India’s Reverse Diaspora
yaleglobal.yale.edu
yaleglobal.yale.edu
"As Bangalore moves further up the technology ladder, this four centuries-old city of nearly 6 million citizens has ambitions to challenge places like Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, as a world center for innovation."
I am Indian, live and work in Bangalore and have lived a few years in the United States. This is just a rhetorical flourish on the part of the writer. There are no such "ambitions" visible on the ground.
Of course the writer has conveniently made the subject of statement "the city", and has given no supporting evidence.
There are many MNC research labs, but nothing like what the article implies. And very often these Indian research labs don't produce high quality research. Just ask someone in Microsoft or Yahoo Research how good the Indian "labs" are.
Intel seems to have a more succesful offshore lab, but it is the exception, not the rule.
It looks like the journalist took a couple of weeks tour of the city, swallowed whatever Nandan Nilekani and other corporate CEO types told him (Infosys Labs is a joke within Infosys. "Innovations" often have to do with "process improvement" and so on, hardly cutting edge CS research) and wrote a sloppy article, thin on logic and facts.
These are fluff pieces written by visiting western journalists after visiting the shiny campuses of SWITCH (satyam, wipro, infy, ..).
This piece is nothing different than the ones that gets printed often in local english media (esp. ToI). It is tiring to listen to the "phoren" returnees living in their gated communities, complaining daily about the traffic and power-outages. Bah!
After having studied in what is arguably the best undergraduate tech campus in Bangalore, I know what goes around for "research" and "high tech" in computer science departments.
All the undergraduate schools are solely focussed on getting you into one of the SWITCH companies. Woe be you if you had an independent mind and tried to join a more hacker friendly company like Google/Thoughtworks etc.. The immediate family will start distressing over you not making it to the holy shrines of Infy, Wipro etc.,
Some interesting discussion here: http://www.pluggd.in/entrepreneurship/why-wipro-infosys-and-...
Of course all is not doom and gloom. The hacker scene is quite vibrant with Python/Ruby/FOSS communities being as active as anywhere in the world. Quite a few youngsters are getting into the startup mode. Even if a lot of them are testing the waters by attending startup events, reading and blogging about it, being on HN and boot strapping their ideas while living with their parents (not many basements in Bangalore, I'm afraid :).
Going forward, I strongly believe that these independent hackers will do more for the startup scene than the "bill-by-the-hour" Goliaths.
The big outsource companies making up such a large section of the IT market have ugly business models. They get the kind of work where quality & innovation are not actually real competitive advantages & the bill by the hour on a cost+ basis. They're poisoning the industry everywhere from Universities to corporate culture.
Indian culture is creating problems. I've heard variations on this theme. Mostly they centre around family expectations & such pushing young individuals towards being risk averse.
The former, I think might not really be a 'problem' as it seems. The availability of secure jobs (especially places where parents have a memory of this not being the case) will bring in employees. They would have been Accountants or hairdressers if that is where good solid careers lay.
But, maybe they also make this career path accessible to those that otherwise would have been accountants or whatever.
Sure, these companies may not be the best possible for creating a thriving startup/innovation city. Maybe a Lenova or a Google would have been better. But that doesn't mean that these companies are a net loss.
The key message of the article though is correct. A lot of immigrants (working in the IT domain) are coming back, surely not because they see Bangalore as a hub for innovation, but rather it gives them a good opportunity to settle back in their motherland without compromising too much on the other things in life. Not every tech worker is doing high-end research in US, and those who aren't in to it, can very well get a similar job back here.
I am not exactly sure about quality of work done in 'labs' of the big software companies, but as you said things are coming up well in the hardware companies. (I worked in Intel Bangalore for a couple of years)
Overall. at least at this stage, if one is coming back in hope of finding the same entrepreneurial spirit as in the Silicon Valley or be a part of super skilled staff in a research lab trying to cut out a next generation chip-set, the person might be in for some disappointment. (But heck, if you can settle in for lesser financial incentives, there always is ISRO/DRDO for the cutting edge technical work.)
Then again I bet the US Hardware industry didn't see Taiwan as a real threat as smart Taiwanese, graduates of US Universities who spent time working in the US Hardware industry came home and started companies?
