The end of the line for Indian outsourcers – or a new beginning? | Hacker News Reader

The end of the line for Indian outsourcers – or a new beginning?

washingtonpost.com

12 pointssndean12 comments

This has to be one of the most ignorant industry pieces I have read in recent memory.

"Modern-day applications also don’t require large teams of engineers doing software development: They are user-customizable and can be built by anyone with basic programming skills."

Ok.

You might enjoy his self written bio page: http://wadhwa.com/bio/

Needs more pictures of himself though.

Geeze. I'd almost forgot how a lot of college really is.

Thanks for the reminder.

I don't think we can take him seriously as a distinguished fellow without at least one head shot of him facing right.

Yeah. The whole article went off the rails when I got there.

Any idea what he is referring to?

Didn't look at the article, but seeing this quote out of context I'd assume it's about cookie-cutter CRUD/CMS-based apps. Not that I would agree with that assessment, as even running those professionally and at scale requires experienced engineering staff.

Today, every app is written multiple times, usually at least twice for the two major smartphone platforms (sometimes a third or fourth time if they're trying to support Windows Phone, Blackberry, Firefox OS, or some other upstart phone platform) and at least once for the browser. It requires at least 3x the labor that was required during the relatively-brief period when everyone was cool with a browser-based web app replacing a desktop app and expected their mobile web browser to learn to read the internet instead of expecting developers to write a special version for their phone.

Additional effort is also being split through the complexity prism of cloud server administration, CDNs, and devops. Everyone believes they need a high-availability cluster for everything these days. We've also moved away from the trend of straightforward RDBMS-backed applications and gone to the experimental realm of key-value stores, document databases, and trying to figure out some XPath-type thing for raw JSON structures.

The author's assertion would've been more true about 10 years ago, but I don't think it was ever really true for anyone who wanted something more than a simple blog, which have been readily available off-the-shelf at least since LiveJournal became a thing in the 90s, so no real change there.

While I don't agree with the author's opinion on a whole, one thing to note is that most low level programming/testing jobs are now automated and the skillsets required for programmers have changed drastically.

We use jhipster for spring boot development and it has take most of our work programming for the business "glue". Within few minutes we had to start working on business logic. Traditionally a programmer had to create the dependency libraries, create the controller, services etc but they are all automated now.

What we are lacking is devs who can think from Business perspective and quickly work on it. I am lucky to have two programmers who do think on their feet but it took me close to an year rummaging thru outsourcing websites.

The game has changed, it has not shutdown

I stopped reading at the "The US doesn't know how to run robots and needs India's help"

These big it companies are good at overpricing and under delivering

Please don't use quotes when you're not quoting verbatim from the article. The author is clearly just suggesting a path forward for Indian companies to maintain a stream of revenue going forward. Nowhere did he suggest that India is an expert in industrial robotics, he's just suggesting the country could explore that as an option.

"Modern-day applications also don’t require large teams of engineers doing software development: They are user-customizable and can be built by anyone with basic programming skills."

That's where I stopped. Was there anything important after that?

No country will give visa if they know about Caste system https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

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