I also can't see how its changing, I've become rather cynical from having to deal with it constantly. I sure hope you're right, though.
We, also got burned by someone who accepted another offer and quit, a week after beginning work with us. Obviously, that guy--and whoever recommended him--are on our shitlist now. Word does get around hopefully.
> It's hard to argue they're wrong.
Except for the fact that in this very thread there seems to be quite a backlash against them. Seems to be very short-term and selfish thinking.
Eugenics. Thalidomide. Radium paint. Lead paint. Leaded gasoline. The list goes on.
It's quite easy to argue against taking shortcuts and eschewing rigor in favor of "results" if you know some history and have some perspective.
There is a huge amount of friction that eliminates if counterparty can be trusted vast majority of the time.
Our HR Department now calls new-hires every couple of days to keep them engaged so they don't take a job elsewhere. It sucks when you hire someone, plan things three months in advance, and.... they don't show up to the job without ever telling you they took a job somewhere else.
And yet nobody ever agrees to lower the 3 month notice period rule.
The industry wants 3 months, so their benches are warm, and they can handle the buffer better.
How thoroughly one side has won indicates how thoroughly the power is held. One could call it legal enslavement.
> The workers want no notice period.
Im my anecdotal experience nobody wants "no notice period"
If you don't take a job seriously at one company, why would I expect you to take a job seriously at my company?
If I offer you a job, how can I be sure you'll show up for it, and not just take the next offer that comes along? I can't. So you're no longer in consideration as soon as you tell me you're disloyal to your other company.
In some industries in America (especially media companies, but it's also common in high-end retail), if your boss hears that you're looking for another job, you're immediately fired. Sometimes it's even written into the contract, if you have one.
A job is a business. The loyalty is goes only as far what the company or the employee can offer.
Likewise a company can fire employee anytime as soon as that employee is not needed anymore or better employee come along.
Doesn't this go both ways? In this day and age in America, there's no loyalty going in either direction, employer or employee.
I think it's hard for most jobs, at least in my space (mobile software) to do much effective work when staying only for -let's say- 3 months at some company.
But mismanagement happens. The example you mention of being let go after just 3 months should be the exception, not the rule. I certainly never experienced something like that. Then again I like to work for big clients, feels to me more guaranteed they will still be in business tomorrow and me getting paid.
"Make game of that which makes as much of thee."
Some people steal; some might have even stole something from you. Doesn't mean you have to too, and I doubt most people are held back only by law/punishment.
Of course, once the candidate joins the company, regular interpersonal concepts between employees that involve loyalty and commitment can be pursued.
To all the people mentioning ethics - a company can and will fire people without any reason. I know a couple of people personally who can't sleep not knowing why they were fired. In 30 mins, they were walked out. That's incredibly unethical but for some reason, not giving advanced notice to your employer is considered unethical? Hypocrisy!
In a little over 25 years of experience, I've observed that the most competent developers I've worked with have been Indian. The most incompetent developers I've worked with have also been Indian. That doesn't say anything about Indians as a population, it's just that 90% of my coworkers, for the past two and a half decades, have been Indian.
There are some great developers here and plenty of crappy ones. And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
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edit: I'll also add here that a many of the best developers I've worked with are American as well.
Yes, and it's called selection bias. A given engineer leaving their country gets no better, but the selection bias that applies to engineers who do leave their country means they are better on average. The good engineers who don't leave for some reason (family or such) are just as good as if they had left, but the average engineer is weighed down by those who don't have the skill to leave.
>And some of the worst developers I've worked with are Americans in America.
I've encountered some horrible American developers as well. The difference, in my experience, is that they tend to cost the same as a good American developer and thus get replaced a lot faster.
There are a lot of extremely talented devs working in India; at Google, Microsoft and all the start ups in Banglore and Hyderabad, but unfortunately there are more people working in those IT industries and thus skews the perception.
A lot of my colleagues and ex colleagues either work or have worked in Infosys/Wipro/TCS at some point in their careers. And again, they didn't "magically" get worse or better when they left or joined my company (I'm in a product development company).
Wipro, Infy etc aren't able to hold quality senior technical talent because they cannot pay as much. The better senior developers leave to product development firms that pay better and have better quality work and work life balance, leaving behind newly joined junior developers who know less, but will accept what Infy/Wipro pays and work ungodly hours.
I've read that every 5 years the number of active developers doubles. That means that every 5 years 50% of the development workforce has little to no experience. In India, that 50% starter workforce is concentrated, sitting in the big consulting firms, developing their skills and getting better, and when and if they get better, they leave.
The real problem is that if you pay peanuts, you get... people willing to work for peanuts, until they can get a better job.
And that right there is the issue. Happens in Sri Lanka as well although to a lesser extent (smaller population). The companies that have been most prolific in outsourcing are the ones who are responsible for the current stereotyping of India's IT industry.
