Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly
false and very misleading.

Let us take FANG one by one.

Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of
the work is in software development area.

Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as
Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay are executed in Bangalore. The Bangalore office of
Amazon developed many critical services for Amazon Prime from scratch.

Netflix: Can't talk much about Netflix because most of the work that does
Netflix does in India is in the business, legal and marketing area.

Google: Are you kidding me again? A significant portion of some Google
infrastructure services and some Google public services are developed in
Bangalore.

Source: I have worked in two of the FANGs in Bangalore and I have friends in
the others.

And I don't know where you are getting your heavily biased data point about
NetApp from. If you take one data point and say the whole company works on
internal PHP tool, well then here is a surprise for you. All companies work on
internal PHP tools or something to that effect. They have their enterprisey
systems to run. Every company does that.

Whoever has told you this very naive view of NetApp has forgotten to tell you
that NetApp also works on data storage systems, cloud analytics, performance
analytics, OpenStack based private cloud orchestration (whole distributed
software systems developed from scratch in Bangalore). Before you keep
spreading this kind of false data about the top-tier software companies in
Bangalore, please lookup NetApp ONTAP and enlighten yourself.

Source: I have worked in NetApp too for 3 years.

~~~
kamaal
I've worked in FANG companies too. In fact most people who left Google I know
did it because they were largely in QA and their friends who were so called
working in crappy services companies, often from colleges considered bad, did
more code work then them. They were largely forced to leave and join start ups
because the difference in experience was catching up with them.

Fb was purely a 'hire and send' unit in Hyd, and even now most of their core
work is either Menlo Park or London. In fact London is where most of the folks
go should H1B fail. The dev work Fb does in Hyd is an acquired company.

Amazon is a different case as dev teams do all the work, and there are no
separate production engineering teams. So you do all that work, under a
'Software engineer' title. You would also be curious to see the attrition
numbers in Amazon. They rival Infosys. :-)

Yup, NetApp if you don't work on core teams. Same with Cisco and Juniper
networks. If you are not with core teams, internal tools is what you do.

This whole trope Services companies being crap, Mythical opportunities in
product companies or 'Promised land' land immigration opportunities have
forced hordes of talented people to get into SRE and other non-dev work, and
then later end up realizing that immigration et al is largely political
lottery which most of them lose. And yes once you go down these non dev paths
for a few years, the guy from tier-2/tier-3 college whom you laughed at, for
joining Wipro, will be having the last laugh.

~~~
throwaway1414
Looks like the people who left Google you know were not hired into Google
proper. What you describe sounds like they were working for a vendor providing
QA services to Google. Sure your friends were probably walking into Google
office with a Google ID card but being on Google payroll is a completely
different thing from being on a vendor payroll.

Every company has core teams and non-core teams. Why do you present the non-
core teams' work as representative of the company as a whole and not the core
team's work as representative of the company as a whole?

Your comparison of Amazon with Infosys is ridiculous. The high attrition rate
of Amazon has nothing to do with the quality of work. It is due to the culture
- long working hours and the demanding work culture. But the work in Amazon is
at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys.

Which FANG companies have you worked for? You might throw one of the names
from FANG at me but I cannot believe you. I know I am a stranger on internet
and so are you, so it is just going to be my word against yours and a lot of
anecdata from both sides. But per the anecdata I have, I see that your
comments here are so misinformed that I do not believe you have worked for any
FANG company.

~~~
kamaal
>>But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what
you get in Infosys.

No. In fact this is precisely the kind of binary classification that forces
people to make bad decisions.

Please try to understand that people working Wipro or Infosys or TCS are
humans like us, who use the same programming languages and same computers.

This binary classification is why people up becoming SREs at Google, while
they could have probably been programmers at Cognizant.

~~~
throwaway1414
You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad
decision? If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of
employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product
companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to
themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there
is no good reason to work for FANG. This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry
to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG
than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.

