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Comment by theshadowmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Ok, here's the thing. Indian developers are not overrated. The developers that you are trying to hire might be overrated. Very good developers in India mostly work for big product companies or startups. Most good developers do not freelance. And coming to technology consulting companies like TCS, Infosys etc.., hire a lot of new college grads at cheap salaries who have no clue about the work and make them slog.

So, if you want good freelance developers it might be difficult to find good one in India. But, if you are a startup that gained some traction in the US or elsewhere and want to start an office in India, you'll find good developers if you pay well.

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This is the honest truth.

I've dealt with outsourcing to India before and share many of the same headaches mentioned in these comments.

I know it's a generalization, but I believe it's fairer to generalize about Indian outsourcing businesses than about Indian individuals: these businesses are doing their best to maximize profits, like any business does. They hire very low, mark up quite a bit and (in my experience) misrepresent their talent pool.

Conversely, I've worked with a number of brilliant Indians at a large corp here in North America.

The good individuals leave after a couple of years or less. The turnover is really high. They leave for the same reasons anyone would: better opportunities, mentorship, culture, money, etc.

In reality, it's a smoke and mirrors game where the outsourcers mostly win. Indian individuals get a bad rap.

Offshoring is no panacea, it's become a fairly efficient market, and whatever free lunch was there is no longer. Companies that were trying to outsource to save on wages or capitalize on increased productivity are not getting those results: "We find no significant change in average wages or in total factor productivity measures for offshoring firms." (http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2014/files/if...)

It's increasingly obvious there are no gains from offshoring unless you have other more compelling reasons (e.g. 24 hour/global support, shortage of local talent pool, global availability, etc...)

I completely agree.

Yes , it's the bean counting IT firms that have to share a large portion of the blame.

Anyone who is good and asks for a higher salary is quietly moved out.

In an IT services company it's all about the billing rate. A manager can always be billed at a higher rate than a lowly developer. So say you've been a developer for five years. Now the company can no longer "afford" to bill you as a developer.

So they'll force you into management so that they can bill you as a manager. I've seen brilliant developers , who're still interested in writing code , but now all they do is fill excel sheets and status reports. And you'll be forced to manage multiple projects so that they can make even more money off of you.

Otherwise you'll forever be stuck at a lower pay grade as a "mere" developer.

IT services companies have a super low cost business model and they aren't interested in moving to the premium end of the market.

The attrition in this sector is enormous. Just look into the figures for Infosys , TCS etc. It's reached upto 30% ! If 30 % leave in a year , it doesn't take long for all your experienced people to move out.

But they've perfected this continuous conveyor of clueless graduates being cycled into the software meat grinder. They don't even hire CS grads. They'll hire almost anyone put them through their cookie cutter "training" and now you're ready to work on projects for the Fortune 500.

Then there is the pervasive cheating and deception. Resumes are faked , they hire clueless developers straight out of college and make them work night and day to deliver their first project all the while assuring the client that they've put their best devs , with 3+ years of experience on the project.

You're endlessly in maintenance projects which means you don't have much of a chance to learn and grow.

So a lot of the "bad Indian coder" meme is due to the way that low cost IT services firms are structured and the people they hire.

So very few people who take pride in coding can survive for very long in such an environment. If they're really good , they've already jumped ship to some top 10 product firm or startup.

So you're very unlikely to find any good coders there , and the ones left will be doing management.

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