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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Here's why you should feel threatened by programmers in India.

I recently hired a guy over there to work for our startup. He's smart and he gets things done. He's still a little green, but overall he adds a lot of value to our company. He's just as good as anyone I would have found in the US.

And after we exit/die, the company he starts might be competing with yours.

India has a billion people, 10's of millions of code monkeys, and millions of good coders. The existence of code monkeys doesn't mean you don't need to compete with the smarter guys.

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Except that he won't. There seems to be a strong societal and cultural pressure working against people that want to go into business for themselves.

My Dad thinks I'm a bonehead for spending my time at startups and such even though I've tried explaining how working at a large corporation can suck your soul out. I'm pretty sure its not just my Dad and immediate family.

Isn't that little anecdotal? Yes agreed there is, social bias against people who want to do start up. But I see many people coming up against that and starting up their own startups. Agreed majority are still sweating in IT services, but we don't expect them to do startups anyways.

In fact, If OP was able to hire a single guy who is good and works remotely, that single guy is 100% startup material (otherwise, he would have been already employed at big IT service company) and very likely to start on his own few years down the line.

Of course its anecdotal. The original article from jplarson that we are all responding to is also highly anecdotal.

But you have a good point about the OP's hire. I'm also very glad to hear youngsters are starting to do their own thing. :-)

Actually, my guy was employed at a big IT shop (Microsoft, not an outsourcing shop). He quit since he felt he was stagnating.

Us Chinese also have a strong cultural inclination towards working at a big company instead of striking it out on your own.

That hasn't stopped the likes to Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Fred Chang (Newegg), etc etc. And that's not even mentioning any entrepreneurs in Asia.

India has a billion people, I think it's pretty safe to say that there are a significant number of entrepreneurs worth their salt that will come out of that place - cultural impetus or otherwise.

I would think of Robin Li of Baidu as the #1 Chinese tech entrepreneur. Why? Because he was successful in China. Also he had the vision to figure out where the Internet would go in China + the cajones to execute on it.

I know of the folks you have mentioned however they gained success in US. There have been lots of successful Indian-American tech entrepreneurs as well.

I WANT successful tech entrepreneurs to come out of India. I want young Indian techies to contribute towards the upliftment of India instead of working for US. No offense towards native-born Caucasian Americans.

I'm just puzzled its taking so long especially when it seems conditions are so ripe in India for tech startups. So I can only imagine its a cultural thing.

Most people won't. I've met him, and I think he is as likely to as most US startup programmers.

The issue is not whether the average Indian programmer is as good as an average American programmer. My guesstimate is that they aren't. The issue is whether out of a billion people, you can find quite a few competitive ones. The answer is that you can.

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