Comment by curiousDog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curiousDog | Hacker News Reader

Oh not this stupid argument again. Many problems he mentions aren't specific to India, you'll find them across all developing economies (We had most of the same issues contracting work to a Chinese and Brazilian company).

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. And some companies are clearly okay with said cheap work. There's a reason the IT industry in Hyderabad/B'lore is booming. Want solid contracting work without slackers? Sure, you can still find plenty of those too in India (thoughtworks?) but pay up (albeit less than what you may have to in the valley). The reason you're outsourcing core-work/parts of it to India should be that you can't find enough talent locally; not for getting it done cheaply or because your in-house developers think the work is 'beneath' them (I've seen this happen way often, dev with inflated ego doesn't want to test. Wants to do a cold hand-off and expects the cheap developers to be on his level and take dirty work off his hands. Starts cursing). So, there's probably room for both (cheap and expensive) industries in India. Unfortunately, you might have to expend more effort before you find the company that fits your needs.

Articles like these insinuate nothing but Xenophobia and racism. More often than not, Indians are always on the receiving end of it despite contributing so much to the software industry in general. The author from Ukraine of all places probably wants soviet like discipline and work-ethic for USSR salaries? Yeah, ain't gonna happen comrade. The employees on the other-end aren't stupid either. They have many friends in the US making bank working at Google/FB. Why would they work their balls off for peanuts?

I definitely agree the title of the argument is jumping to conclusions, but the problems are very real from what I have experienced.

paying more (to Indian (as in, in India) developers) doesn't alleviate those problems. people have really stretched what xenophobia and racism means anymore.

Why should they work for peanuts when their friends are working at google and FB making bank? because peanuts where they are is a very high standard of living, and lets face it, they do not have the skills or they would be working at fb and google making bank as well. One should never do a poor job just because they think they aren't compensated enough.

As I understand, it's more of a cultural thing. I live in a Middle East country where a lot of low to mid-level workers are from India. If you want to get anything done it's full of bureaucracy, things are done to the minimum standard of working (a socket in my apartment came off the wall, the handyman came to fix it and used a bit of brown tape - job done!), and people are always looking for ways to one-up themselves.

A company I'm working for is currently trying to build up a team in India (for lower costs), and all the problems we are facing are those described in the article. Given my experience with how they are in my country, combined with the company most likely paying the minimum, I'm not really surprised.

On the other hand I have a friend in the UK who has a couple of on-site developers from India working for him and he says they are great. Of course, I'm sure not all Indians work the way I have described, but I wonder whether for these guys they have picked up the Western way of working from living there.

(Apologies if I come off as harsh or offensive, I'm not saying the Western way is better than the Indian / Asian way it's just different - which is where these outsourcing issues come from, as people expect outsourced developers to work the same as a local developer)

>>The reason you're outsourcing core-work/parts of it to India should be that you can't find enough talent locally

Sometimes, but not always. A lot of companies outsource because they feel software is just not a part of their core business. Very similar to the way why some companies outsource payroll.

this problem is specific to India because India is center of IT outsourcing and this problem is unique to IT. Contracting work to China is mainly manufacture sector which real product are being shipped. quality and standard are well defined in advance. customer can simply reject goods if they don't pass quality test. can you do that in software outsourcing? when we talk about this problem we don't need to mention other contribution done by Indian developers. Let's just focus on one problem. I am sure there is thread for discussing Indian contribution in software industry. Actually author kindly mentioned he also met some very good developers both in US and India to be politically correct.

Makes one wonder if one could hit on more quality assured work if one shopped somewhere within the states but outside said valley.

Your post contains more xenophobia than the article, "comrade"

How is that?

I think this excerpt is representative of the content that woah (reasonably, in my estimation) found xenophobic:

"The author from Ukraine of all places probably wants soviet like discipline and work-ethic for USSR salaries? Yeah, ain't gonna happen comrade."

Correct.

"Your post contains more xenophobia than the article"

This statement seems completely unfounded to me. I feel the OP makes valid points, any professional developer that delivers high quality work is not going to be cheap. If you want high quality solid software you have to pay for it. Developers who have been around long enough know this and charge accordingly. If its cheap you're only getting one of two things, a good developer who doesn't know what they are worth (probably because they don't have the exp yet), or crap.

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