I think that this is a good example of how racism, conscious and unconscious is making us worse at predicting the future. Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. But there wasn't actually strong evidence that Indians were less good at doing cutting edge research.
This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. In a way, they have to re-invent the wheel. In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity.
Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India.
>Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans.
As someone who grew up in America during that time, this is the exact opposite that I was told by the media and teachers. We were taught that Indians were just as effective (if not more) than people working in the US and that we shouldn't select jobs that will be outsourced in the future (like programming). In fact computer science enrollment in many colleges were at an all-time low during that time because of outsourcing fear.
So I completely disagree with your generalization that many Americans thought Indians were worse at programming.
Yeah 2002-2005 or so the conventional wisdom is that there wouldn't be software written in America anymore -- that companies were going to beat a path to Asia just like they'd done in textiles and furniture.
Economists explained that software is a highly "tradeable good" and Asia -- especially India -- was filled with millions of highly educated cheap programmers.
Given that the number of people employed in software in America has remained constant since 2000, and that wages are about where they were then too, I think the evidence is that there has been a substantial "pressure release valve" effect going on. So while the most dire predictions of the 2000s haven't come true, it's also true that the confident optimism of the 1990s ill advised.
I would say that software development has been good to me so far as a career, but I still think I would hesitate to encourage a young person in America to pursue it.
> I would say that software development has been good to me so far as a career, but I still think I would hesitate to encourage a young person in America to pursue it.
This is absolutely terrible advice. Please do not ruin some young American's life with this advice. Technology seems to be one are where the demand seems to always outstrip supply, and a person trained in Computer Science would be capable of learning new skills and advancing rapidly in the tech industry.
I think that software is a unique industry in that it is a "self growing" industry. Unlike other industries, in which the more workers there are, the lower the pay, I think with software developers the opposite is true. I believe that the more software developers there are, the more things will be automated, and therefore the demand for software will grow with the supply.
Furthermore, since it the complexity of software grows exponentially rather than linearly, I believe that as the number of software developers grows linearly, the demand will grow exponentially ;).
San Francisco seems to be the only place where that holds true, and I say that not having tried to get a job there. The average length of time for engineers I know of trying to get a new job is 3-4 months. Any one of us could easily be a shit engineer but its in the 10s of people now. While that's better than a lot of industries now, that doesn't mean that demand outstripped supply. Its just at an ok point. If demand was much higher you'd see salaries rising rapidly at least and I know of few companies that are willing to give significant raises to keep someone vs hiring someone new. Why else is there advice to job hop so frequently to increase your salary?
Giving raises to existing employees is not related to demand and supply at all, but to other institutional reasons. Managers have more freedom to give offer higher salaries to attract good talent, than they have to offer super high raises, which can also cause discord among teams unless you offer raises to everyone, which may be more money than the manager can afford.
Of course it depends on the market, but I disagree that is just SF. Seattle, NYC, SoCal (LA, San Diego etc.), Boston, Austin all have a thriving tech sector, although Bay Area still far outstrips them in demand and compensation.
Those other factors due exist for preventing raises to other employees. The claim, however, was that demand was _far_ exceeding supply. When that happens with any good people start hoarding the resource and going out of their way to maintain their existing supply. If there was truly that great a difference between the demand for software devs and the supply of them, we'd see companies doing their best to keep their employees, at least on average. Instead we're in a situation. Where companies are engaging in some sort of brinkmanship with their employees to see if they'll accept the lack of compensation increase, and they dont appear to care if they are loosing employees due to it.
I'm a bit of an oddity in that I took summer / nighttime college courses in 1995, when I was 10, then had a job programming right during the dot com bust. Everyone said that even if tech recovered it would probably all go to India so when I entered full-time university I went so far as to study structural engineering, something I didn't think would be easy to outsource.
When I transitioned back to software I was actually shocked at how big of a skill difference the median Indian and American / Canadian actually had. The top 1% between the two cultures is similar, but the median Indian, circa 2009 when I last interacted with them, was far behind.
Maybe academia was painting a different picture than the corporate side. In my experience (inside the corporate side of things), the Indian-firm's quality was objectively so much worse than the American-firm's quality that it was laughable to even consider them on important projects.
This mirrors my experience. When I enrolled in a CS masters in 2006, I was repeatedly questioned why I would enter the field when all those jobs would be going to India.
