India’s Snapdeal Says the Country Doesn’t Have the Programmers It Needs | Hacker News Reader

India’s Snapdeal Says the Country Doesn’t Have the Programmers It Needs

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26 pointsdevnonymous42 comments

All this says to me is Snapdeal doesn't know how to recruit. There are LOTS of companies that are actually finding a sense of validation and satisfaction in not being able to find people - it makes them feel elite and special. It's a sort of non-recruiting that boosts the corporate ego. "We are so awesome that we just can't even find ANYONE as awesome as us."

There's no shortage of programming talent. Only a shortage of recruiting talent.

http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/theres-no-shor...

I sent one of the best developers I know to a job interview, he was rejected.

http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-of-...

Employers don't want great developers, they want what they want.

http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-dont...

Well they are not talking about developer. They are talking about technology specialist, which India severely lack. One of the reason is where in India would you study enough to become a specialist. You will have to go to a foreign University and hence India will have to hire people from outside India.

As someone born and raised in India, I find attitudes like this quite annoying. Programmers tend to be passionate and self-learners; you want an university to teach you? Look at what some programmers from Tamil Nadu came up with: http://hasura.io/

This is such a stupid comment. There are lots of specialists in India, isn't it possible that Snapdeal just doesn't appeal to them? Snapdeal is not exactly building anything ground breaking and a job at Snapdeal is nothing to write home about, for a specialist. They just come off as a shitty Flipkart/Amazon clone. All of my experiences buying from them was unsatisfactory.

Also I dont think someone needs to study in a university to become a specialist. Passion I think is more important than formal university education

click-bait article really. Its like saying Google doesn't have the programmers in US it needs. my points: 1) Snapdeal is in Delhi- Not really a hub of software engineers. Most of them are in south of India and very few people really want to move to Delhi. Also, people from south India almost never like to move to Delhi. Even people from North like to stay in Bangalore because it offers many career opportunities.

2) Snapdeal is really no big deal in India- With flipkart,google,microsoft and a bunch of awesome new startups in south, and Snapdeal having no presence in bangalore/Chennai/hyderabad etc- Programmers have a lot of options.

3) I know very very few people who use snapdeal. with amazon,flipkart and ebay i don't see why snapdeal is relevant. Why would a good programmer move to join this company? its not one of the big ones. Its not a cool startup and equity will be low.

I agree with you on 1 and 2 but not on 3. Snapdeal is one of the very good e commerce platform here in India. The problem is that Indian students are still not ready to join a company like snapdeal or flipkart when they have offers from FB, Google, Microsoft, Amamzon, Visa etc.

During campus placements at my college, none of the CS and Maths and Computing went to snapdeal. Instead snapdeal has to settle themselves with guys from other departments.

Its funny you say that because everyone I meet knows flipkart but don't really use them but use snapdeal all too often.

From foreign news articles it does seem like flipkart & amazon are the big deal which is why I find it confusing why in india snapdeal is a bigger deal.

Snapdeal has better prices on a few products, but the overall experience isn't any better (wrong products being shipped, customers cheated by soaps/bricks in product cases). Flipkart/Amazon prices are a little higher but the overall experience is better. Both offer pretty good support as well.

Flipkart is technically more impressive than Snapdeal. (Flash sales/in-house hardware, etc). It has it's own brand similar to Amazon basics - DigiFlip, some of which are of decent quality - cables, chargers, etc.

I have done it all and my experience as well as of people I know:

we have done all the price comparison and we have found that deals,coupons etc are not worth the time. I just want a site that I can go to and be somewhat sure that I am getting a good price.

Flipkart is fantastic for that. I have never ever found a product on flipkart that is cheaper elsewhere and I can also see my other options for similar products on the same site.

If I am being adventurous, I browse ebay where I get good deals.

In general, a company complaining about there not being enough programmers is saying that there aren't enough programmers at the price level they are willing to pay.

Just raise the salary. Watch as programmers magically materialize.

My favourite analogy is property. I cannot find any nice houses selling for £100K in London. Surely it means that nobody is selling any. Or maybe they just cost more and that's a reality.

Some interview anecdotes from India (Not all mine) :

For an SDE interview obsessed with binary trees after around 4 possible traversals, the fifth one was: "Can you write code to traverse Binary-Tree in a zigzag manner ?" "seriously ?" Rejected.

Questions asked in a PHP dev interview: "Can you write code to invert this link list ?" "Yeah I could in college, but I haven't touched C for last 5 years. I can explain the logic though" "Being a Php developer doesn't mean you forget how C looks like" Rejected.

Salary negotitation "My current salary is 50k, I am hoping for 10% increase" "We will give you 30k, dont you want to work for a world class technology product company " "Ok, can you still match my current salary ? I might join in that case" "Do you want to work for a world class technology product company or not ?" "Sorry" Rejected. candidate too demanding, lacks passion.