I began my career in the services industry. Later I have worked for two FANGs
for two years each. I quit them not because the work was bad. The work was
damn good. I quit because I got a better job with a better salary and easier
working hours.

And what's with this silly comparison of SREs at Google with programmers of
Cognizant? Why compare SREs with programmers? That's comparing apples to
oranges!

Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be
doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant. A programmer
at Google or Amazon is going to be far more skilled than a programmer at
Cognizant. Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an
SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.

If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the
choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.

And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If
you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at
Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of
work has to be better than another. One is not better than another. They are
just different. They require different skill sets. A lot of very smart people
I know are SREs. They enjoy the thrill of cutting through the complexity of
network topology, load balancers, DNS, container orchestration, system
performance, hardware and software issues to resolve puzzling issues when
services go down.

~~~
kamaal
>>You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a
bad decision?

If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say
that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just
committed career suicide.

>>If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of
employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product
companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to
themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there
is no good reason to work for FANG.

That is because most of the work in FANG's is not OS kernel programming or
writing some earth shattering code. Most people are fetching stuff from HTTP
end points, parsing XMLs/JSONs and posting to another HTTP end point. Or the
same with a data base.

The peak hype I have seen is using Pig/Hadoop to deal with files of size a few
KBs and call it 'Big data' programming.

>>This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things
are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and
Cognizants.

Lol. I'm going to say again. Companies mean nothing. Show me your projects.

>>Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be
doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant.

Thanks for bringing this up, there are units at Infosys who design chips. None
of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.

>>Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at
Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.

I've had friends at Infosys who worked on Airbus 380's software's validation
team. To listen here that people like you think that's lower quality work than
how HTML pages look on IE7 is one epic thing I've heard in a while.

>>If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then
the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.

As of now chances of landing into an SRE job is very high in FANG companies in
India. Because that is the kind of work they want to be done from here.

>>And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If
you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at
Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of
work has to be better than another.

It has to be. Some work is bad. I give it to you that people move for money.
But they also end up committing career suicide.

Yes I do believe being an SRE worse than being programmer at Cognizant. This
is not 'service company' mentality. These are facts.

~~~
pwneduser
"If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd
say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have
just committed career suicide."

With such a narrow and demeaning view I doubt anything can change your mind.
But I have many colleagues who have switched roles between SREs and full time
development many times in career. They are some of the most competent
developers at my workplace. They have seen so many systems crash and burn at
high loads that they instinctively design and develop systems with multiple
points of redundancies to fail gracefully and recover automatically in
distributed environments.

So choosing SRE was far from suicide. Instead it enriched their careers. Don't
underestimate the kind of experience a SRE work at Google or Amazon can give
you. An average SRE at Google works at a scale and complexity that an average
Cognizant employee can't even begin to imagine.

------
megaman22
I can only hope so, after near on a decade of dealing with TCS, HCL, Cap
Gemini, Cognizant, and others.

I tend to get drawn in because I'm working for an ISV that makes a product.
The Indian third-parties get drawn in because the real customwr has outsourced
a function to them. I now have to deal with the incompetent pm on the
$outsourced side, instead of the competent, reasonable pm on the real
customer. And eight layers of red tape aroind simple config changes arise

~~~
singingfish
TCS: Total Catastrophe Services

~~~
sidcool
They are the biggest IT services company with $100 billion market cap. They
are bad at many things, but making money is not one of them.

~~~
chris_wot
Someone needs to help reduce that market cap. They really are the pits.

~~~
sumedh
You can always start your own company and compete with TCS :)

~~~
badpun
The business model of such companies is to bullshit and sometimes bribe the
execs into a multimillion contract and then deliver crap (they often have
threaten going to court to get paid for their non-services). Not everyone is
willing to do that.

~~~
sumedh
You can still run your own business honestly and not go for the shady
contracts.

------
gaius
A company will outsource because it’s cheaper, in the short term at least. But
an outsourcer runs on billable hours, so they are disincentivised to automate
repetitive tasks.

So here’s the new competition: outsourcer who can do the job for 1/10th the
cost, or In-house engineers with advanced automation who can do 100x the work
at the same cost.