Around that time I was one of 6000 or so laid off and the work sent offshore, at a financial services company. Anyone who'd lived and worked in that period will have seen their or their friends or colleague's jobs at risk for the same.
Exactly for the last 20 years it seems (through ignorance) many non-programmers associate a programmer (even in America) with automatically being Indian.
>> By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers.
1. IBM offices and most multinationals do pay competitive salary in India. We have the same problem with retaining talent in India that we have in US. Its hard to retain good programmers.
2.Thanks to US immigration system, you do find a lot of folks with deep experience working for firms in US for years return back to India. They carry with them the best practices that they learnt in US. Some of these people also attend US universities.
3. At least the big fives (I don't know about IBM) have consistent coding and code review standards across geographies and use similar frameworks, deployment and monitoring tool chains. So there is not as big of an impact as you think on coding standards across geographies, be it Dublin, Sydney or Bangalore. It usually tends to be the same.
But those policies derived from American companies. Say Indian Programmers takes those policies and apply them, will they become the next trend setters in the entire IT industry or will smaller engineering companies continue to set the trends and standards in the USA?
I'm still banking on American workers to prove these companies wrong via innovation from within our borders, boycotting software companies who offshore American innovation and unionize or something to that effect to protect American workers here.
My thoughts are not about race, creed, religion or anything against India or Indian Programmers, it's about protecting American workers for American families here and in the future.
It's not racism, it's the fact that India's tech sector came up so quickly, there were so many engineers, probably not all with the same level of training, that lots of code probably was crap. Not because Indians can't code, but because the industry wasn't as developed as elsewhere. Obviously that can change over time, and it has.
> This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
Corporations pay people what they'll accept. Since many Indians are essentially doing salary arbitrage between what they'd make in India and the US, they'll accept less. Also, cost of living in India is much lower.
Literally none of what you've explained here is a result of racism, just economics.
Just a thought about the "huge" salary difference. Are you taking the Purchasing Power Parity(PPP) into account? I know that PPP is too macro for comparing very specific cases but it does steer the discussion in the right direction.
Let's say, an engineer's monthly salary is $10,000 in the US and he can afford X level of arbitrary "comforts in life". To be able to afford the same X level of arbitrary "comforts of life" in India, he'd need just $3000 - $3500.
These numbers are for illustration purposes only. Actuals will vary. of course.
No amount of salary will give you clean air and tidy streets. Some people will just prefer that as part of their package. But I guess few months / years of experience won't hurt westerners.
When you talk about PPP, keep in mind to factor in housing and other modern lifestyle conveniences. These are very very expensive if you price it as a percentage of your salary. Even in the Bay Area, a Home is still 5-6X annual income of a typical software engineer. In India, it is more like 10-15X.
To give some idea of the market - people are starting to count stock options as future income in order to qualify for home purchases. The median home price that sold recently in San Jose is close to a million dollars.
5-6X will not get you a nice house in a nice area. It will just get you a small house. In San Jose, the cheapest ones I'm seeing are in the 500-600K range - smaller than 1000 sq ft.
as a counter to that, in third world countries, rent is often a way better deal all round, so if you're not hung up on home ownership, you can get by pretty well for less.
This is most certainly not true. I don't deny there will be shitty houses for a drop-dead rents, but you can also get a fairly luxurious rentals in Mumbai and Bangalore, at least (I don't have personal experience with other cities).
Companies try to do that in America where they justify your income based on the fact you live in an area where you have high PPP. (Urbana,IL vs Palo ALto,CA)
That doesn't make it right to do or that this behavior will get the high quality talent pool every company says they will hire. So why do you think that it will work in this case?
It's not like the stereotype is entirely fabricated. This was created by how Indian workers were used by corporations -- to cut labor costs without much regard to the quality of work. If they're doing the same thing in their Indian offices, it's not going to do them any good in the long run.
I've actually worked with and managed international teams for a number of major consultancy companies and outside of silicon valley I don't see much difference in skillsets and proficiency between the US, Europe and India.
That surprises me, given you say you've been working with major consultancies.
I've been working with and leading international teams for almost 10 years now, mainly with teams in India.