"There is raw talent in India," says Sridhar Ranganathan, a managing director of Blue Vector India in Bangalore. "But how to polish that talent is India's dilemma and my challenge."
I dont care about research, but I do about startups, and just a few of the startup conferences happening within one month in Banglore
1. www.proto.in 2. http://www.tiesummit.org/ 3. Watblog VC mixer. (Cant find the link offhand) 4. Almost every weekend there is either of OCC/Startup Sat/Barcamp etc.
Just because you dont know where to look does not meen there is no startup activity in Banglore.
I never said there aren't startups happening in Bangalore. Please feel free to point out any sentences in my post which imply as much. In other words you are reacting to something I (or anyone else as far as I can see) never said.
Over the past year, I conducted well over thirty technical phone screens in hope of finding a single, somewhat-skilled Java development contractor. The majority of those interviewed were Indian people who were working in the US on H1B visas. Interview results ranged from the mediocre down to the abysmal. The resumes of all these candidates claimed several years of work exclusively in Java, and many also purported to have had lead/architect roles.
My screening technique is an insult to a good developer. I ask questions that anyone who has written any decent Java code should be able to answer without pause. For example, I email a small snippet of code containing a try/catch block and ask the candidate to trace through the flow of program execution if the checked exception is thrown. Literally half of candidates think that program execution terminates whenever a catch block is entered and the contents of that block done executing. How could someone have written any quality code and not know this? I'm not asking Java trivia.
What's going on here? If I was going to travel half way around the world to work as a Java developer, I'd be sure to read a couple of Java books on the plane. Is there something uniquely American/Western about expecting people to "know their stuff"? I'd attribute my observations to general, world-wide idiocy except that the rate of ineptitude relative to claimed experience was far worse with Indian candidates. Perhaps a Mid-Western, Fortune 1000 company isn't a compelling place to spend six months on a contract? The role was to do back-end engineering work on a pretty large, well-know site -- something I would think would be compelling compared to the average "maintain a crappy legacy banking system" gig. If I claimed to be a Java developer and didn't know much Java, I'd be so embarrassed that I'd study every night to achieve competence.
I feel like such an Ugly American asking this question, but I can't discount my observations. What am I missing? Is there some selection bias in my data set that I'm unaware of? I also find a general lack of creativity in these candidates, but I attribute that to the rote nature of Indian education (at least that's what I've read about most schooling in India).
Note: I'm not trying to start a "Java sucks" language war here...When looking at a candidate for the long term, I don't care if he/she knows Java at all. However, when you claim to have done Java for five years and don't know basic stuff, I have to question if you know anything at all.
Is there some selection bias in my data set that I'm unaware of?
As mentioned in this thread, majority of H1Bs are lapped up by the big services firms and body shoppers. Not many would be willing to leave a permanent job in a big firm and apply for contractor position. But yes those who went through body shoppers and are just looking for a better pay package would queue up to interview for you. Sad but true.
So your selection set really is "mostly" bottom of the pile programmers, and hence such hard luck for you.
On your observation about general lack of creativity, these people are probably not the best ones to form an opinion, but yes our education system is to partly blame for it.
My advice to you is to only interview H1Bs who have worked for other software (non-outsourcing) companies you have heard of before. If even those are hard to find, interview only those who have worked for top outsourcing firms say Wipro, Infosys and TCS.
If I may list the issues that are possibly unique to Indian programmer, they are, in no particular order:
* Money triumphs everything. Most Indian programmers don't care for the technology as long as money comes
a) in ever increasing quantities
b) from a reputed, brand-name company
c) offers foreign travel, with US being first choice.
* "Work Ethic" - that can be quantified as pride in one's individual contribution, quality of output, constant drive to improve one's skills and knowledge as a distant measure after social status, money for many Indian programmers.
* Enjoying Programming for the sake of it is considered trivial pursuit and not "serious". For instance, being a Python/Rails/Lisp/Haskell programmer of some capability is a matter of pride in US etc. Not so in India. If you are not working on "Enterprise" stuff, all you get is a "oh.. ok".
