How do programmers in the west see programmers in the east?
programmers.stackexchange.com
programmers.stackexchange.com
A lot of my Chinese friends have expressed the need to get a good job, thus there is pressure for them to be in a major that 'guarantees' that: computer science/engineering is seen as desirable in that light. Having attended one of the computer science classes, I've seen two striking things:
1) Only a small percent of the people in this major are have an actual interest in the topic. The rest hope to get some administrative job in a big company and that this degree will be their ticket in.
2) There is a mechanical sense to the way projects and assignments are done. The philosophy seems to be: if I follow the steps that the teacher gave then I am able to solve this problem. There isn't an emphasis on analysis or synthesis. I attribute this to the emphasis on rote learning.
These two things make it easier to see why the symptoms described in the discussion occur. In addition, I noticed that the level of education is quite behind my own college experience. They were learning things in their third-year first semester that I learned in my first-year second semester.
As a side note, I don't go to one of the top tier universities; I was told that my university is a second or third tier university, so I suspect that this is the reality for most Chinese computer science students.
Obviously these issues won't exist in UK Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. Also not in Masters degrees at most unis. But I wouldn't call it a Chinese thing at all. Happens the world over based on my anecdotal evidence.
Hence a normal indian programmer is going to be below average. And a normal chinese programmer is going to be below the average.
But a normal western programmer is also going to be below the average.
I've worked with some really bad western programmers. And I read excerpts from western programmer blogs that make me cringe (e.g. the "real men don't catch exceptions or check for nulls" crowd).
The absolute 100% head and shoulders worst two programmers I ever worked with:
The westerner: a consultant from Thoughtworks who deliberately broke core parts of our project, some call it sabotage, others would call it billable hours.
The offshore indian: a completely useless twat who did no work whatsoever but just made excuses. You'd talk to him and get problem A sorted out and then repeat for problems B through H... and then the next problem would be problem A again. It was like it was a roundabout, the same 'reasons' why he couldn't get any work done just kept coming around and around and around again.
Overall, I would take the indian I guess, at least he can be safely ignored.
For example it might be that CS is currently more popular than maths/ physics/engineering, as a result all most top students (including high scorers in the math or physics olympiads) will apply for CS at university regardless of their interest in the subject. Those with the very best performance on the entrance exams will be accepted for CS at Peking and Tsinghau, the next tier of students would have a choice between math/physics/eng. there or CS at a 2nd tier university, and other students between math/physics/eng. at a 2nd tier university or CS at a 3rd tier university.
On top of that the popular subjects will shift with time, so not only is it hard to judge a student's motivation but you might think that on paper someone is a good student because they were accepted for CS, but perhaps at that time CS was picking up students rejected from engineering.
Doing the assignments was really easy. My reactions were something like "omg, they wrote a complete and proper spec!" - but it wasn't that. When I reflected upon it, I realised that the spec was very short, but they had removed all ambiguity from it, which made the assignments ridiculously easy compared to real life work.
Secondly although I swore I wouldn't do this, I turned into one of the 'mature students' (read as: grumpy-old-men types) who laugh at students whenever they complain about their workload.
That said, I think the problem is that managers think code just needs to be "typed up" to work. Developers are viewed as interchangeable cogs and not technical assets. I'm actually amazed the "port" came out as well as it did with the set of circumstances we presented the company. I work with 3 Indian expats who are all very competent developers, I would say among the best I have worked with. Its just the combination of distance, cultural difference, and lack of problem domain familiarity that causes outsourcing to fail, not bad developers.
The first proper comment in TFA hits the nail on the head for India, and is relevant elsewhere. If you approach programmers in a non-Anglospheric country adopting the cultural and business manners and expectations of the Anglosphere then your project is doomed from the get go. This is doubly true for countries like India that technically are too big and diverse to form part of the Anglosphere but have a massive number of English speakers, often as a second language.
I don't perceive programmers from any nation in any particular way, because there are good programmers, there are crap programmers and there are culturally different programmers.
What I will say is that for programmers who have English as a second or third language or not at all it's much harder for them to work as most of the tutorials, books, online resources are written primarily in English for an English speaking populous. Even the languages themselves are written in English following English idioms. How would you feel about programming in a language that uses Mandarin or Hindi as a base language?
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how-do-...
A lot of the remarks there by eastern programmers reflect on their own view of their fellow programmers in the east. The answers show a high level of awareness of the problems caused by the cultural expectations to follow orders and obey the structure and hierarchy.
(Of course all of the points below are just what I've seen or felt, and do not apply to everybody.)
New developers working in big outsourcing firms in India:
- Many college graduates who end up in these jobs, are only there because that is the best paying option they found. It is not something they want to do for a long period of time. It's not hard to see that there are not tons of people who are self-motivated to work on piece meal code that belongs to someone else.
- Like in the US, most good developers want some control over the architecture of the code they work on, or want to work on something that they are excited about. This is usually not afforded by the environments in the outsourcing firms. It results in working just for completing the work, and not being very involved in the products.
- Personally I don't think developers in the east are happier just following instructions and not imaginative. Working on different projects every few weeks, without much control over the projects assigned leads many times leads to such behavior. Again, many developers are just looking to do an MBA, move into a project management position, move to the US, or just do something else.