I see a huge gap between skillset and proficiency between the US, Europe and India. But I must qualify this - I've most been working with some of the large outsourcing companies in India, Capgemini, Infosys and Cognizant, and these companies are where you find unbelievably bad coders. I often literally have to interview 20+ candidates before I find anyone even half decent, and even then, the level is much less than a candidate with similar time-served from Europe or the US.
This shouldn't be surprising if you see how such companies run development projects when left to their own devices; they will staff a project with 5-10x more devs than would be used elsewhere, and everyone works on an unimaginably narrow part of the project - someone might literally do nothing but write maps for the ORM, another person might do nothing but edit config files. It's madness.
I have however had excellent experiences with Indian devs on the rare occasions where I've been permitted to use small, development-focused businesses. Excellent developers absolutely exist in India - but they are as rare as hens' teeth the big body shops.
I like that you're upfront and detailed about your experiences and do not generalize. Much appreciated.
I should tell you that these big body shops have a reputation for hiring really bad programmers, basically because they have "processes" that they use to turn these people into problem solvers in very specific domains. More often than not, that is what their clients want as well: human eyes on a system designed and written by someone else. When in college, these were known as "bus" companies, because they would give job offers to a busload of students, but all the offers were pitiful and the work horrible.
Just like you noticed, if you want to see real talent, look elsewhere.
Thank you. This always bothered me as someone with Indian background. It seems like some programmer make assumptions about my code and I have to do a lot more to gain acceptance in some companies/teams.
But on other hand, I have a theory. Indian firms write a lot more code. Their code quality distribution probably is same as any other group but since there is more code, a large percentage of overall bad code comes from India.
It is kind of like some teams in a large organization write a lot of code but they are the one with the most bugs and they get punished. Another team that rarely has bugs but they don't write as much as code as others and are rewarded for introducing least number of bugs in production.
I will chip in for what I feel about the supposedly bad code quality problem. Most of the US firms which outsources to India is looking for work to be done in an unreasonable amount of time. To make my point clear, if a story takes 8 points, it should be done in India for 3 points and at 1/4 the cost & hence. Both firms (outsourcer & outsourcee) are to be blamed for this (to look good on their Q4 reports). Not the programmer.
I guess that's because we get more Indian referrals from a team with more Indians. At least my current team is dominantly Indian because of this reason.
Also, I personally feel there is fundamental difference is how Indians interview the candidates. Indian interviewers usually try to identify the weakness of a candidate (if there is a fullstack opening and the candidate's strength is more on the backend, the interviewer leans more towards frontend to identify the weaknesses of a candidate). Non-Indian interviewers most try to find the strengths of a candidate. When I attend interviews and see a panel with Indian names, I know that those slots suck.
Of course exceptions apply for everything..just my observation being Indian working in Indian teams..
True, and it's true for other nationalities (Asian specifically) too. It's a shame that we talk about merit and behind the scenes it's all a sham with with cutbacks and shady hiring practices (and I'm saying this as an Indian citizen in the US).
Let's not forget a Western stereotype from 10 years ago: the deprecated specialist. Since the 80s, IBM has had a lot of bloat from poorly managed technologists who owned "the JDBC-based plugin for integrating AIX-based Lotus Notes servers with a COBOL-based mainframe that is only used by JP Morgan and the state government of Ohio".
Despite the risk, it's easier to toss these responsibilities to a junior-level developer overseas than to maintain a 20-year veteran in the New York office.
On the other hand, they've probably had a lot more early exposure to the idea that one is better off changing jobs every few years. After having three jobs in ten years instead of one, they're much less likely to be stuck with a non-transferable skillset.
So, you are saying that maintaining, some shit code written in the 70s and maintained by 10s of enterprise programmers, will result in better experience?
In the tech sector at least, the relative salaries of employees located in India is still significantly lower than those in most America metropolitan locations.
This overall reduced cost to a company is significant enough to invest in the market. As India is still considered a developing country, the quality of life, while debatable, would be considered a downgrade for many who could potentially be poached from other regions.
"the quality of life, while debatable, would be considered a downgrade for many who could potentially be poached from other regions". Why would it be a downgrade. If they paid an American $120k a year to live in Bangalore, that would buy the American a nice villa, pay for several servants, and allow for frequent travel. In SF, that same money gets you a shoe-box apartment.
I guess you could also use that money to buy a diesel generator so you don't suffer from the daily power outages and you can buy a great water filtration system so you don't have to worry about ever drinking unclean water either.
