Were they in India? That's specifically what osrec said. Nothing about Indians.
There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
----
edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.
Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing.
Please note, everyone protects their own interests.
There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.
A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company).
Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.
I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave.
The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.
Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base.
In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.
This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.
And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry.
Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates.
Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door.
This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes.
This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.
Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...
For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action).
Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.
Is there a typo (or 2) in here somewhere?
Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually".
At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education.
Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help
In your original sentence, you are trying to use "them" as an adjective to modify "incompetent developers," but "them" should only be used as a 3rd person plural pronoun. Using "them" as an adjective is not proper; your examples sound strange to native speakers, and is usually associated with vernacular English in general. Native speakers may assume this usage is due to poor knowledge of proper English, or possibly a regional (improper, but common) usage in the American South.
https://grammarstars.blogspot.com/2008/08/41-them-and-those-...
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them
A couple of other examples: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB33z9xoSw8&feature=youtu.be... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUsB4y5RVk
There are plenty more examples on Google.
--
I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.
No, it isn't. Using "them" in the way you did makes you sound like a hillbilly.
Just some advice: it's wise to avoid using any words or usage listed in the dictionary as "dialect" unless you're very familiar with the particular dialect it's from. Likewise, you should be very careful with "informal" terms unless you've actually been introduced to them informally by someone who knows how they're used. There's a lot of cultural context that needs to be mastered with those, and you won't learn that from a book, let alone a dictionary.
*edit - I will add that the 2 youtube videos are not good examples to be learning english from...
Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.
>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.