Those same companies are also the ones bidding with lowest costs in order to win more contracts. I submit virtusa as exhibit A where India and Sri Lanka are battling each other for contracts and India generally being able to offer lower rates.
Which then feeds back into how those projects actually get completed, and as per the quote and the article, it involves 18 hour workdays 6-7 days a week with poor compensation against 8 hour work days. And this ends up churning out humans who know their worth and know what jobs they can get now that they've got that first job on the CV, aka the foot through the door.
This then restarts the cycle where companies have to complete projects and keep bidding on new projects to maintain the hired workforce and on and on and lower and lower it goes.
This part of the industry has been a shit show for a while. I will be sad for the people who lose jobs. No one deserves that unless they were knowingly malicious. At the same time, the software industry has to mature, and I don't see how this business models will be sustained with such maturity.
Do you think the work in product development companies are any better? They just get paid more. Most of the US captives in India will never send their most important product line to India. It is just maintenance of a product line which will be phased out. Most of the big semiconductor companies, networking companies are like this. Most of these companies hire contractors from the companies that you mentioned. They would have some stupid 8-10 levels of interviews to show that they are doing some serious work. After joining it would be a miracle if you are working on some sensible code base.
In fact I have personally seen that some of the work which these service companies are genuinely good which the product companies will never get. Unfortunately it gets ruined by the horrible developers and management there.
This is unfortunate and, most of the time, true. I do wish we had better work coming here.
Still, in spite of some concerted efforts to change that...
For example, an Indian in India may not think twice before throwing their food wrapper on the road side, but would probably never do that when on holiday in London (if they did, society or police would reprimand them for it and correct their action).
Similarly in tech, certain things (esp. related to quality/code cleanliness etc) seem much more relaxed in India compared to elsewhere.
Is there a typo (or 2) in here somewhere?
Similar to saying "Look at them eyes" or "One of them developers will get to it eventually".
In your original sentence, you are trying to use "them" as an adjective to modify "incompetent developers," but "them" should only be used as a 3rd person plural pronoun. Using "them" as an adjective is not proper; your examples sound strange to native speakers, and is usually associated with vernacular English in general. Native speakers may assume this usage is due to poor knowledge of proper English, or possibly a regional (improper, but common) usage in the American South.
https://grammarstars.blogspot.com/2008/08/41-them-and-those-...
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/them
A couple of other examples: 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB33z9xoSw8&feature=youtu.be... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elUsB4y5RVk
There are plenty more examples on Google.
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I want to say I take your point. I wouldn't use this in formal writing, but as far as I can tell this is an accepted western way to emphasise something.
No, it isn't. Using "them" in the way you did makes you sound like a hillbilly.
Just some advice: it's wise to avoid using any words or usage listed in the dictionary as "dialect" unless you're very familiar with the particular dialect it's from. Likewise, you should be very careful with "informal" terms unless you've actually been introduced to them informally by someone who knows how they're used. There's a lot of cultural context that needs to be mastered with those, and you won't learn that from a book, let alone a dictionary.
*edit - I will add that the 2 youtube videos are not good examples to be learning english from...
At the very least this usage would cause the listener/reader to assume that English is not the speakers first language, or assume a lower level of education.
Not meaning this to be a discouragement, but hopefully, a help
Obviously no. But NRIs have an incentive to portray that image. Once you go out of the country, you have to now worry about your own interests. If you keep singing praises about your ex-countrymen they will outsource more work to India, and you the newly minted US passport holder, who has a job in the US will suffer. Or worse you might be on the path to receive a GC and may have to restart the process if you lose your job due to outsourcing.
Please note, everyone protects their own interests.
I love my Indian brothers and sisters, and think that the real offender in creating bad experiences with Indian devs are Indian businesses, which IMO have exploitative practices and emphasize over specialization. Even worse is the practice of requiring a 3 months notice to quit as a rule. There are 1 billion people in India, and I want the innovative, hard working, and kind among them to be welcomed to the US with open arms. I am deeply proud to have helped two highly talented young men get H1B visas and eventually green cards. They became great friends of mine and my family.
Sincerely, a white American guy who can't wait to travel to Maharashtra one day to visit Pune and Mumbai, and meet my friend's families.
That is because you dont pay them well, the good engineers who are being paid well work in MS, Amazon etc in India.
I also saw some incredibly good devs there but you get both.
All the problems mentioned here do exist and are real, but they're not the whole story. The management culture over there s a bit different. Managers tend not to want to be involved in anything technical. There is a 'yes' culture of not challenging requests. However there are plenty of exceptions to the 'rule'.
Negotiations are for freshers whose father's have been paying college fees and bills. The remainder can't afford to turn down a job for these reasons.
