beachgeek

This is exactly right!

Its excessive regulations and crazy labor laws that stop people from building factories in much of the US. I am mostly leftist on much of my view and I'm sure people here will downvote me, but unions have screwed workers.

People in the US can continue saying these are sucky jobs etc, but every Chinese person I've met who's worked at these factories has claimed they've enjoyed the experience. Although the ones I met said they did it while putting themselves through school etc.

I'm from India. Abdus Salam was MY hero while growing up in the 80s. I kind of understand the weird religio-politics in Pakistan, which seems to have led to Dr.Salam being marginalized.

I'm starting to see where you are coming from, but I really think its OK to celebrate this girl's success and recognition.

It does seem like they are over doing it a bit. But this is a country with a serious shortage of real heroes.

If other Pakistani kids are motivated and inspired by her life I think its worth the renaming, adulation etc.

Cool article. Two issues though: 1. The author assumes America's decline is a done deal. But anything can happen. 2. All three of the regional powers mentioned (India, China and Russia) have developed extensive trade links in the last 10 years or so. Yeah they may still decide to flex their military muscles but generally you don't fight with someone you're doing business with.

I think there will be heated arguments about natural resources, but I just can't see India, China or Russia going to war over them in this day and age.

There are tons of semi-technical job positions. Its very important though to get a good grounding in CS. My recommendation would be to either complete your degree if you're close to it or get a strong minor as someone else said.

My story: I did a BS in CS from a pretty strong tech school. My goal upon graduation was to hack the UNIX kernel. This was no easy feat in the early 90s, so I took a job as a sysadmin upon graduation. When I finally got a chance to kernel hack in 1995 I found I hated being in front of a monitor for 8-10 hours at a time. Even though I loved contributing to open source/Linux etc in my spare time. Eventually ended up in technical sales/PM. Still dive into code once in a while, but couldn't be happier with the way its turned out.

Although I still complain once in a while, just because :-)

Good luck with any path you decide to take.

The risk you took makes everything else seem very mundane in comparison.

Great article, but what an awesome last name!

I would think of Robin Li of Baidu as the #1 Chinese tech entrepreneur. Why? Because he was successful in China. Also he had the vision to figure out where the Internet would go in China + the cajones to execute on it.

I know of the folks you have mentioned however they gained success in US. There have been lots of successful Indian-American tech entrepreneurs as well.

I WANT successful tech entrepreneurs to come out of India. I want young Indian techies to contribute towards the upliftment of India instead of working for US. No offense towards native-born Caucasian Americans.

I'm just puzzled its taking so long especially when it seems conditions are so ripe in India for tech startups. So I can only imagine its a cultural thing.

Of course its anecdotal. The original article from jplarson that we are all responding to is also highly anecdotal.

But you have a good point about the OP's hire. I'm also very glad to hear youngsters are starting to do their own thing. :-)

OK. If you look at the growth amongst Internet users in India between, say 2009 and estimates for 2011, it resembles the growth amongst Internet users in US in the late 90s. US had 120M Internet users around the time of the Web 1.0 boom.

Mobile usage is even higher as you know so it seems like mobile app startups could do really well. If the growth is happening in small towns/rural areas even better, no SV company is going to want to spend time in Gummmidipoondi to understand their target customer. I don't know if cultural variation is really an issue: look at iPad for instance, even a non-English speaker has a finger with which they can tap on the screen.

I've heard horror stories about red-tape, corrupt officials and so on from friends. But every time I've dealt with GOI officials they've been extremely helpful. Maybe I just got lucky.

You'll still need to figure out how to spec your project.

Otherwise in your next iteration you'll still have an inefficient poorly coded app, only you would have spent 3X times more money getting there.

Except that he won't. There seems to be a strong societal and cultural pressure working against people that want to go into business for themselves.

My Dad thinks I'm a bonehead for spending my time at startups and such even though I've tried explaining how working at a large corporation can suck your soul out. I'm pretty sure its not just my Dad and immediate family.

I think his point was that Chinese startups have the advantage of serving a large internal market of Mandarin speakers, while Indian startups need to compete in the English speaking world.

On that note I have a question for smg. I have not been able to figure out why there are so few Indian tech startups serving the Indian market. I can only think of naukri and makemytrip. Do you know why? I read somewhere that there are 120M Internet users in India now, up from 80M two years ago. Do you think it now makes sense for Indian web startups?

I'm not familiar with mobile startups in India though, so maybe there are a lot of those.

At the big company where I work they're actively getting rid of their US-based employees and hiring in India and China. My employer isn't one of the ones I mentioned above. But I know from friends working there, that this is the case there as well.

I think there are a number of reasons for this.

1. Many engineers just aren't interested in the old fogey US tech companies. Do you think a smart kid out of a US college would be more interested in working at Google/Facebook or at Cisco/Microsoft? As a result they have a tough time hiring. In India, people actually LIKE working for the man at big giant companies. It is a status symbol. So its a lot easier to pick up good talent there even if the company is regarded as a has-been in Silicon Valley.

