luckystrike

  For the average person, arithmetic is sufficient but for an advanced major, 
  giving them problems is crushing (I speak from personal experience).

I was also startled a bit by the following statement in the article:

  Math homework in India consists of math problems that students work through, as opposed to the United States,
  where homework is heavy on reading about math topics in a textbook.

  For some reason, American kids seem to be willing to put in the work with athletics, 
  but not put it in with the one subject that’s going to matter more to their lives than any other activity.

In India, kids are taught to be respectful to elders/seniors, and it is often taken to an extreme, and one is not encouraged to present a different point of view to them most of the times. You can also add to this mix the earlier generation's 'yes-sir-ism' to Britishers and people in power, and it would give you an idea why most Indians you have worked with, do not tend to speak up much.

I have commented about this earlier on HN, things are changing and changing fast here. The next generation of Indians, is far more open, direct and confident. Globalisation after 1991 and more exposure to 'western' ideas, has had a very positive effect, both economically and culturally.

Fog Creek Software tried to model itself on this company, but as Joel pointed out, it did not really work out 'that' well.

  I wouldn't even recommend going into business with a friend.

  So I'd guess the conclusion is that olympic medals have nothing to do with population size or money.
  Instead it has everything to do with if the country cares or not. India clearly doesn't.

But money does matter a lot. Countries who are doing well in global sports arena, either have a very strong government sponsored program (e.g. China) or solid private backing (USA?). It does take a lot of investment to churn out superstar sport-persons.

Till now sports was not on the highest priority list here, and add to that pains of a huge developing nation, the state sponsored program is just for namesake. Interestingly the first individual gold medal winner (in shooting) for India, comes from a very affluent family, and even has his own private shooting range.

Once more money, and more 'focus' comes in, things would definitely change.

  But it wasn't an overnight eureka, and it wasn't intentional. I didn't just walk out of high school, pick up a Ruby book, 
  meet Tom and PJ, then launch the site GitHub.
  Before GitHub came, in chronological order, Spyc, Ozimodo, my ozmm.org tumblelog, ftpd.rb, 
  Choice, Err the Blog, acts_as_textiled, Cheat!, acts_as_cached, Mofo, Subtlety,  
  cache_fu, Sexy Migrations, Gibberish, ginx_config_generator, fixture scenarios builder, Sake, Ambition, and Facebox.

  Let me tell you how a CS student prepares for exam,
   Variables is 20 marks, Pointers are 50 marks and Arrays are 40 marks, Lets just study Pointers and Arrays(you get the point right). 
  This is pretty much the case everywhere in India.

And as far not giving your best (or getting the best) when you are working for $5 an hour (its great we have currency exchange rates!), is also not true as well. I know plenty of people who give/gave their best, just because they liked it. I love programming and believe i churned out good stuff, when i was earning that much. And there are plenty of others like me.

So does that "pretty much" means, everyone does great work, no it doesn't.

It is never wise to trust and go by any blanket generalization. I am afraid the author raised very valid points, but at the end made this blanket statement:

  So what is the solution?
  Don’t outsource. Seriously.

  If your work is very monotonous and does not demand high quality, outsource.
  If you want a very good software product and if it the flagship product of your company, never ever outsource.
  You are doomed otherwise.

1. Outsource wisely. If consider yourself a hacker, and are in early stages of developing your product/startup idea, then outsourcing is definitely not for you.

2. If your work is not well specified and not well thought out, cross location development would make it even more harder to come up with something special.

3. Good programmers are not easy to find anywhere. If you are looking to outsource, and want a good team, please be ready to put in the hard yards. Negotiate, and select your team.

4. If even if you have the right team 'skills wise', please give this 'relationship' a little bit of time as well. :-). Developing a good working relationship across geographies is not easy. So, if you are looking for a quick solution in a short time frame (2-3 months), your odds of not getting what you really want, are higher.

Previous related discussion threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=217858

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233145

   they've still not sorted their caste system

2. Related to point 1, what is the 'essence' of the site? As in what kind of posts are allowed/not allowed, comment etiquette, is there any moderation? (Right now i see 'Bomb' blasts in India' as the top link. Incorrect headline, and and conveyed an entirely wrong message to me at least.)

3. For some reason the create login page didn't give me focus on the text boxes. (Firefox 2.0.0.16)

4. I was on a profile page, but did not get automatically logged on after creating the account.

The good part is you prefer the minimal and simplistic design. Good luck with your venture!

p.s. There was a 'pg' id on the site as well. :-)

But as of today, things are changing, and i guess the other points really do not apply as much as probably they might have 20 years back.

Thankfully, things changed from 1991 onwards, from what we call here as 'economic liberalization' (loosening of government controls and restrictions). Add to that more exposure/integration with the 'west' through media/internet and now the attitudes towards business/learning/other activities are changing.

The change will take time, and it's just my guess that the next generation that really doesn't have to worry about the basic issues of life as much would be far more risk taking, and would be doing more game changing things, relative to what's being done today.

I remember one of PG's essay where he mentioned his reasons of why some of the other places cannot replicate a 'Silicon Valley'. If i remember correctly, his take on Bangalore/India was that inherently since the country is still poor, it would be very difficult for it replicate the valley culture at this point at least. (He used an example of uneven steps on a railway station in that essay). His reasoning is not wide off the mark.