"Do you know Node JS ?" "No I am interviewing for a frontend developer post" Rejected.

As these interviews point out, most of us are bad engineers.

Yes we Indian developers are shit. We are expected to work 24 hours a day, taking orders* from product managers, who many times just become PMs because they did not want to (or never understood how to) code and are expected to feel oblige to take the smallest cuts from the bonus pie, not paid for/encouraged to take any courses (one of my bosses actually suggested me to unlearn all the "cool shit" as I was increasing expectations of good work of other employees ) , and we are inefficient at that.

But even after this, it is not at all fair to compare us to the foreign recruited people who earn twice, generally have more experience (as every experienced person in India becomes a manager), and could do all cool github coding in their career (try telling about Github to one of my previous PMs, he will point you to know more about scrum) . After all its only in foreign developers one can find "10 years of big data" (Hadoop recently turned 10 btw) and "15 years of building scalable applications in Golang" type of experience.

There are a few Indian startups which are changing the scene. For the rest, its better they hire from outside the country. If someone can make a bold statement like this, he should have done his homework.

This I can certainly relate to. In India wherever you go in the IT industry you are expected to forget about your life,family and just focus on minting money for your employer and for Shitty pay.

I have 10 years experience in the industry and I have worked for bodyshops,niche hip companies and for awesome startup(s). In all of them,shamelessly expecting you to work extra hours, sometime 15+ is a norm. And when it comes to paying you for it, you are handed a nice package of politics and bullshit. I kind of admire people who somehow manage to use politics or whatever to actually chill and not work at all. At least they are less stressed. Not good programmers in India. yeah right. Pay them well. care about their life and create a reputation for your company to do that and see how they come to you.

Its not just the employer's fault really. I am now in a different country and nobody expects anyone to work after 6. because nobody will do that. We Indians accept it ourselves. A lot of them actually take pride in having no life and spending all the time in office. I hate them from the bottom of my heart.

what is a bodyshop? in the united states a body shop is where they repair cars

Ah it just means one of those huge outsourcing companies. Infosys,Wipro,TCS.

This makes me very curious about the culture around the Indian tech industry. Why does there appear to be no encouragement for exploration or experimentation? Further, why does there seem to be a strong emphasis on prestige? For example, I know full well how powerful and prestigious Google is, but that doesn't make me want to work there. I get the sense that that kind of attitude is not common in India.

Indian society has traditionally enforced collectivistic values.

From a young age, be they a male or female, one is conditioned to unwittingly absorb the various rules and responsibilities of a narrow lifestyle (get married at ~25; have babies; earn a living; stay married till death; have grandbabies) that there is little space and time for creative pursuits.

It is all thankfully changing now of course.

No. I think that is because most Indians are too low on resources to experiment with their life. This hence has evolved into a culture, where safe (prestigious) jobs (and now safe startups) are the only ones considered good.

I recently started a startup building a product which does not cater to the "hot" sectors like e-commerce and convincing people (we're B2B) to take a risk (for anything, even a free trial) is really hard. Also a innovative solution is generally looked with suspicion (I dont blame people for this, most shiny things here are frauds). I hope we can change this in the long run.

I wrote more on this (just yesterday) here: https://medium.com/@muktabh/why-is-a-pure-technology-startup...

>>Why does there appear to be no encouragement for exploration or experimentation?

Herd mentality. You are considered good if you are from childhood scoring good grades, ace all the entrance exams, enter a reputed institution, score a good job in campus placement. Any deviation from this is considered dangerous by the herd, to existence of the herd itself.

After all if one could get good by exploration and experimentation. All the effort the herd spent in being good guys since they were born, following all the rules of the society would be a colossal waste.

TLDR; What exactly do they expect if they openly advertise "B.Tech from premier institutes. IIT’s, REC’s, BITS, etc" as a job requirement for almost all of their engineering roles?

https://careers.snapdeal.com/careersection/ex/jobdetail.ftl

I am guessing, this is some kind of cheap publicity stunt.

I would have partly agreed with Snapdeal since finding good engineer has always been hard.

But this filtering by IITs/NITs/BITs shows - how out of touch they are. I know some of the most brilliant programmers in Bangalore/Pune and they are not from these "premier institutes". In fact, being from NIT Trichy myself, I have concluded that - most engineers from these colleges are risk averse and likely stick to a well trodden path of B.Tech + MBA or head to US for MS.

Anecdotally speaking most of my good IIT/NIT/BITs folks moved out of the country/went for MBAs after graduation.

The average ones got hired locally by multinationals like EBay / Amazon / Google etc..

So the ones who were actually applying to companies like Snapdeal etc.. were the 4 point someones who really have nothing but an "IIT degree" on their Resume.

I interviewed a couple of those for our startup. Honestly speaking, we found more interesting people via Employee referrals - even if they didn't graduate from these universities.

They took down the link. Appears to be a cheap publicity stunt indeed.