Much of Bangalore and modern Indian cities are almost at par with San Francisco as far as Infrastructure goes. How do I know this? I travel to India 3 times a year for work.
Sorry you are so wrong. What do you consider infrastructure? I have lived in the bay area and in Bangalore, I have no idea how you can even compare them in terms of roads, city planning, utilities agencies, Civic agencies etc. I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.
Living in Prague, I visited the Bay Area recently. I've never felt more like I was in a 3rd world country. Not even when I was in the norther Czech Republic which is in REALLY bad shape. I mean, have you been to oakland? The place looks like a war zone.
I would agree with you if you would have compared Austin to Bangalore. But the fact is : San Francisco is in as terrible shape as Bangalore is. So moving from San Francisco to Bangalore would not lower your quality of life at all.
>I think the exchange rate of your country's currency allows you to stay at top tier places when you visit India, that's why you'd experience India differently than Indians.
I live in Bangalore and I'd say he's correct. Bangalore might be better compared to other Indian cities, but nowhere near the level of a American city. There are issues with power outages, water quality/shortage, absurd traffic jams where you'll be stranded for hours, costly real estate and even rent.
My point was, that they should pay westerners that kind of money to move there, in order to pull experience in. India has plenty of talent, but they don't have so much experience.
> This overall reduced cost to a company is significant enough to invest in the market.
Tech companies are especially inclined or incentivized to offshore work because their highest cost/liability sinks are their employees. Other sectors, a significant portion of their costs/liabilities are equipment, supplies, etc. Tech industry is unique in that their employees are their biggest liabilities.
I know that tech companies have been struggling the past decade+ on trying to rein in their employee costs. HR departments have trying hard to lower employee costs.
The move to bring in more women and minorities into tech is a commendable goal by FB, GOOGL and the tech industry, but it's also driven by rising employee costs. It's not spoken about widely and openly but these companies are desperate to get control over rising salaries/costs in the industry.
Diversity is a great way to maintain and lower employee costs that have political/social benefits. Another way to lower costs is offshoring, but that has a lot of political/social costs.
But profits are profits and costs are costs. The industry isn't going to stop offshoring because of bad publicity given how much they stand to gain.
Taking the commentary in this direction is unneccessary. In the 90s, the rise of outsourcing originating from the US and the rise of US-based H-1B-farms raised valid questions about the difference in production quality (in the historic, 'what-kind'-ness sense of the word); the wages paid in foreign countries with lower prevailing wages were predictably lower, as otherwise offshoring would have made little financial sense, and importing exceptional talent from overseas was always an option for those willing to pay for exceptional talent.
IBM and other US firms do in fact pay locally competitive and generous (but not outrageous) salaries in India, as well as other foreign talent hotspots like Romania and Estonia.
> Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents. The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans. But there wasn't actually strong evidence that Indians were less good at doing cutting edge research.
Where are you getting this info from? I have grown up in America and never heard of this.
I don't think IBM is a good example, because they've been exactly the kind of low-quality Infosys style body shop that people make jokes about. The only difference is that IBM is mining out their reputation (built up all through the 20th century up until the 1990s) in order to charge inflated prices to clueless enterprise customers. Remember, they were the ones that charged the TSA $1.4 million for a left/right randomizer app. If you've ever used a piece of 21st century IBM software, you probably don't remember the experience fondly.
There are companies doing great work in India (Zoho comes to mind). Why would anyone want to use IBM as the representative of Indian innovation?
> I think that this is a good example of how racism, conscious and unconscious is making us worse at predicting the future. Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code
They were once... They invented entire industries single-handed once. Now they are just trading on their old reputation, which they haven't deserved for over a decade now.
Racism isn't based on facts. BUT, Indians and [insert third world country citizens] do great--in a country like USA.
Question: Now IBM charges probably $300/hour per programmer. Even if it is $100 and I understand that not every hour is billed, but why isn't IBM making way more money given Indian wages?
Every Indian I have worked with in the US has been reasonably competent or better. Every Indian I have worked with remotely from India has been worse than useless. This suggests the hypothesis that the problem is with the work culture, rather than intrinsic to the workers.