If what you are saying is true then you should have a chat with the person who hired them to see what is going on.
The poor salaries which I am talking about is Rs 2 lakhs for freshers who join IT consultancy services.
So more than your average CS engineering grad?
>>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer.
B.S.
Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.
The "throw enough cheap coders" at the problem will work really well, until it doesn't, and at that point you have nothing but an expensive mess that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
If you don't have a good foundation, you're screwing the project in the long run, and this is the result of every offshoring programming project I've witnessed.
The problem, I think, is that management draws conclusions about the quality of Indian engineers based on interactions with the ones working in the US, who by definition are the absolute best of the best. "Sanjay is one of our best engineers", the bean counter says, "and my God, there's _a billion_ of them back in India!"
I think that's probably true - the people who can claw their way through the H1B process are probably among the best India has to offer. I don't believe that that's entirely why management loves them, though. The fact that they work 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in crowded, noisy open offices without ever complaining since they're under constant fear of being fired at a moment's notice and being unable to find new work, coupled with the fact that they're capable software engineers, is why management loves them.
Disclaimer: LinkedIn Employee. Our Banglore team isn't noticably different skill wise than our SV team.
Basically, it's not (1) or (2), but instead (3): that these guys are master scammers, liars and confidence tricksters. They exaggerate without committing to anything and lull their customers into a false sense of security. They are THE slipperiest eels in the industry.
If you don't believe me, I encourage you to give them a try just once - it will probably convince you.
In that case any IT consultancy could fool those people. If a US consulting firm is chosen, how could anyone make the claim that they were chosen on merit?
I know quite a few "business-focused" people. It is not so easy to fool them even if IT is not their core competency. Businesses typically will include several protection clauses in the contract and set the legal jurisdiction to their own country. I don't believe it is easy to fool businesses for years on end. They would go out of business pretty quickly.
>They'll promise them the world at a fraction of the cost of competitors, and the business guys will present a healthy set of cost savings to their board. Once the customer is fully locked in, they will fail to deliver on a few of those promises. Then the excuses start. Then the timelines slip. Then, after many months of this charade, they might get fired. Then the customer might try another company. Then they go back to on-shoring their dev team.
Then data would show that those firms have no long term contracts or repeat business from previous clients. Does it?
If it's a US firm, then there can be financial and legal repercussions. Good luck going after a firm in India.
This isn't just an India thing. This is how government contracts work in the US too. The government contracts out to Lockheed Martin for a big IT project (used to anyway, LM got out of the business on the civilian side at least), LM hires the cheapest 'talent' they can find, loading projects 80/20 management/engineering, drag their feet for a few years, and eventually someone on the government side decides they're going to make their career by being the person who brings this project across the finish line. So they ignore or lie about the requirements being fulfilled and drag the steaming mess in-house, while LM hosts a champagne-drenched celebration. Contracting has fundamentally perverse incentives.
>Except the person on the US side who fought for and won the ability to outsource the project to save money is personally invested in success. He has decided this will make his career. So when it comes to fulfilling those contractual obligations, he will sign off on it, then bring it in house and try to quietly put together a team to fix the system to make it actually function.
Its hard to imagine the owner(s) of the company not being good with numbers here. Surely, such frauds will be found out eventually? In any case if a company has indeed hired such a dishonest person, I would hope they improve their hiring process and do some due diligence on their previous record to weed out such people in the future.
It's a systemic problem, a problem of corporate structure and incentives, and exactly the ecosystem where these kinds of contractors thrive.
If most of the firms that have outsourced have got really bad work from these big firms then why are they not suing for bad quality work? Why do they give bigger and bigger contracts? That shows the type of people in your management which you should take a hard look at before complaining about the quality of work of these big service companies.
Source: I have been on both sides. I have seen the internals of them doing business and it is a freaking mess.
On the other end of the market, there is a very talented workforce that commands a premium price that delivers world class products. You just need to know where to look. Most western tech decisions to use Offshoring/Outsourcing are based on the key belief that costs can be lowered. In a truly capitalist market, workers are also looking to extract their maximum worth (and upward mobility) and If you pay less, your workforce will bail at the first opportunity.
Additionally, no one wants to work for a project that is driven by a spec document that you authored and requires no design input from the local team
For internal Enterprise apps, for testing, for some other things - you need just basic developers who can understand problems and solve them.
Also - there's a lot of basic IT work and basic dev-ops-ish stuff that can be done.
So yes, if you try to build a hot new thing, for your hot new startup using Infosys, you're going to fail.
But if you have large company, and need some well-defined system for reviewing customer service inquiries ... well, if you manage the project correctly, Infosys might be a good choice. In fact, it may be your only choice because hiring devs in North America is very expensive.
I get this with people Accenture and the like too though. . .
E. Europe is considerably more expensive than India.