Snapdeal happens to be looking for people with 10+ years of experience in Big Data/Cloud , while in India 10 years ago, even product companies were hard to find, and I am not sure cloud focussed and big-data companies existed anywhere other than places like SV. In such a case it seems only reasonable that they are finding it hard to find the programmers they need in India.

They could consider opening development center in Bangalore or Hyderabad instead of US. If there are good enough developers in India for Google and Microsoft Snapdeal should not have problem finding the right people.

Neither does it have the ethics to hire good ones. Recently, someone created an account using my email address. Now I get all kinds of spam from that account. Although it's easy to fix that by blocking their domains, I went ahead and contacted them about the issue. The standard reply was, "someone will get back to you..". After a while I simply asked them to close the account, here's the reply:

------------

Greetings from Snapdeal!

We are writing to inform you that we are unable to close your snapdeal account,however if you wish to unsubscribe the same,kindly confirm accordingly.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience you have experienced.

In case of any further assistance or clarification on this issue, please reply back to this email.

Assuring you of our best services always,

Yours sincerely, Team Snapdeal

--------

What the hell does "unable to close" mean. Account killer rightly calls them "deeply blacklisted" https://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-snapdeal-account

Fortunately, I have the time and resources to legally force them to close my account. I never agreed to their terms or privacy policy, yet it's been shoved down my throat. This is not an isolated incident though. I know numerous people who had bad experiences shopping with them. You often don't get your refund easily if the product is defective. I can imagine that a company with such a smug attitude towards customers would be a class A shitty employer.

10 years experience with big data and cloud? That doesn't really say much about the quality of a coder.

These arbitrary metrics are pretty pointless IMHO. You can learn what you need to generally in around 1-3 years. Someone with 10 years experience could easily have been doing a job that gave them about 1 year's worth of experience but for 10 years, rather than having 10 years of varied experience.

I'm a bit out of touch. How are the salaries for software developers in India these days? A few years ago it was pathetic. Could be a factor, though.

Sometimes I really feel like going back to India and starting a development bootcamp in my hometown of Chandigarh. Reading articles like these brings me a few steps closer to actualising that desire.

relative to inflation, hasn't increased much. also, fine if you are single but once you have a family with kids, you feel the pinch even if you are with one of the big ones. The biggest issue for me is the time. Do politics, become PM and then chill all you want. As a techie, you will not have much time for family. Also, as a techie you still hit the ceiling very soon. If you are happy with the job abroad, stay there. Its not as rosy in India as the media somehow shows you.

I left India 3 years back and from what I gather, salaries at reasonably good places have pretty much doubled and in few places tripled. Am not even talking about Google/Fb.

I agree, but you also have to consider the crazy inflation rate there. Not to mention cost of housing and no decent public infrastructure. You need a lot of money just to get a reasonable standard of living there.

These start ups don't get the talent they need, because they purposefully don't hire the talent they need. Atleast three times in the past I've had recruiters tell me these yet to be named start up's can't hire me because they hire from the IIT's only. In short don't bother to apply if you don't belong to our self congratulatory crowd. One time I was told this in an onsite interview, I had to tell them on their face if such was the case they need to tell me before hand, instead of wasting my time having me travel to their place.

And the interview methods are so badly broken, you are only likely to hire mugpots who memorize math theorems and repeat them in interviews. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying algorithm knowledge isn't important, but these people aren't test your algorithm skills, they are testing your skills to repeat the algorithms you memorized. Honestly I don't know of any serious math problem worth solving can be solved in minutes, unless you already know about it(Or you are Terrence Tao or Gregori Perelman). Which in case your are not testing problem solving skills, you are testing how many problem solution sets the candidate has memorized.

Now guess how people get around these interviews. Most people who ace these interviews are from so called elite colleges nearly spend all the time in the day on interview forums. Instead of actually working. And since they spend so much time there, they feel obligated to use that effort in switching jobs more often for better pay. This leads to a big crowd of people who abandon projects mid way only to hop from one company to another. All the while day productivity at offices being very low.

Now if you are hiring such people why should you complain? You are getting exactly what you wanted.

Hire for productivity and for people's commitment to make your projects and company successful. The results will follow.

other requirements: 10 year plus experience with Deep Learning and Azure DocumentDB

This somehow reminds me of how a recruiter tried to recruit Guido Van Rossum for a Python job.

Has deep learning been around for 10 years ?

Also 10 years of practical use of any quantum programming languages. Also 10 years of experience of using all mainstream frameworks that will be released in 5 years.

theoretically yes, practically only experimental very little.

Investors should first hire a bunch of auditors and financial analysts before engineers to go through their books of accounts. All their books are cooked.

How come foreign companies seem to find the ones they need? You never hear about a lack of Indian talent. Never have experienced it. I have always been able to find knowledgeable indian programmers to work with remotely.

I think there's a lot of talent in india. Just need to search deep enough.

Best talent in India is to be found in USA.

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