But as i said, we are very optimistic, things are gonna get way better, way sooner.

http://www.httpfuse.com/index.jsp

In terms of career/work etc, i really do not think one needs to worry much or brood over past decisions, we all got plenty of time (hopefully) to work everything out as we want it to.

This quote sums up a lot of things nicely:

  The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. -- Elbert Hubbard

I happen to know the Indian folks whom the author got on board his firm. They actually are 'very' good, and i guess that is the primary reason why the author is so happy at having it all figured out.

The point that is a bit off the mark in the article is:

  Because of the fairly fluid and competitive labor market in the IT world in India right now, 
  many Indian employers don’t allow their developers to blog or make contributions to open-source, 
  for fear of losing them to competitors who might contact them directly

Most bloggers i know, write because they are genuinely interested in an activity/thought/event. If someone writes about something they are not really interested in (or knowledgeable about), it would be plainly visible. (One of the exceptions i can think of are people who write pure fiction like short stories on their blog ala writers.)

  Even Bill Gates is struggling with this one. He built a huge r&d center in bejing a few years back and he's deeply regretting it now.

The first key hurdle is obviously to find the right company. RFI's and RFP's have been around long, and a very intelligent reply to them does not necessarily imply you would get the right set of developers to work for your project. A startup typically would not be a very 'big' account for most of the companies, and your probability of landing up with very good 'programming' talent is minimal. (I guess good programmers are in short supply at most places). At the end of the day, the developers on your project is what really matters.

Assuming, you are smart (and lucky) enough to have selected the right set of people for your offshored development project, still getting this relationship working across geographies, takes a bit of time. A fast and nimble startup, probably just does not have the luxury of time, assuming the product would change rapidly based on user feedback/market/competitor situation. (unless it was freakishly conceptualized in a brilliant way from the start itself)

In all, unless you have a relatively simple product in technical terms or a very well specified one, and have the luxury of time with you, only then look at outsourcing your development work.

One line decision maker: If you consider yourself a hacker, do not outsource your (initial) development. It's not for you, and high chance you would be left disappointed.

  Be transparent. Share your work constantly. Solicit feedback. Appreciate critiques. Let other people point out your mistakes.

But sometimes making the decision of 'when' to open source your code, does also have to take in to account the 'community acceptance' factor. If the code is of not that great a quality, it can put off potential key contributors, and actually wrongly tag that product with a hard to get rid of 'below average' kind of label.

Of course, once its out, or if someone is contributing to an existing open source project, throwing 'code-bombs' isn't a great idea at all.

  I still think that *one* of the finest tests ...

If a person is good (and quick) at understanding someone else's code, it is a good indication of him/her being blessed with a good analytical mind, and experience/habit of delving in to code.

Of course, this ability helps when working in a team, but more importantly it is required to understand the existing solutions and their drawbacks/advantages. e.g. If one intends to write a web server or a new VM for a language, it would be helpful to refer and understand the existing open solutions, before starting out.

In short, the ability to understand someone else's code quickly is a definite pointer of a good potential programming ability. Getting a person to write code is the best test most times, but the ability to adapt and learn new language/technology faster is governed highly by ability to read code.

  I refuse to give up on the idea, and I know that the window of opportunity is only a few months.
  I am considering outsourcing the development to India, so I can get it to a releasable state.

You have got a lot of good suggestions on the way forward from here. I would also endorse you seeking out the Django experts on this forum who have offered help. At the bare minimum, they can review the code and tell you where exactly you are and how much more effort it would take to make a beta release.

Alongside, you can get some legal advice on getting out of this partnership with the least possible damage to you and your ethics.

Learning to code obviously would be helpful, and it really ain't that difficult.

Don't worry about this temporary setback, just get back up and give it a shot again. Being in the medical field, am sure you would have seen people fighting and coming out strong from far more difficult situations.

Good Luck.

  This is an over-rated post telling us about a problem that only exists in the ignorant. 
  It's cut from the same cloth as all the misinformed "Twitter's Dropping Rails!" posts 
  and I'd expect better from the voters on HN.

I am an active user of Ruby, and agree with you that the author is making over generalized sweeping statements such as: "yet it's the standard, recommended practice in the Rails community, because it makes it easy to "guarantee" behaviour in a given environment"

There is no silver bullet for software distribution in any particular language. One has to be smart and pragmatic enough to weigh in the pros and cons of static linking/vendoring in their particular case, and then take a wise decision on it.

It might be better if your core thinking and goals, match to some extent with your probable co-founder.

Having said that, the 'skill set' of the person should compliment yours, so that as a team you are able to achieve more.

I think it's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees."

I guess this is what has put off a lot of people, along with the reference to the caged lions, right at the start of the essay.

The key message (as i got it) from the essay was:

"one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live."

It is spot on, and i completely agree with it.

In the 'Cliff Notes', Paul summarizes it well, when he writes people are reacting to what they imagine he would be saying in the essay, but yes, i guess the essay intro could have been worded a bit better.

Little what i have read of Paul's essays, it doesn't look like he would be intentionally putting down "any" smart programmer, just based on where (s)he is working, and i would still stick to that opinion about him.