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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

...and the coming rise of Indian entrepreneurship.

People are often too quick to cry racism, but I really think that's the only explanation for all these "India isn't a problem" stories.

Most Indian engineers are Java drones, but guess what... most American programmers are Java drones. And yeah, there's a new generation that's prosperous on relatively less effort, but have you taken a look at Silicon Valley lately?

Unless you believe that the American innovation engine is also slowing, you don't have a lot of reasons to believe that we won't see more and more innovation coming out of India. In fact, if there's a crash in outsourcing, it might accelerate that process (or simply shift the outsourcing market to target Europe).

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People are often too quick to cry racism

You mean like without offering any evidence for their claims?

I thought the article was superb, well reasoned on its key point of cost inflation in the industry, and thoroughly devoid of sordid prejudice.

Your reference to Indian entrepreneurship is a little ironic since the author (whose name is a Sanskrit word) has herself founded and sold two companies [1], and appears to have a particular interest in... Indian entrepreneurs [2].

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/author/sramana-mitra [2] http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india...

I'm busted. Okay, I missed that, and I have to retract what I said. I went off half-cocked.

I do have evidence for my view (although, obviously not applicable to Ms. Mitra). I'm half Indian and half Caucasian. Many of my relatives are in the outsourcing biz and I work for the American giants that are their customers. So I see both sides. I tend to think most Americans in this industry underestimate their Indian counterparts, and underestimate how fast things can change.

But, Ms. Mitra's pessimism is obviously borne from experience. Though her other articles show Indians doing more innovative things, perhaps she sees those as the exception.

one thing i hear a lot is the "brain drain" of smart people from India moving to the US (GB too? not sure.) if opportunities within India present themselves then maybe they will begin staying and start their own companies

The brain drain does seem to be slowing down considerably. Many of my friends from India, who did their grad studies in the US, are now returning to India to start their own companies. Or at least to join the R&D groups of MS or Intel etc in India.

No prob. I have deep admiration for India. Not so much for big outsourcing, which has a top-down bureaucratic approach to making software that has been producing poor results everywhere for decades and that thrives on the (software) ignorance of exeuctives and managers (the kind who fund and run those infamous multimillion-dollar, hundreds-of-programmer projects, and then hide them under the rug when they fail). But this has nothing to do with India; it has to do with software projects. Where I think the Indian outsourcing industry was brilliant was in its marketing to these executives, persuading them that what failed here would succeed in India, mainly because the labour force would be cheap (and abundant, and obedient). This was effective because it was based on a familiar model ("it's like moving a factory to Mexico"), and it had wishful thinking on its side ("this time will be different"). But bureaucracies don't do a good job of building software anywhere, including in India. So this whole story had a time limit on its effectiveness; say about 10 years to figure out that it really wasn't different this time. Meanwhile, smart programmers are the same everywhere, including in India. They know perfectly well that they're the ones holding up these boring projects for little pay and little status. It's just a matter of time, same as here, before many figure out that they can do a lot better. This is going to drive up the cost of retaining good programmers in India, as it should; and one would expect it eventually to lead to the emergence of an entrepreneurial hacker class, which would be a great thing.

Many very smart people built amazing products in Java (Google, Amazon, Ebay). Calling them drones makes you sound like an amateur.

He's not saying everyone who uses Java is a drone. He's saying most Indians (and Americans) are Java drones.

You're right. I didn't mean to imply everyone who uses Java was a drone, but there is a class of Java users who are heavily dependent on frameworks and couldn't code anything from scratch.

I myself have written in Java for one of the companies on your list.

This is a matter of culture, not race. Is culturism bad these days?

Good question. I don't know - people tend to throw the "racism" term around when really its culture. India is made up of a bazillian races anyway, so clearly it can't technically be racism unless someone intends to slightly a significant percentage of the global gene pool in one hit (which is more comical, then anything).

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