Median income in India is $3.6/day. It takes very little training to have someone do work for $10/day, which is a three-fold increase in income and a huge boost to standard-of-living. That's call center, data entry, etc.
From there, it takes a moderate amount of effort to train someone to churn out low-quality code. That brings income to perhaps $100/day, which is a very decent standard-of-living in a low cost-of-living area. That's maybe 2 years of bootcamp-level training and 4 years at a low-quality university.
Most of the talent pool in India (and many other developing countries) is shaped like a pyramid, where top-tier talent exists, but it's hard to find the needle in the haystack. Interviewing is far from a perfect process.
It's not a problem which is quickly solvable. The amount of top-tier talent can grow exponentially, but low-tier talent can grow just as quickly for many years -- India has over a billion people.
It's not clear it's even a bad thing. At the end of the day, the transitions from $1 => $10 => $100/day are a lot more important than $100 => $1000, since they provide for access to decent food, housing, and medicine. It's okay to prioritize growth at the bottom.
Without prioritizing the top at all, at some point, you do hit the middle income trap, but that's a much still better place to be than $3.6/day median income.
What has grown faster: the number of IIT seats or the number of "technical colleges" and bootcamps?
Manager no. 1 (HR) is a pushy, luxury SUV-driving, former IC who doesn't know anything about me or my work yet offers "advice".
Manager no. 2 (technical group) is a former IC who:
- Still plays at being a lead IC while also supposedly being an overworked manager
- Believes the world is orderly, the impact of work is entirely quantitative, and lacks theory of mind
- Believes he has a monopoly on good ideas
- Shoots down everyone else's ideas
- Refuses to concede any point or apologize in any context
Manager above them is a good guy, but all of his direct reports come across as a-holes.
I'm ready to bounce because:
- My coworkers don't value software engineering, curiosity, professional development, excellence, experience, aren't supportive in any sense, and not people I would socialize with... they're really boring. The ex team lead is a cool guy and one of the hardware integration people is my kind of properly socialized, hilarious troublemaker.
- On-call preventable fires happen often, sometimes in the AM
- "Too overworked" to do anything right the first time, so tech debt accumulates and there's no incentive to fix anything
- "Too overworked" and yet there's no possibility of new hires
- No one cares about the tech or language we have to use. Customers complain about it
- Nothing fun happens at work. Ever
Understanding when you are getting push back from an Indian team can be very difficult.
I've worked with people in India for 20+ years. Understanding how to read pushback and identifying issues early are skills you learn pretty quickly, but it is a good point.
As I said, there are awesome engineers there, and the key is to shape your hiring to the actual environment.
The hierarchy issue is humongous, though, even once you are really familiar with it. For me it is often just a blind spot for people who grew up in the US. I have many issues with US culture and the idolizing of titles, celebrities and rich people, but India is so often next level on this topic, coupled with a kind of acceptability of abusive behavior by the people higher up in the hierarchy.
Staying on top of this is both necessary _and an obligation_. You have a responsibility to the people you hire.
That's because a lot of the Indian consulting firms will take pretty much anyone off the street, put them through a 1-week "boot camp", and throw them at a project with the title of Senior Engineer*. As you said, there are plenty of talented engineers, but they're obscured by the sea of warm bodies whose only function is to put billable hours on an invoice.
* I haven't seen this firsthand, but it's what I've been told by Americans who have done management stints out there. It certainly seems consistent with the quality of work from some of the cheap job shops.
It’s just they are outnumbered 1000:1 by some of the worst engineers I’ve encountered.
That set is hired entirely for low cost area-under-the-curve reasons. It’s sad because clearly there is interest in the profession (at least, seemingly, until their parents start asking why they aren’t VPs yet) but somehow companies and the educational system fail them.
For the most part India “worked” because it was so cheap you could hire an army of people and a crazy number of managers to make those people minimally productive. There is an art to that but it has enormous costs on the non-mediocre teams that have to burn tons of energy constantly course-correcting the remote teams and push back constantly on code quality issues.
I’ve worked for companies with massive india teams. Consistently they are pretty bad.
The companies who do it right are doing it to find talent, not cut costs, and ruthlessly filter and winnow the WITCH fodder until they get teams that are functional. But you have to be ruthless on quality and nepotism.