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Comment by abhinai | Hacker News Reader

I'll summarize my experiences.

(1) (Too far removed) Engineers in India / China mostly work on projects meant for Western markets. They do not always understand the problems that the project is trying to solve. They rarely get to see it work in the wild.

They can't feel proud of creating something they will never see in action. If the project is a huge success, the engineers who created it will almost never be rewarded.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to care.

(2) (Culture) The culture prioritizes seniority over performance. Manager is always right. If you are a 10x engineer and your manager is mediocre but always right, good luck navigating the potential issues.

(3) (Wrong incentives) Most software engineers work for outsourcing companies. These companies get paid for delivering projects. Size of project matters. The incentive is to inflate the projects and create as much work as possible, maintainability be damned.

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Thanks for that summary, personally I regularly say that "productive Asia" and India gets, unfortunately not only for them but for the entire humanity, the worse of UK/USA business model and push it to the extreme, than someone always reply that I'm racist and do not understand when I counter-reply that I do talk about business models and imposed culture, not people and that's interchangeable with ANY damn nation and population...

If we look at the history India (as a whole subcontinents) produce one of the most advanced math in the world, China probably discover more thing in navigation century before Europe and now... We are all, easter and western in a race toward a new middle age...

"Most software engineers work for outsourcing companies. "

Is this still true? I have heard that years ago it was prestigious to work for the likes of Infosys but now the best engineers work for Indian startups and the outsourcing companies only get average ones or worse. This seems in line with the people my company gets from outsourcing companies. They all seem pretty clueless but the direct hires are quite good.

>>I have heard that years ago it was prestigious to work for the likes of Infosys

It is, even now. Walk in to any engineering college, and ask where most people want to work. Another dark untold truth of Engineering in India is, Electronics/Electrical branches have a lot better quality students, than CSE/InfoScience. Sometimes it's like night-day. This is because a degree in EE/ECE gives you a diverse range of career options once you pass out. So in the ascending order of ranks in entrance exams, first EE/ECE seats are full. In many cases there are situations where EE/ECE candidates even in tier 2/3 colleges are better than CS students in top colleges.

Outsourcing companies discovered this long back. There is no logic in paying 5x market salaries to CS candidates, when you get 2x better candidates at 1/5th the price.

Secondly, Indian product companies aren't exactly engineering intensive companies. If you get a job in something like FB or Google straight out of college, you are good. For any body else who has to go into Indian product companies, you work on ancient dinosaur era tech. When compared to this, many a times in outsourcing firms you are likely to find better quality of work. This happens all the time. Many times FAANG companies hire these CS top college people, and make them work as sysadmins/SDETs. While some EE/ECE whom they look down upon is working in a code intensive project in a outsourcing firm.

So as a safe bet, playing your cards well. And keeping a good outlook for a large section of crowd, outsourcing companies still work well. Also look at this, if you are optimizing for money straight out of college, and not skills. Then within a decade you will be beaten by those whom you look down upon.

Of course none of this applies if you get into management.

i'd say most managers from india are pretty worthless if i talk from a purely experience based domain knowledge perspective, it's four years of college education they don't pay attention to followed by 2 years of a job they don't pay attention to and then ka-ching MBA PROGRAM followed by doing whatever the company that hires them wants them to do.

lots of wasted education and experience is basically pointless.

Please extend it to the world: most managers are pretty worthless or worse, a damage. Managerial culture is a damage to the entire society.

When it spread we cease to innovate, to really research, we only popularize and improve (a bit) per-existing techs being unable to really evolve them and create anything new. And the more we advance the worse situation became.

We start to have car's that exhibit astonishing absurd issue like top-line Audi's that lock their driver inside due to an unknown fault (banal things like classic internal door little rod, mechanically connected to the lock mechanism are not there anymore in many models or became a different beast), normally always-working machines that start to exhibit random behaviors and no one can really understand why, not counting big projects that nearly ALWAYS fails from fighter jets to ships to space industry project.

Education itself in terms of formal diplomas became meaningless: personally I "discovered" ancient books (lecture notes) that contains more information, more clearly explained and open a world of possible "evolution paths" that far bigger and expensive modern textbook fail completely to provide only at a fraction.