- My friends always talked about those strange people who were content by starting jobs at outsourcing firms. Some of these people really liked development, and were able to handle the lack of control and investment in the result of their work. Others, were more focussed on the money, or external concerns such as loans, marriage etc. These are the people who sometimes are seen as the yes men - working hard, but not smart. However, it's just that their smarts are targeted elsewhere.
- Developers working in outsourcing firms are the ones who come in contact with programmers in the US. The majority of that group, in my opinion, is not really looking to work long time in their position, not interested in development or move away into other areas if they are (or get) better. Only a small portion likes their work, and as mentioned - paid appropriately.
- Thankfully, there is an ecosystem for good developers who want to start their own companies. Also larger companies such as Adobe, Faceboook, Google etc have more equal sharing of responsibility between their US and India centers.
In the bay area most people who work in development roles, really like and want to be doing software development. On the whole, they have more say in the product, architecture and process of development, than developers working in outsourcing firms in India. Also, developers working in companies that value software engineering usually interact with a similar pool of people (which explains the surprise that most 'developers' can't solve FizzBuzz kind questions).
I'm used from my western colleagues to a lot of discussions on "how"s and "why"s (which I think to be necessary, for the record) but which is absent in the coding practices of my eastern colleagues. They will usually follow a middle road which leads quickly to a usable result
1. Japanese programmers wrote a huge proportion of cutting edge video games in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
2. China (and Japan, and Korea, and India...) has a massive domestic consumer and b2b internet, written and scaled by domestic talent. It's much bigger than the US internet.
3. You better believe Koreans and Japanese write a WHOLE LOT of firmware. When was the last time your TV or BluRay player or Toyota ECU crashed? China is clearly playing catch up here - Chinese electronics crash all the time lol.
Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.
Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.
I would consider anyone who's doing categorizations based on "east" and "west" to be a tad intellectually dishonest.
There aren't many, if any, good developers in rural or extremely poor areas. Most of them move to technologically advanced urban hubs. This normalizes the differences a little and still make comparisons somewhat valid. At least less different than if you were to look at country-wide demographics.
People have a persistent blind spot for that one. I think there is Japan-developed software in, hmm, guesstimation, 60%+ of new cars in the US bought in the last 5 years? (Even in "American" cars. Japanese engineers and managers think that America is always one news story away from leading a witchhunt against Japan products. Recent events have, ahem, not diminished this perception.)
...
DOT DOT DOT
Software is rubbish across the consumer space: TVs, DVDs, home routers. To interact with, it feels like somebody has scraped some functions together in assembly to meet a broad requirement, and then left it as soon as they could get away with it.
I expect the projects are hardware-driven. The movers and shakers care about the hardware, and design this first. Then some hardware-oriented guy get the short straw and is told "build a software layer on this technology to fill these checkboxes". The result is the unresponsive, buggy, hard-to-use rubbish that we get in our consumer devices.
I think companies would need to take a different approach to device design to get around this.
There are exceptions. Pacman was great. But things like Mario and Donkey Kong are about pressing the button at the right time, timing skills, not problem solving or exploring.
Also, I've been very disappointed with the "problem solving" in modern western games, which boil down to "we liked Half-Life 2, so move some crates around!"
And here's a translation of the original article: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl...
He seems to think it's a technological and budgetary issue, not a Japanese-ness issue.
"The engineering population in Japan may be in jeopardy. We should first review our education system here in Japan."These discussions also neglect the enormous selection bias present when you're talking about outsourcing. The vast majority of developers in Japan and China are not proficient enough in a foreign language to work with teams in other countries. We're gazing at these countries' developers through a very, very narrow lens.
On the other hand, getting hired is a touch difficult, too. Companies that post at websites like Career Cross are mostly looking for fluency and lots of enterprise experience - I never even had any luck getting a reply. Most companies who are looking to hire foreigners also only want people who already have the right kind of Visa (an Engineering Visa - btw, if you have one, GrouponJP is hiring a PHP+Perl programmer to do some marketing analysis stuff).
Things aren't all bad, though. I got my job in Japan by going to one of the Recruit/MyNavi events for Japanese students who had studied in English speaking countries. Recruiters chase down the few foreigners there, but admittedly only one company was actually hiring programmers, and I ultimately wasn't happy there - YMMV.
Some video game and consumer electronics companies also hire foreigners, but large companies usually make all applicants take a test that's difficult for native speakers - I applied to Capcom, but they expected me to be fluent and take the test like everyone else. Of course, that depends on the company - you might have more luck elsewhere, and if you're close to fluent, it's worth a shot either way. Try to apply as a "new college graduate" if you can - there's a whole lot of bias against anyone who's held a previous full-time position, and I'm sure it doesn't disappear when they look at foreigner's resumes.
The other route is through foreign companies - I know at least one person at Google Tokyo who originally interviewed in the U.S. On the other hand, I know someone else at Lockheed Martin who's been fighting to get into their Japan office for years now - so how difficult it is depends on the company.
My advice - do Study abroad, JET, or just a 2~3 month trip; go to Tokyo (I personally prefer Osaka, but the jobs are in Tokyo) and go to the HN Tokyo meetup; if no one knows of any openings, apply to a bunch of foreign companies there; if that doesn't work, get a nice black suit and go to a recruiting event.