Are Indian Programmers not Programmers but just coders?

This post is from 2007. And things have changed drastically since then.

Ok, I am from Bangalore. And let me tell you. Technical skills are in heavy demand now.

To understand what the problem actually is. You need to understand this. Just like the web boom in US, there was an IT boom in India. IT companies witnessed a 100% year on year growth. Their workforce head count was doubling every year. And they really had no other option but to hire people from every engineering back ground. They were forced to promote people regardless whether or not they deserved it.

People became managers within 5-6 years of joining industry. And that is when the meme spread "Being a programmer doesn't help in IT you have to be a manager". We are long past those days now.

The growth has stabilized and I would rather say its completely normalized now. Companies are no longer feeling the need to promote people rapidly. In fact they now have a excess bench strength of managers. And many of them did get laid off in the past few years. Word has it that its going to very difficult for the managers from now on. As they bring little value to the table.

On the other hand the Indian IT industry is plagued by the disease of Job hopping. Absolute utter idiots who can't write a 10 line script now hop every year pocket a 30% raise get a promotion. You will see people who never wrote probably 1000 lines of code are now architects.

Given the scenario the operational efficiency of big IT companies has fallen like a pack of leaves. They are not taking high risk premium projects anymore. As they simply don't have the kind of good people to execute them.

The demand for good people is growing by the day. Most of them I know work at start up's or product firms or they are into consulting/freelancing. There is a lot of money there and there are a lot of tough good problems to be solved.

IT Industry in India is pretty much alive and rewarding, except that those rewards are no longer in big companies. They are else where. And hey, there is a lot of money being a programmer. More than managerial jobs.

You just have to come out of the big IT giants and get into smaller places.

I am not sure if the post was troll bait or not. Denying the possibility of truth within the massive generalization in the topic wouldn't be best idea, having said that one has too look at companies like Gluster [Acquired by RedHat] and InMobi to look at some high technology being produced from this part of the world. Given the population of India, there are actually more english speaking people over here than the whole of Britain, similarly even a high number of brilliant programmers would get drowned the chorus of massive coders working for huge outsourcing firms. Since you come from India itself as your blog suggest, and are from computer science related field, and hence would be very well verse with what I have mentioned above, I find digging a five year old post, combining with the topic headline 'Are Indian Programmers not Programmers but just Coders' not in the very best spirits.

The post might be old and filled with link bait content.But it has a few valid points. Big companies like TCS, Infosys etc, are destroying the lives of thousands of software engineers. I used to work in TCS about 3 years ago and I knew a guy who had done his Masters from IIT (which has the brightest minds in India). He was hired from IIT for a good pay and he was put on a maintenance project for GE. It was a dumb job where he used to monitor some stuff and call up the responsible guys if he saw something wrong. And he was a mechanical engineer.

So, TCS effectively took a guy who might have done a lot of good in the mechanical field and just wasted him. I am really pained by things like these.

I'm from BITS Pilani (yeah, yeah, the BITS and IIT rivalry, yada yada) and we tactically try to keep these companies off the placement process as well.

I'm just glad that there's someone who does see the difference and is willing to talk about it.