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Comment by GaryNumanVevo | Hacker News Reader

We're currently having issues hiring in Bangalore. We've been looking for a ML Infra person to help during non-US hours. Unfortunately hiring for such a position is bimodal in that market, you've got people with substantial experience really know their stuff, most of whom are getting snapped up by startups who pay much better, and then you've got the people who just threw ML on their LinkedIn to get into your search and can't tell you what a linear regression is.

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It is still cheaper than hiring in US.

Even if you pay half the amount you pay avg (let's say 60K USD) in US, that will be very very good amount for an Indian living in India (30K USD/year is very good for living in India).

So, if you expect good work and don't want to pay even the amount which is equivalent to what an entry-level developer in US might get, then you will never get good developers.

I've tried it for a year ( gave decent pay), but it did not succeed.

Developers from the Ukraine are better, from experience.

OK. I don't know about how much developer take in Ukraine. But my comparison was from US.

Since there's a lot of investment going on, by startups and giants like Google, Apple, Amazon etc who are hiring a lot in India, it is difficult to get good devs easily because devs will see few things even before trying for interview,like

1. Company's product and how it aligns with their perspective 2. Brand 3. Monetary value

(not in any order)

And these companies will keep on paying large amount of money because it will still be cheaper than what they pay in US. These giants will give a brand recognition. And as we all know, these companies have amazing/challenging work too.

So smart talent gets occupied and is hard to snatch from such giants.

There was only 1 good Indian company off the 6 I tried.

And they went on with their own SAAS application. The difference was the CEO was was doing the project managers work and tested everything himselve.

The other teams were constantly saying yes, but execution lacked severally.

So yes in their context meant: we heard you, not we understood you.

Then you'd have to pay more.

Exactly! I have lost count of how many times people on HN rant about quality of "Indian software engineers" when they are paying so less that they get bottom of the barrel. And they make quick stereotype out of that experience without any introspection.

I've thought about the "worker shortages" that are a common theme in tech, I think a big part of the issue is that American's income has been flat-ish for the last 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_median_persona...

So when there are specific jobs that have scarcity and salaries are raised, many managers literally have no experience with that and don't know how to hire in a competitive market.

I've been in the banking industry in Asia, where the compensation is well above the average local.

The average quality of the Indian engineers (in banking), is unfortunately pretty abysmal.

The problem, I think, is their bias towards to hiring their own. Banking IT can become absolutely dominated by Indians, to the point where Indians can staff > 90% of IT positions in countries where they are a minority. The average quality of the Indians in there are pretty bad.

The difference can be seen clearly in companies that enforce some kind of diversity quota. The average quality of the Indians in there is noticeably higher by a wide margin. These companies are unfortunately a minority.

That's a component and a big component of it is the non-technical managers and wannabe founders that are working with the indian software engineerings and failing to articulate anything in anyway for any engineer to accurately deliver upon.

That's part of the software engineers job too is it not? They're the hired expert.

When I was consulting I spent half my being a product development/manager person because I needed to be.

This skill is likely what enabled you to do consulting. Understanding and critiquing what your building is a really important part of being an engineer, but it's relatively rare - which is a shame.

So much this.

A reductive view that isn’t quite correct. In a healthy job market there should be a smooth range of work in a field from lower value and lower pay up to higher value and higher pay. An uneven distribution means there are companies who struggle to justify the salary demands of an overqualified person because the work or the business model supporting the work doesn’t benefit from the surplus of value that employee brings. There’s nothing wrong with being that kind of company. In time the median skill level of Indian engineers will increase and solve this.

A smooth distribution for ML engineers doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, imo.

Is ML more of a team sport? With specialists in operations, data cleansing data, configuring models, etc.

We're offering 90 percentile compensation for Bangalore, we have excellent engineers in our offices there already. I'm just complaining about the bimodal nature of ML hiring in general. General software development is a bit more linear.

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