Tell HN: Outsourcing a Perspective from an Indian CS Student

Another day another post: It seems to be a fashion to write a controversial blog post about how outsourcing sucks and how we did it faster than them, which makes outsourcing costlier!

Now bing an An indian student who is studying CS at an US university here are my observations about ground reality in India:

Unlike other fields outsourcing software dev requires slightly smarter people. So What do smart students in India do? And why do always all articles talk about shitty indian devs?

Here is the analysis:

Every year top 5% of graduating class from whole India (IIT's, toppers in smaller schools) go to USA for PhD's or join a multi national firm in India (MSFT, GOOG, JPMC, etc).

The next 60% either join MS courses in US universities or work for Top out Sourcing Firms such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Patni, Satyam etc. Theses firm which now have revenues in billions of Dollars are the significant outsourcing players.

Then you also have few mid size firms which have few million dollar revenue per year. Now the bottom 35% join smaller firms, those which market themselves on hire a coder websites and such.

The top companies do not take smaller project, that is unless youre project isnt worth at least few million dollars they dont care. Thus most of blog posts which talk about management mismatch and shitty projects are working with bottom 30% of the talent pool.

E.g. Company like TCS which serves say Pfizer, will have a large team working in india and around 5% people working in USA with Pfizer to co ordinate the whole activity.

Sadly most of the stuff such as answers about outsourcing on stackoverflow or blogposts are written by devs who work in small companies, and who have access to a considerably less smarter talent pool in India.

Thus as a Final Message: If you aren't working with a company in india that has at least few million $ revenue, you are probably working with wrong people or you are too small to outsource.

In India outsourcing is synonymous with the billion dollar companies which bring most of the revenue and not with smaller dev houses which have around 100 employees. So dont judge indian devs by wrong sample. student who generally work for Infosys and other come to USA after 3-4 years to pursue MS in CS (which in funny way HN'ers think is useless) and get jobs that pay really well.

You can just explore LinkedIn with names of the companies i gave in this post and see for yourself.