Of course generalising the above behaviour to ALL Indian programmers is a disservice and wrong. As a hacker(if I may claim so myself) and a native of Bangalore, I'm proud of many excellent programmers I have met in the last 10 years and I feel that many of us are on par with hackers from elsewhere in the world.
To answer your "selection bias" question. There are many reasons why you will not get a qualified hacker to appear on your radar. Getting a US visa is a huge pain in the neck. If you want a H1B you will have go through a lot of circus. Any self respecting hacker would balk at paying upto 60% of their salaries to body shopping firms.
H1B applications are flooded on the first day of applications by big name companies and body shoppers. This leaves no space for a hacker (who by nature are content to be hacking on their own) to "hustle" to get into USA.
I wouldn't touch a lot of these H1B programmers myself. My own hiring processes back home in India have been similar to yours. I would typically give a programming test and a computer to the interviewees and ask them to solve them for me. A significan percentage of candidates from large, brand name companies would fail. Some of them wouldn't even know how to use command line SQL query tools.
So, your sampling population is the one which is contaminated by people who are largely motivated by the desire to work in US and not by technology.
Google probably has 10K+ H1B engineers from India working for them (and not via an intermediary). There are thousands of H1B engineers from India with graduate degrees from top US schools. A very large majority of these Indian programmers care about technology, as do most programmers in India who work for software (non outsourcing) companies.
By saying that "Most Indian engineers don't care for technology" you are painting these guys with the same brush. Even with your qualification that "not all are like this", it reeks of bias. A more accurate statement might be "Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops don't care about technology".
/An admittedly biased but more informed opinion from someone who has worked as an H1B engineer, has a graduate degree from a top 5 CS school in the US
Someone who has studied in US does not really belong to the "Indian Programmer" set I was talking about here.
If you read my comment elsewhere in the thread, I defended people working for non-SWITCH companies including google for bucking the trend. I know that the caliber of programmers working for Goog, Y!, MS, Adobe is much higher than the typical Indian programmer who aspires to a H1B visa, whose primary motivation for a US Visa is increased money and social status.
I'm not painting everybody who is on H1B as bad. But if you consider that nearly 100,000 apply to H1B visas from India, it not hard to see that a vast majority are not of the same caliber as potential GOOG/MS/Y! employees.
Well, I have worked in India for 8 years as a programmer and have interviewed dozens of potential employees to work for startup companies that I worked for AND I have had the opportunity to interact with a wide sample of H1Bs in the USA. I stand by my measure of "most programmers" even if it is anecdotal.
And your paraphrasing "Most Indian programmers who work for outsourcing shops don't care about technology" carries the same bias that you try to dispel. I personally know a lot of programmers who work/used to work for SWITCh companies while also being excellent hackers and FOSS contributors.
Consider it anecdotal evidence, but I've known several Indians who've done that, and I've seen it while reviewing resumes for interviewees as well. I'm not sure about Pakistanis (they're culturally similar to Indians tho) or Trinidadians (never worked with or interviewed one, and if I did I wouldn't have an adequate sample size). It doesn't matter; as a developer you're much more likely to interact with Indians than Trinidadians.
FWIW, I'm an Indian myself. And know many other Indians that don't pad their resumes, and are very talented/hard-working people. But if you had a job posting in the US and measured x = %age of Indian applicants that have fluff on resumes, and y = %age of non-Indian applicants that have fluff on resumes, you'd find x > y.
Most of the top-tier companies are not actually technology companies but intermediateries between $5 Software or Electronics Engineers, $7 MBA's and Clients in Developed Countries. If these companies existed in Ancient Egypt, they would be in the business of supplying slaves to build Pyramids. There are hardly any Technology companies here which are actually in the business of creating and branding products. Most of them are sweatshops where you can buy a Fresh Engineer whose expertise is Java, C, C++, VB, Python, Ruby ( add languages as you hear them is the motto here).
The author's claim that "The Indian government extends dual citizenship" is therefore incorrect.
I think it is fair to say that what is currently needed in India is not the same thing that is needed in California, which means that the work being done will not be the same. There are also different challenges, including problems finding the right kind of staff, power cuts and horrendous traffic.
To get some more impressions from our visit, check out our blog at: http://www.akvo.org/blog/