2. At some point in a tech company's lifespan, decisions seem to be made purely for financial/cost-saving reasons instead of for product/customer reasons. This is usually the point at which good engineers start leaving the company because they realize the bean counters are running things. This is also when these companies start expanding their India ops. Word gets around, and hence this is somewhat co-related to point #1.

3. Empire building: For some weird reason, engineering managers love having a lot of reports. Its reasonably cheap and easy to staff up in India and China, which means an engineering manager at some loser company in the US can get to brag that he (its always a he) has 100 engineers reporting to him.

Agree that communication (or lack thereof) is a key issue. That can be worked out but having 11PM conference calls or combined hacking sessions stretching to 2-3 AM gets old very quickly.

Another is the fact that the culture within a lot of contract shops isn't exactly innovation-driven. I really don't understand how you could get an engineer/coder passionate enough to be interested in some stranger's project.

Net net I agree with the author: you can still make a career out of tech. The doomsayers from ~10 years ago who predicted the end of the US programmer were wrong. I don't think however that big companies (Cisco/Microsoft: any company with a big India development center) will ever hire legions of US programmers again though. That train has long since left the station.

You should consider moving back. I think its a lot easier to find tech gigs when you are based here.

Are you in the SFBA?

The very first startup I was in (as an early employee) went IPO in the late 90s. My next startup (where I was a founder) crashed and burned in the tech bust that followed. The crash was beyond my control, however failure was incredibly hard to deal with for the reason you mentioned.

I did the obvious thing, got a real job, saved cash etc. Things have obviously changed dramatically since then in terms of ease of starting one's own project, so I've been plugging away at mine for a while.

I have to admit though that I do find myself thinking like "Bob" sometimes because I want desperately to avoid another f-up. I've gotten around it by having a key team of advisers/mentors that have done startups successfully. I challenge their opinions sometimes, but generally listen to what they say.

Its also very easy to over-analyze something until you don't know what's up or down.

Me too, all of the above. How did you get over it?

This has been a great discussion all. Being a tech guy myself, I agree with the majority of you. Its pointless working oneself (to death?) for someone else like we do, especially when the end result isn't even cast in stone.

But every time I think my job sucks, its too hard, my boss sucks etc, I think of this guy. I took this pic in India when they were laying a road near where I live. It was 100F and 100% humidity. The guy in the picture was carrying hot rocks and tar in a metal pan and spreading them across the road:

http://i624.photobucket.com/albums/tt328/hmbsandman/carrying...

In general, I am thankful and immensely grateful. If you are reading this you should be as well.

Just once? You got lucky.

This is unreal. If the employees weren't "adding as much value" why not just fire them? California is an at-will employment state anyway.

Well even robots need some form of human supervision.

I remember reading a comment from Steve Jobs to Obama that he would never build a factory in the US due to overly burdensome regulations and the like.

When the dollar started collapsing around 2008, I asked some friends who ran operations for the big manufacturing companies as to why they wouldn't bring the jobs back stateside. It made intuitive sense to me: wages rising in China, cheaper dollar, higher fuel costs. Not to mention its always harder to run things when your employees are half a world away.

The universal reaction was no way they'd bring manufacturing jobs back. Reasons: 1. Don't want to deal with unions. 2. Don't want to deal with hidden costs like healthcare etc. 3. Too many regulations. 4. Just too hard to scale up or down. Apparently in China if you need to scale up your factory, you send a bus into the countryside to pick up villagers. Train them for 3 weeks and bam you have a factory worker. Who's living in your factory dorm, so they're available for over-time etc.

It sounded insane actually, I can't imagine any normal person wanting to work like this.

But its great if you are running a factory.

I am speechless. This has been the story of my life, and I am stunned that you know exactly whats going on.

Great point. I'm definitely going to need some funding to make money. The only thing consulting will buy me is additional time to market the site/hack and get more users.

Funny, that's what my wife said too. I noticed from your other post that's what you do. Are you open to a phone call? :-)

Sounds like you don't want to join the Turkish army then...

Wait, you need to take a prostrate exam to join the Turkish Army? WTH?

I had an interview back in 2009 where the CTO of the startup asked me a question, I answered it, after which he very confidently corrected me with the wrong answer(!)

Needless to say I didn't join them. The startup also went belly up about 6 months after I interviewed there. How do guys like this get funded?

The OP's question got me thinking about the expense/cost breakdown. I had calculated this earlier but figured I'd share the numbers in case its of any help.

For my project, I bought a new server ~3 years ago which I used for development and hosted from home for my prototypes etc. I paid around 1K for it.

I'm finally ready, so I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 vs. hosting. Two months ago I also bought a switch(new) and a server off Craigslist: total cost $550.

My provider has a bandwidth cap, like most. Making certain assumptions about the amount of b/w each user is going to consume etc, I believe I can support 3M users/month off my provider for a little more than $200/mo before I am upgraded to the next b/w tier.

For the same amount of CPU/bandwidth etc, making the same assumptions about users I'd pay ~$1K/mo on Amazon EC2. But I'd be able to support around 100K users/mo. Yes I know this is a huge number but its less than 3M.

Which is why I'm not going the cloud route. Plus in the worst case I can sell or donate my servers for a tax write-off.

I'd love to hear from others as well :)