[Ask HN] What do you think of indian developers? | Hacker News Reader

[Ask HN] What do you think of indian developers?

4 pointssuchitpuri12 comments

I am fascinated by this thread. Can we also get a "What do you think of white developers?", "What do you think of women developers?". /s

tl;dr: It is just a population of homo sapiens. You will have good and bad people.

I think the question is referring to the cultural norms of programmers with an Indian background. malux85's answer discusses this well.

And that makes my (snarky) question any less valid. Why not talk about the cultural norms of white programmers from the midwest? Why not talk about the cultural norms of girl programmers then? The problem with shit like this is it can act as a heuristic that you can use to feed your confirmation bias or it can bite you the fuck in the ass.

E.g. not every guy of an Indian ethnicity is a yes man to use ideas from malux85's anecdote. Neither are women inherently bad at math or computer science to use Larry Summers's stupid-ass argument.

Well, of course not. However, cultural norms are very important to take into account when working with people of all backgrounds. There's a very fine, yet important line between taking cultural norms into account and forming stereotypes.

As with any large population there's a bell curve, good ones and bad ones at each end. You get what you pay for with programmers, Indian or not.

With those out of the way, there is one thing I've noticed:

There tends to be a culture that they always immediately say "Yes" to any request, even if they have absolutely no idea where to begin.

This is not the "I haven't built this exact thing before, but I have built two things that are similar and should be able to hook them together and change behaviour" <-- that thing is part of normal programming life.

No, this is more like "I have absolutely no idea if the technology stack can even DO what you're asking, if it's the correct choice, or if I am even remotely skilled enough to implement this" ... just immediately say "YES" and head over to stack overflow to ask questions.

I have a good friend who is a developer from India, and I asked him why this is, he told me that "There's a culture in India that you just say YES to your boss and never ever question him or his methods, the employee just says YES and then does their best to figure it out"

With this in mind, I always make sure that when dealing with Indian contractors, at the point of where I would normally go over the high level implementations with contractors I make an effort to dig a bit deeper, just to make sure there's good understanding and no miscommunication.

Overall experience has been good now that I know the cultural gotchas.

EDIT: One other bit of advice my father gave me "Pay peanuts, get monkeys" .. this sums up most of the problems with code I see :)

Well put. I agree with everything you've said.

I will say that I've noticed a distributing trend which points to a lack of integrity among some of the Indian programmers coming straight from India. Two things in particular were astonishing to me:

1) Many of the Indian programmers routinely lie on their resumes about their experience. If they took a 6 month training course on a technology, they will say they have 3 years of experience.

2) In some of the larger consultancies, a skilled developer will sit for all the phone screens. Then they will send over who ever is available on the bench for the projects that the skilled person interviewed for, whether they sat for the interview with the client or not.

If you know what to look for, these types of individuals are really easy to spot. The unfortunate problem is that many big company hiring departments don't know how to spot them and they impact the reputation of anyone of Indian origin.

The more important question to ask is what do you think of yourself. Are you a good developer in your eyes? Or you are just trying to make a quick buck off a client who is equally trying to save a few bucks. "Don't run after success, go for skills and success will run after you."

My company tends to hire consultants based on certifications without a valid tech screening. It seems to me that a lot of Indian devs have certifications coming out of their ears without really having the skills to back them up.

Other than that, I work with a couple of extremely talented Indian devs that are full time employees of the company. I think the issue is that people jump to India for dirt cheap work, and they get it, but it starts to develop a pattern in your mind. I think if they local hired high school kids for the same pay rates, they'd have the same quality of work.

They're human. There's male, female, good and bad ones :)

Good tech skills, but most of them didn't speak english/german (working languages here) well enough.

The misunderstanding lead to software that had good quality but often didn't do what we wanted :\

> The misunderstanding lead to software that had good quality but often didn't do what we wanted :\

This.

If you want me to cook a new dish, you should give me in writing exactly what you want or at least make sure that you carefully read (in full) and sign off the requirements/specs document(s) produced after our discussion. Clients 100 percent (yes I mean it) of the time aren't even sure about the full requirements, let alone clearly conveying them during initial stages. This always ends with this word "misunderstanding".

I'm saying this from my experience working with both small and large fortune 500 clients.

Honestly? Awful. I know I know I shouldn't generalize, but then again you asked my opinion. So, let me explain. I work as freelance developer, 25% of my work is "fixing" Indian outsourced code. By fixing, I mean, rewriting the entire code an charging more than my normal rate.

I guess that happens when you are cheap and not only limited to Indians, but to be honest, every time I have to "fix" outsourced code, it's from India.

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