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Anyone who's read outsourced code can vouch for the similar QC problems. I work with a lot of great Indian software developers; none of them worked IN India itself; they tend to be the ones that are skilled enough to quickly realize they're able to command massively higher wages by leaving India.

India, despite it's reputation as a software outsourcing location has never been able to produce exportable quality besides textiles. There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.

The author's description of the government being 'bureaucratic' is a nice way of saying corrupt, and certainly has no direct bearing on manufacturing yields. That's simply the way business is done in a largely domestic economy.

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I suspect that most people who have interacted with remote teams based in India, have had the same experiences.

I'm honestly surprised that Apple didn't choose Vietnam or Indonesia over India.

The worst I could say about the India based teams I've worked with is that some were to-the-letter to a fault. Anything not explicitly stated was skipped, where you'd typically expect a dev to fill in the unstated but obvious things that you only discover while working a task.

But that was at Amazon. At my current gig, the India based teams are great. Not quite up to the standards of the US teams, but I'm sure they're more cost effective. They're also hungry for more interesting responsibilities, and are proactively improving things. It makes me think that Amazon just had shitty management over there.

You're willing to throw amazon under the bus, but what company are you at now?

I work at Mercedes-Benz. I'm not secret about it, I just don't feel as comfortable being noisy about current experiences with their name attached, as I do things from several years ago. I don't know that that's necessarily a logical reason to make a distinction.

Not been involved in manufacturing there. But was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of IT and datacenters in Jakarta.

I'm honestly surprised that Apple didn't choose Vietnam

There are some Apple products already being made in Vietnam. I believe that some iPhone work is going there soon, as well.

I'm sure there are political considerations.

India of late has a capricious regulation problem which makes it difficult for tech firms to have predictability.

And everyone already knows you can get decent quality manufacturing done in Vietnam. India would like to be considered in that same group.

Therefore it's in Apple's interest to present India with the opportunity to demonstrate that capability, while giving Apple a measure of leverage in cases where India's government is considering outlawing encryption or unmoderated forums or the shift key or whatever they think will make people stop complaining about them today.

Does everyone also know about the outsize influence China has on Vietnam? If the goal is to de-risk a China / US Trade War scenario and prevent Chinese government from stealing chip tech etc - then you dont get much by going to their pals next door ;)

I wouldn't call China and Vietnam pals. If you look at history, the suspicion/animosity between the two goes back thousands of years.

I don’t think OP meant it a friendly way either. Like under China’s thumb “pals”.

They are moving some production to Vietnam, starting with some Macbooks:

https://www.investopedia.com/apple-moves-production-vietnam-...

I imagine once Apple is confident they will likely add more products there.

50% rejection rate sounds incredibly high to me.

I'm not sure the code shipped by the offshored programmers I've interacted with built 50% of the time.

Something like 90% of "software engineers" in the country are considered unfit for software engineering [0] [1]

[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/only-6-of-those-pa...

Yeah my experience has been abysmal. Now I have met engineers in the states from India who were some of the most brilliant people I’ve met, but the companies I’ve been at that offshored drove me crazy. Time complexity and DRY were things these individuals had never considered worthy of their time. These weren’t all cheap hires either: some of them were senior engineers making six figures

I was at a company that moved from an offshored setup to an offshored and outsourced one, and that was eye opening.

The offshore employees were, on aggregate, no better or no worse than their US counterparts. They were carefully recruited by a dedicated team, and all ended up with solid institutional knowledge because they were valued and retained over their careers. They even had decent advancement paths as well, including into management - I remember one guy in the office whose reporting chain went from him to Hyderabad - USA - Bangalore - USA. That had to be fun.

But then the outsourcing bug bit, teams were decimated in both countries, and that’s when I got to see the typical horror stories firsthand.

I’m careful now to ask people who talk about “offshoring” if they mean building a team of FTEs in another country, or hiring a body shop with the lie that they’ll handle the “non-core business tasks”.

> There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Motors

Anyone want to vouch for their great experience driving a Tata car?

Not exported outside the middle east and India.

Looks like they sold 5 of them in Europe in 2016.

https://carsalesbase.com/europe-tata/#:~:text=Tata%20cars%20....

You do know that Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover... right?

Wasn't that a package deal? "Buy all of it or we won't sell you anything!"-style? IIRC they were shopping only for some tech not those brands.

Not really in the Jag or Land Rover game mate. That said, they have a horrible reputation for unreliability.

They bought them.

They are engineered in the Uk. Engines made in Uk and China. From memory India was assembly from knockdown unless that has changed. Supply is for the domestic market. Just because there is Ownership doesn't mean transfer of skills

Hyundai does some design work in India and manufacturing (i20) but hardly any exported, and for the domestic market.

Mahindra is probably doing the most exports, at a guess

Maruti, Kia, Volkswagen and Nissan are exporters of cars from India to 100 locations around the world. Simple search would have fixed this.

I do not have a Tata car, but its everywhere here in India. It gets the job done and it is reliable, cheap to service and maintain and has good fuel economy. They also have make so many heavy buses and trucks. Technology and reliability isn't an issue with them. The latest Tata cars score high in NCAP too. Only reason I don't like a Tata car is because they are not so great in styling their cars. If some of them have good front design, they look bad from the back. The one's that look nice from back or sides doesn't look so nice from in the front etc.

Only have good things to say about Tata Indica. My dad was a Cab driver. Indica's were big then. We had two cars, both crosses 2,00,000 kms. The last one not only crossed 2,00,000 kms, we still use it.

Very durable and value for money.

