
Indian engineers are so bad that a tech giant wants to hire high school grads - hourislate
https://qz.com/941399/indian-engineers-are-so-bad-that-hcl-technologies-wants-to-hire-high-school-graduates/
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fellellor
More like HCL is so cheap they don't even want to spend the pittance they give
their fresh engineering hires anyway. And besides it's not like they are
selling software in the first place. What they are selling is labor, and more
precisely warm bodies on their "bench". A live 12th pass kid is just the same
as a fresh engineering graduate in that respect. The real tragedy here is how
the "journalist" has just parroted HCL's bullshit in their headline.

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candiodari
This. Indian engineers are not bad. There are very impressive Indian, Chinese,
Bangladeshi, Indonesian etc engineers.

However

$5 per hour engineers are bad. Especially in organisations that seem designed
to keep them bad. Indian, Chinese, happen to be overrepresented in that cohort
because of living expenses and their numbers.

Managers that hire these folks and expect quality, secure and well-represented
software should be held to account, that's all. Not that most companies can
produce decent requirements in the first place, and these guys also tend to
have a "don't bother me" approach to communications as well.

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fellellor
That 5 usd metric is just random and I just can't agree with you. Everybody
has to start somewhere and considering the cost of living in South Asia, $5
per hour isn't all that bad. $5 an hour may be some kind of janitorial level
income in the US, but it's not so in India, because of the foreign exchange
rate difference. Of course a talented and ambitious programmer can earn much
more than that amount if they seek out the opportunities. And you need more
than just cs talent to discover and exploit said opportunities.

The point I was making was that companies like HCL don't care about cs talent
for most of their hires anyway. They are competing for contracts which require
them to show bench strength. Since it's literally impossible show 1000s of top
notch engineers just sitting on their rolls jobless, they just hire whoever
comes along and after a few months of "training" say shit like, "We have a
million engineers just waiting hand in hand to personally work on your
project". Of course they also hire some who know what they are doing, but most
hires are only for appearance sake. Since if they manage to win a big contract
that will easily cover for all the hires and more.

As for the workers themselves, most won't show any interest because they have
no idea what impact their work is having. For example they rarely interact
with clients. Their metrics for success has nothing to do with quality of
work. I can't imagine workers from any culture, including Americans and
Europeans, evolving into expert professionals under these conditions.

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candiodari
The $5 metric is just my random number meant to indicate "below this,
everything is crap". I agree that $5 is perhaps not the real border price that
should be used for this, but hopefully we both agree that there is such a
level, and HCL is purposefully going below it to save a buck.

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rkwasny
Someone needs to realise that employing 100 cheap junior people to deliver a
software project is not going to work. You end up with <20 developers + 80
people overhead (PM/QA/etc) and communication overhead will kill any
productivity. Better to hire 10 people that know something and just pay each
of them 10x.

~~~
hourislate
If you read the article you would have learned that they are choosing to train
these people in a boot camp style environment. It seems the education system
is failing in producing solid software developers.

I am struggling with a similar scenario right now. My oldest is
struggling/coming to grips with attending a University where he wants to study
Cyber Security but will spend at least two years learning about Geography,
History, art appreciation, peoples of culture and two years of other courses
that are loosely relevant to the Cyber Security Industry and dreadfully behind
the times.

He took History and Geography and other courses through out HS. How much more
do he need to be exposed to it?

This is why our System is failing us and a lot of kids are unprepared. They
only way to learn what you want to learn is to do it outside of Academia. Sad
but true.

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kjsingh
Come on! India produces one of the best engineers in the world. If you look at
the numbers, they need people doing run-of-the-mill 'coding' jobs who need not
be 'trained' in complex algorithms and software engineering. They can hire
school grads, train them to the basic skill set they need and hire them at 30%
less salary. No good engineer would like to be hired for 2.5L in these
companies.

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danielmain
The most common problem working with indian developers in my experience was
that they cannot say 'NO'. the culture maybe?

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vorotato
this article title is the worst.

