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Comment by emontero1 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's worked closely with Indian developers for the past 3 years, I can corroborate several of the statements above. My teammates and I were usually spellbound by the acronym-laden resumes of some Indian developers. "Wow, this guy must be really good! Look at his credentials, dude!", I used to say frequently. Reality, however, sinks in rather quickly. More often than not, the "super star" ended up turning in subpar code, working a bazillion hours a week and, still, missing deadlines and estimates by ample marks. It was all very confusing at first. I understand fully now.

I'm not saying there aren't excellent Indian developers. I've also met a few of those. Alas, those are not the majority.

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Im too young to know firsthand, but I recall during the .com boom here in the states one of the problems was that anyone who knew how to spell html could get a programming job. It was a hot field and people seeking the "big money" were getting programming jobs they didn't deserve. On the university side I knew several people who switched majors to business when they learned that coding involved typing (no joke). Perhaps the same is going on in India right now? From all accounts, programming is the hot job in India.

I bet if someone put together a good summary of the "brilliant" people in a field, and had them talk about the level of talent when that field is the hot job, it would look the same as these coder stories.

Maybe this implies that the current state of the Indian market is temporary.

I can say that I've worked with several excellent Indian developers here in the United States, and they regarded Indian firms as (by and large) unsuitable places for competent people to work. They said the prevailing approach was to hire the cheapest possible people, scrupulously go through the motions (cargo-cult style,) produce copious evidence of work, and be sure to meet the project requirements in some literal sense so you get paid. As for quality, as for whether you produced something that the client could actually use, well, that's someone else's concern. If you managed to provide something that resembled the requirements and it isn't usable, that's someone else's fault.

I can sympathize with this from a cultural point of view, because it's frustrating to try to fill in the blanks and detect deficiencies in requirements when you don't have the same cultural context. It's easier to just work to the spec, and naturally (under business pressure) this devolves into working to spec in a very minimal and cynical way.

go through the motions (cargo-cult style,) produce copious evidence of work, and be sure to meet the project requirements in some literal sense so you get paid. As for quality, as for whether you produced something that the client could actually use, well, that's someone else's concern. If you managed to provide something that resembled the requirements and it isn't usable, that's someone else's fault.

On the other hand, these companies get business. They would not get business if their work was unusable. You can sell a crap car for cheap. But you can't sell a car that doesn't drive. And if you can (time + materials, work to specs, etc.), you can't do it twice.

I'm just saying, the market is hard at work here. They must be filling a need.

Do they get repeat business? Also, are American engineers that use their work being pressured to frame the collaboration as a success? When a VP's bonus depends on his ability to show cost savings through offshoring, you can bet the managers under him will find some way to patch up the code stateside and declare the project a success. The official proclamations of success create good word-of-mouth for the contract company, so they get more business. I've seen this happen firsthand, not with offshoring to India, but with developers being forced to work with an American consulting firm that their executive happened to trust more than his own staff.

> They would not get business if their work was unusable.

It happens. A four-man startup I worked at in 2000 tried to outsource some thick client development. Their first deliverable wasn't even close to being compiler ready. It took a couple weeks of conference calls just to get a binary that didn't crash instantly.

A larger employer later had much the same experience. The code we got from a contract shop was such a trainwreck that we opened a branch office and hired our own developers over there instead; that worked out fine.

Excellent ANYTHING is not a majority.

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