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Comment by pastor_bob | Hacker News Reader

> Interviews over there are insanely competitive.

Why is it then that it's common understanding that Indian teams are usually bad? Why are they so difficult to deal with and why do they produce bad code?

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Because you get what you pay for.

A significant number of engineers that FAANGM and a lot of others brings into the US from their Indian offices are top-notch. The salaries they pay in India are in the $60k-130k range which is incredibly good there. Same with a lot of good startups and core engineering firms. The off-shore consultancies you might be familiar with are sweat shops that are a dime a dozen with engineers coming and going a revolving door. They're optimized to make a quick buck with as cheap labor as possible. Just like the US firms that hires them.

Body/team leasing is nearly always shit quality, doesn't matter if it's from India or not. You can try to pay folk in India much less than you can get away with in e.g. Europe though.

I've had some good experience hiring contractors. It all depends on what the goal is. If the goal is high quality work there are shops for that and if the goal is for a big enterprise to manage costs and de-risk themselves by hiring contractors as easy-to-let-go resources, you get exactly that. I've dealt with both and the latter is just extremely frustrating made infinitely worse by dealing with the timezone.

If you've seen job placements in top tier colleges in India, it's obvious that none of the body shops ever get even a small percentage of graduates wanting to join. They're always the last choice even for the less academically inclined. It has been the case since at least 2005. Until then these companies still had some sway and were hiring some good candidates. Now they're coasting on their "account winning" architects who then transfer all day-to-day stuff to some of the most tough to deal with engineers.

This seems about right, if you want the expert in something you’ll pay out the ass for it but drowning in extremely high quality code.

But if you just want good code it’s cheaper to hire employees. Contractors around or below the cost of full time employees are truly something else.

There a over a billion people in India, and tech is where the young have been going for a while. In any large population you willhave good and bad people. In the US the bad move to something else, but in India there isn't a something else better than working for a place that will hire you cheap to produce bad code.

There are a lot of bad engineers in India, but if you can weed through them and are willing to pay there are a lot of great ones too.

You're probably thinking of a few big consulting companies who by no means represent the best and brightest and are just resume fodder for many others. The turnover at these places is awful.

Just one example, a lot of target's tech seems to be developed in their Bangalore office: https://india.target.com/work/teams/targettech. Hard to tell how much, but I imagine that being a significantly better workplace than Accenture. I hope one of their developers sees this and can clarify the extent their team works on the app/sites.

Because people hire the cheapest people they can get.

The highly skilled people likely wouldn't even be on the market for hire because they already have well-paying jobs.

Because, somehow, being good at contrived puzzles don't mean squat when it comes to delivering actual value in production.

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