They appear to be the ones with 50% failure rate

> At an iPhone casings factory in Hosur run by Indian conglomerate Tata, one of Apple’s suppliers, just about one out of every two components coming off the production line is in good enough shape to eventually be sent to Foxconn, Apple’s assembly partner for building iPhones, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I say this as the whitest white man ever, so please correct me if I'm being discriminatory.

I understand it's also a culture issue. India has a culture of never telling clients "no" for anything, even if they know they can't do it. So you ask for something insanely complex, and your contractor in India will throw a mountain of buggy code at you. I wouldn't be surprise if that's also the issue here.

Noticed the same thing. Even implying that what management wanted wasn't realistic would make them incredibly uncomfortable.

We had some Indian devs in a subsidiary for years, and that absolutely tracks.

Cross-cultural communication is an actual field of study, you know? But in this case, with the unwillingness to say "no", it's a killer. We ended up cutting them loose because even though they were cheaper per hour than US-based resources, we couldn't make the progress we needed to make. One US dev because 3, and that became a whole team, and that's how we decided to continue.

I've heard it as Asian cultures in general, being conformist. For example, I've heard the same from Japanese devs who have to save the face of their superiors, and in Chinese manufacturing as well.

They've done well in the pharma industry recently, but it's their one major success.

I would strongly suggest not calling India's pharma industry a success. It is rife with terrible quality and government-sponsored coverups.

Here is one book that goes into some detail:Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma

Many children lost their lives in Gambia and Uzbekistan after consuming tainted cough syrup made in India. The worst part is not the error, it is the fact that indian regulators and the indian government don't do anything to solve the problem.

We're in Australia and after reading that book we'll go out of our way to not buy generics manufactured in India.

Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals? An odd omission.

I speak as someone who worked in India -- Bangalore, in the IT sector -- for 2 years. I loved the place and the people. But for sure the work ethic is ... different to Australia.

the disappointing thing is that India can absolutely dominate the sector and supply cheap generics to poor countries. They have the expertise and supply chains. All while making a tidy profit.

Instead, greed and crony capitalism takes over and increasingly, the indian government is getting increasingly involved, reacting to any criticism in a churlish manner.

Really sad to see the wasted potential in a country like India. I suspect this is cultural and not easy to fix.

Why do you suspect it’s cultural?

Have you spent any time in India? It is absolutely cultural.

That might not be palatable but it's true.

My mate Kiran used to lament the state of his own country. "The corruption..." he would sigh.

Weirdly, it doesn't seem like a regulatory requirement to print the country of manufacture on the box. All of our food is clearly labelled but not pharmaceuticals?

It's the opposite in the US, for the most part.

i am pretty sure that every few weeks I see floating up yet another article about some generic made in India recalled due to whatever reasons. So while they did capture a big market share, i think it's acknowledged that they have quality control issues

No. There have been years of serious quality problems at certain Indian manufacturers. Here's a case from 10 years ago:

During a visit to a facility of leading Indian drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd last year, U.S. inspectors found that a black fiber embedded in a tablet may have been a hair from an employee’s arm, according to documents seen by Reuters. ....

The Mohali plant, in the northern state of Punjab, had not been making U.S. exports since last November, when it voluntarily recalled its generic version of cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor in the United States due to the potential presence of glass particles in certain batches.

Here's another case from last year:

A parliamentary committee in Gambia said on Tuesday that India-based drug maker Maiden Pharmaceuticals Ltd was responsible for the deaths of at least 70 children from acute kidney injury and called on the government to pursue legal action.

According to a WHO report, "labs contracted by it in Ghana and Switzerland found excess levels of ethyleneglycol and diethyleneglycol contaminants in the Maiden syrups."

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/gambia-lawmakers-say-ma...

Note that the plant cited in the 2013 case was majority owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. They still couldn't get QC right.

No need to go way back ten years. A recall in the US a couple of weeks ago was because of eye drops made in India.

That said, India does produce massive amounts of pharma for export around the world. Just read the labels on the boxes in the drug stores.

This is ironic considering just this last month there was a controversy over their pharmaceutical standards with multiple children dying from over the counter medicine. They haven’t done well and there’s constant issues with Indian “genetics” not actually delivering the amount of a given medicine claimed. There’s also almost no recourse one can take here.

> There are no cars or electronics, or chip fabs in this country.

This is only partially true.

India has factories that provide inter-mediate parts required for creating final product. For example, a car needs axles, engine, dashboard plastics, alloy for body, brakes and electronics. You are more likely to find an Indian name in top-10 vendors for above parts sorted by marketshare. With the exception of engine, transmission, they have expanded.

What it does lack is tack of exporting finished products such as iPhone or smartphone or cars or jets. And I think this will be a long process. Someone with deep pockets like Apple is willing to bet and here we are.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Forge

Indian made cars are exported to multiple countries (1). Exports are growing YoY. This is HN; when making blanket statements like these in the future, please provide a citation.

1. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/pv-expor...

You should learn more about car manufacturing in India especially Maruti with its bestselling models to around 100 locations worldwide.

Also wrong on chip fabs, there are no commercial high scales fabs but govt owned or small scale ones.

Cars are one of India’s larger exports. Cars are definitely manufactured in India- TATA, Mahindra, Maruti etc.

You're right. Nonetheless, not quite at the level one might have hoped given the early promises they made years ago. They never did create the car of the future to sell to the Americans.

Mahindra is the #1 tractor manufacturer in the world.

>India, despite it's reputation as a software outsourcing location has never been able to produce exportable quality besides textiles.

It's precisely a software outsourcing location because they are unable to produce anything of value by themselves.

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