>>i'd say most managers from india are pretty worthless

Bureaucracy is one of the most desired jobs in India. People spend their prime years in 20s, in coaching institutes to crack UPSC- India's equivalent of entrance exams for government civil services. The reason is you get infinite scope to take bribes once you are placed. Like imagine having a blank cheque all life. On top of it you get premium accommodation, cars, drivers, and an army of servants.

MBA, and managerial jobs are the remainder population's way of enjoying the above perks. And they resemble the same levels of inefficiency, waste and corruption.

I can bet nothing will change in India, even decades from now. Once you create such incentives at a social level, people just follow it for generations.

Before software, there was similar craze for Bank manager jobs and CA's. And for the same reasons. You do little to no work, and pretty much splurge in luxury.

Strongly dispute this ECE vs CS characterization. CS is preferred over ECE in India. Source: ECE graduate from India. There is some wierd kind of projection going on with parent post.

My point is about outsourcing firms. Service companies prefer EE/ECE above CS. Of course product companies prefer CS candidates, and often pay well too.

Albeit a good chunk of CS people get into service companies too.

When I was a Placement Coordinator at my college, a representative from TCS told me that a good thing about non-CS candidates is that you don't have to make them "unlearn" things.

That reflects badly on TCS, not on Computer science or it's students.

I concur. That's the reason I avoided TCS for placements.

What are examples of service companies?

Is this still true?

Definitely not (maybe never) in China.

Can you give some context? Around when and where did you work? I’m suspicious of vague answers that somehow apply to both China and India and don’t mention timeframe (China is very different now than 10 years ago or even 3)

All three are not true at least for China. I'm guessing your experience mostly comes from working with outsourcing companies from these two countries.

Most notable companies in China are doing their own stuff, focusing on the local market and not outsourcing. Some are truly innovative and leading the trend.

Here's a good channel to learn a bit about Chinese tech scene

https://www.abacusnews.com/

You did not say it explicitly but your comment hints that indian devs are below mediocre. I will share my perspective as a native guy. My experience is 15 years in dev(mostly c++) experience worked in 6 different companies and have taken up contract gigs in erlang and android(writing ejabberd extensions). Infosys, wipro, tcs and other service based companies have really below mediocre dev's. But other than that the enterprise org's such as emc square, oracle, hp etc have dev's from mediocre to good. The Big Four company dev's (especially amazon) are definitely above mediocre. One observation is while working at enterprise org's i have never seen any 10x people(like the admiration type) on the US or European companies. Only read peoples blog posts. So it seems the 10x people only exist at Big Four or they move there quickly before.

True in my experience. US and Europe programmers from enterprise organisations complaning about quality of Indian programmers is not justified.

I'm in the UK and relate to all of this

This is definitely not the case for China.

Which part?

All 3. Biggest problem in Chinese software is ageism against the old, much less seniority.

Ageism and too much deference to seniority can coexist; for example, a 23-year-old giving in to a 28-year-old who's obviously wrong.

I'm too late to edit, but this is also incredibly common with just a difference of a single year in many Asian countries. You'll see it in the Japanese senpai/kouhai relationship, which affects not only classmates, but people who join a company in different years.

Ageism is a huge thing in India too when it comes to hiring, especially in the IT consultancies. Since they want to ahow cheap rates to their customers, they hire a lot of 0-6 year experienced folks. It becomes harder once you cross 10 years.

You may be right. My experience came from a rather famous and elite team that worked for me in China. It may not be a representative experience anymore.

"Most software engineers work for outsourcing companies."

This just isn't true in China. Just go to New Delhi and Beijing and you will find there is a vast different in IT culture in both countries.

New Delhi, doesn't have a very great tech scene. Blame pollution. You can die out of meditation in New Delhi. Beat that.

The only company that ever sort of existed in New Delhi, was Snapdeal, and they pretty much shut shop as of now.

They are many product(established and high paying) companies in NCR region especially Gurugram(cyber hub).

Maybe true in China

"Maybe true in China" is not an argument. I find comments like these not helpful and disturbing. The amount of blind dislike for other countries without a proper argument makes me read less and less of hacker news.

"Other countries"? The person you're responding to is Chinese.

So he can't be American because he is Chinese? Think for a sec what you are actually saying. You are confusing ethnicity with country. Those two don't equate.

The profile says they work for Alibaba in NanJing. I'm pretty sure that's not in America.

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