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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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.

Anytime someone criticize India, people always come to defend it. As an Indian I disagree with you completely. It gives me anxiety when I think about dealing with employee of another office. I only do that if there is no other option. We should learn to accept criticism when it's valid instead of coming up with excuses. Also your whole comment is whataboutism.

I am not 'defending India'. I could care less about what people think of India. I am not a nationalist or 'patriot'/desh bhakt and have no problems with criticisms of any country or institution. FSM knows India and Indian institutions need plenty of criticism.

I'm just pointing out lazy forms of argumentation, essentially generalizing from narrow experiences, or media propagated stereotypes about millions of people, which is why I explicitly created a sentence of the same form substituting a stereotype about the USA.

My constructed 'criticism' is just as much out of whack as the original, and has no 'truth' in it, when made as a general statement about all of "Americans" / or more condescendingly "you guys".

There doesn't seem much of a link between 'bureaucratic work cultures' and size of the economy (Germany, China, Korea, Japan)

If you didn't understand that point, I don't know what to say.

I'll just say YMMV, and leave it at that.

>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

That's a sentiment a lot of us share about America though. You seem to think Americans are the only people criticizing other countries? Stereotypes aren't born in a vacuum. Americans keep putting worse people in power, the latest of which being Trump. Indian outsourcing is troublesome to work with. And my country, France, has a problematic economy and we have a hard time keeping talent here instead of fleeing for better paying countries. All places have their issues. You don't make issues disappear by acting like they don't exist or focusing on the minority that behaves differently.

Indians are fixated on certifications. My friends still can't believe that I make the kind of money I make without a CS degree (I studied literature). And when I tried to hire someone when I tried building an agency, the only thing candidates kept emphasizing was their degree and certificates, not their skills.

Wow, that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them, and not by what they can accomplish with the skills they have gained. A degree does not make a competent employee from what I've experienced.

Yeah but even in US, this whole college education has become a thing in the current times.

Degrees have been used as a filter for many jobs internationally for a while now.

> that sounds quite sad that they define their self-worth by some piece of paper given to them

That sounds sad to you because you are looking at it from a Western perspective, when you have couple of hundred people interested for a job you can use a certification to filter lot of the candidates.

And like any metric that is easier to "game" you end up in the situation where a bunch of people go for the easy route of taking certifications because they act as a filter and that same filter doesn't work as intended because people are gaming the system.

It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter, to game this you become a cheater.

Of course that it's also harder to scale but if India has such a huge problem in filtering candidates there must exist some companies doing good skill-based assessments and that should be the way forward.

Or just keep the status quo of needing to take certifications and competing with unqualified people that have the same papers you have, for me it's a race to the bottom.

> It's much harder to game a system where evaluation of a candidate's skills is the filter

Agree, which is why some Indian companies have started using skills based assessment websites now.

The problem is this: how do you entrust that the right people are getting into any institution (college, jobs, etc). There are two broad approaches: standardized testing vs. application/interviewing. The Western mindset predominantly favours approach #2 in most contexts, with standardized testing being a factor only in college admissions (in my knowledge). Interviews and essays (to continue the college admissions theme) are good ways to get an insight into the mind of the prospective student, but the crux is that they are interpreted subjectively and not objectively. This keeps a window for bias to creep in. Harvard University had instituted standardized entrance exam; they later scrapped it because of those who passed the exam, a large portion were Jews[0]. Standardized testing is an approach to selection that avoids this kind of direct bias, which is why it was selected as a way to ensure that all communities receive the same opportunities to educate their children (not that this worked out in practice).

[0] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/expose/book/cloak-meritocrac...

Essays and interviews are a thing of the past. I believe they are only used when students' applications are near the borderline?

It's incredibly hard from a recruitment point of view. A degree in the US, even from a mediocre university, at least means that the student is capable of some amount of hard work and application.

But in India, colleges simply don't fail kids. Some others inflate their grades just for bragging rights ("our students had an average score of 80%).

So every time I see an application from a college that I haven't heard of (which is pretty much every college apart from the top ones), I would be skeptical: can this kid actually work hard or am I just wasting my time?

<sarcasm intent="juxtaposition with American groups seen as obsessed with pieces of paper"> Sounds like someone didn't get into Harvard

> Indians are fixated on certifications.

It acts a filter, when you have couple of hundred people for a job application, you cannot read each and every CV but you can easily narrow down your search by saying candidates having XYZ certification will be shortlisted.

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