And that suggests that IBM is not making more money because IBM's work culture has not adapted well to changes in the global economy. It may be that they have shifted to India workers because they are no longer capable of monetizing their workers to an extent great enough to pay competitive salaries in the US, rather than some factor resulting from their reliance on India. It could also be both, creating a vicious feedback cycle.
In short, problem is that IBM is IBM, not that IBM is full of Indians.
the problem is brain drain. asia does "send their best" because the US only accepts the best from asia. having oceans between you allows you to be picky.
> Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code
did they? either way, i think you're equivocating. it's not a "racial" or "ethnic" connotated "indian code" that some people sometimes discuss. it's more in the domain of economics, geopolitics and "IT body shops". everyone has seen brilliant indians accomplishing great things.
> The idea of Indians actually working innovative jobs seemed laughable to many Americans.
this seems like a strawman. ten years ago, people thought IT in america would cease to exist in any meaningful capacity because of outsourcing.
> This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
this doesn't make much sense to me, so some clarification would help. you cannot directly compare an absolute number in two economies. you can't even meaningfully do it between (say) san fransciso and knoxville.
> One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers.
again, you cannot pay a salary that is absurdly huge and completely incongruent with the local economy - be it within india, the us or any other place. at least, not on a large scale. if you payed a wage translated directly from san francisco to india, your purchasing power would be massively inflated over the vast majority of people with "normal" salaries.
it also means that the burdens and inefficiencies of international work would not be offset, and so IBM and others probably wouldn't even be there in the first place.
> In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity.
it's india. talking about "diversity" and "white" as you are doing is just... well, it seems rather ignorant, parochial and prescriptive.
> Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India.
unless you're planning on staying permanently, it's not an economically advantageous thing to do. not necessarily because of the salary relative to local norms, but rather when you return to a the US or Europe or wherever, your savings accrued will be less than if you had stayed.
>Ten years ago, so many Americans were making jokes about poor quality Indian code and Indian accents
It's hard to not fall into this trap in certain fields of IT. To the point it's almost not regarded as racist
Though as a Systems Admin, outsourcing is considered more of a joke than anything. The lowest bidding contractor wins, and the people they hire are absolutely abysmal.
If contracting companies did the same thing, but hiring a 100% "American workforce" (or British/Australia/etc), and they did an equally mediocre job, I'd suspect the derision would shift accordingly
There's a lot of smart Indian people. They're no "better" or "worse" than the rest of us. They're just a larger sample size that get tarred with that brush
>This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
Nobody anywhere in the world is paid what they are "worth". They are paid whatever is necessary to keep them at the company. In other words, as an employee the competition is other employees in the same market.
It has nothing to do with racism, that's just intellectually lazy.
>By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers.
Paying a higher salary doesn't suddenly make the Indian workers smarter. It just makes the job more attractive to where the stronger experience is (currently the US).
I am a foreigner who works for an American customer and I freely admit that I am not as productive as one of their in-house developers. This is because of things like communication delays, lack of documentation (of both their code and their business logic and practices) and generally the overhead of being in a separate team.
Now that IBM has more people in India than in the US, maybe they will find that they face the opposite problem: US workers will have to adapt to their Indian counterparts instead of the other way around, so it will be more productive to hire an additional Indian than an additional American.
I did not even want to comment but I have to.
You are very xenophobic towards americans. Every developed rich nation has this attitude when it comes to outsourcing and offshoring.
But all of it is just anecdotal evidence (it goes both ways).You are not only forgetting about how economics work but also evidently omitting how that happened that US is so rich and can afford paying such salaries.
I really do not want to elaborate more but todays tech companies create such huge social disparities in India that literally everyone wants to work in IT just to uplift himself from "3rd world poor" to EE standards.
I am "xenophobic"? I was born in America and lived there the first 18 years of my life. I'm trying to not merely generalize, and therefore I went out of my way to cite an actual example of the attitude in question.
This racism is again mirrored in the huge salary difference. Are those Indian workers really worth so much less?
One thing is certain to me, that low salary is hurting IBM. By not paying a competitive salary, those IBM offices in India are lacking the deep experience of western programmers. In a way, they have to re-invent the wheel. In the pictures, everyone there is Indian, and that hurts the company as a whole. Diversity is more than just not being all white. Diversity means not being exclusive to any background and ethnicity.
Edit: I have yet to hear of anyone (European or American) from the sectors I work in, being poached to work in India.