It’s not about West vs India, it’s about business models.

~~~
digitalzombie
It's more like abuse of Visa.

These Indians cannot compete or shop around for a better salary which make
native programmer's salary cheaper.

If you don't like the cheaper salary then go back home and reapply for visa
that's the choice they have and it's a disincentive to go through the whole
process.

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa)
> > If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the
> sponsoring employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a
> change of status, find another employer (subject to application for
> adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the United States.
> Effective January 17, 2017, the United States Citizenship and Immigration
> Services modified the rules to allow a grace period of up to 60 days but in
> practice as long as a green card application is pending they are allowed to
> stay.

That's not really a new competition. It's just a cheat/loop hole that
companies use to pay nonnative IT people dirt.

I think a better solution is let non native workers shop around for better
salary (or make it easier) and add a foreign tax on top of their salary.

The foreign tax is similar to out of state tuition when you attend university
out of state, the people who are native who have paid taxes for the
infrastructure vs people that aren't native that are using infrastructure and
may leave the state/country with no loyalty but for better opportunities
should pay a tax. The tax is also to incentivize visa holder to become citizen
in the future.

I also like a hiring cap for non native people base on if there are actual
skill lacking in current work force. The cap is to be revise every few years
base on market.

~~~
qaq
This only applies to US Visas most countries have very simple visa option for
tech workers.

------
buvanshak
around 10 years before, an IT professional was the hottest thing in the Indian
marriage market (if I may use that term, which is common use around here.).
There was no problem for one to find a bride if they are anywhere near IT.
When you here that some girl is getting married, and ask what the groom is
doing, 9 out of 10 times, it would be "Software Engineer in US". Now it is
bank employees. No one needs IT professionals now...

That should tell you something in lines of answering this question...

------
Karishma1234
I spend 6 months working from Sunnyvale and 6 months working from India. I
have seen a remarkable improvement in quality of engineers. I think IT
industry as such pretty much doomed because of automation, saturation and US
immigration restrictions. The fresh graduates now I meet want to work on
products. Products that are meant for Indian markets and other markets.

India can take a big lead in AI and other things if it managed to reform its
higher education and get rid of government controls in that space. If India
opens up higher education sector much higher quality talent can be bred there.

~~~
godelmachine
Hi karishma1234,

May I ask in which organization and in which domain do you work? Asking out of
curiosity.

Thanks.

~~~
Karishma1234
I am a coder. I work in machine learning space.

------
patrickg_zill
The problem is that only the top 10% of Indian programmers are in the top ten
percent.

~~~
carlmr
My experience with our programmers in India is that only the top 1% of them
are at or above mediocre. Most Indian universities are garbage degree
printers. The top institutes are super competitive, but those people rarely
stay in India.

------
onecooldev24
Do companies write checks to plumbers of $100,000. No they don't, cause they
don't deserve (intelligence required for the work they do) and the supply is
abundant. Why can't western developers accept basic economics and move on to
greener pastures.

~~~
chris_wot
Yeah, they do.

------
whatyoucantsay
It is telling that the defining book of the decade on tech startups— _Zero to
One_ was a runaway best-seller in China but didn't even sell 50,000 copies in
India.

India has, perhaps, relied too heavily on the 1 to N promise of globalisation
and, in the process, won in a race to the bottom.

~~~
dingo_bat
Do you have a source for those numbers?

~~~
whatyoucantsay
Ah the joys of HN. Here is a source for you:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWpvgTH9oI&t=25m27s)

~~~
dingo_bat
Well, it's surprising. Don't know what it means but it does mean something.

~~~
whatyoucantsay
I don't begrudge losing the karma to share facts that violate our shared
expectations.

The view I have on it is that in China, there is a large and growing interest
in large, long-term investment in new technologies and new ideas. Obviously
there's a continuum and China is also still implementing and scaling
technologies built in the west, but there's a definite commitment towards
breaking new ground as well.

