Might be the case with many IT services firms but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.
I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering.
There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
I doubt anyone in the silicon valley believes that.
Most large tech companies have engineering centers in India doing real work and there are quite a few Indian expats here doing serious engineering work.
I think the reputation you describe comes specifically from the low-cost IT outsourcing firms. My personal experience reflects this. I've managed and worked with large teams in India that did great work. My experiences with outsourcing firms haven't been as good.
Good engineering can certainly be done by anyone well qualified, regardless of background or upbringing. I work for a US-based hosting provider with international clients, so I get to take calls from customers (often IT teams for large clients) from all over the globe. To use India as the chosen example, I've worked with teams that could out-engineer me on a good day, that clearly knew what they were doing. I've also worked with teams that, possibly due to language barrier issues, could barely comprehend their own code base, much less anything I was attempting to help them troubleshoot. To be quite honest though, I could remove "India" from that equation entirely, because I've worked with many US "technical contacts" that, despite speaking perfect English, lack even the most basic technical skills.
The pervasive idea that westerners do seem to have, speaking from personal experience, is a bias against "cheap foreign labor." The actual problem is of course any company which poorly manages its external teams, and especially those companies which go for the lowest bidder, and then place that poorly equipped team in their Tier 1 customer support hotlines. I think this is very much a real problem, but the discussion surrounding it often invites offensive language, passionate nationalism, and stirs emotions in a way that distracts from the root of the problem.
I can't think of any way to combat it other than to come up with counter examples that paint the high quality teams in a good light, so that's what I'll continue to do. If a team does good work and I'm impressed by them, you bet my family and friends hear about it! It's not much of course, but I find it more constructive to focus on the positives and the potential solutions, rather than to concentrate on the negatives.
>but assuming that so called home countries brains only can do serious engineering is quite short sighted.
I don't think thats the point he's trying to make. The Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market. It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent. Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
Do you have data supporting your claim. I know a lot of people who are really good and continue to work in India. Infact I have also seen a lot of good people coming back to India (since last 2 - 3 years). So things are gradually improving for good.
> at the big scale the top R&D and engineering work still generally occurs in the home countries that were sending work to India and there’s little evidence that these jobs could, at scale, be done successfully by the Indian firms offshore.
I was talking about this outright dismissal without any ground.
> Indian IT industry was designed and built for a certain type of labor/outsourcing market.
Indian IT industry got shaped by the demand. You wanted cheaper options and you got provided one.
> It will take serious investment and attitude shift internally for local startups to grow and retain talent.
Pay good and you will retain talent.
> Much of that talent that is able to perform the serious engineering you describe continually leave the country for the U.S. and other markets.
Please speak for yourself. The west fixation does not apply to all folks. We get to do awesome engineering work here so don't have to be in a foreign land to do so. With remote teams coming into the picture having a preset notion that a team has to be local is an outdated mindset. And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
Unfortunately the poor people who are usually illiterate are treated as a lower class.
The rich or upper middle class kids while growing up see that they and their parents can order the maids to do almost anything and so when the kids grow up they see the maids as a class of people who are not equal to them.
It becomes a status issue as well if you say you dont have maids then your affluent peers will think you are weird or that you cant even afford a maid.
>>And also - we can afford couple of maids in a decent paying job and have a better lifestyle here than the west can afford.
Bulk of you post is true. But lets give west the credit where they deserve. Most of us can't afford maids. May be you can. Even if we did, its more like jugaad. People in west don't need maids because they don't need maids to sweep the floor, they don't have 1 kg of road dust coming in from dug up roads unrepaired for years. Their homes are designed to make vaccum cleaners easily usable. They have cheap dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines and dryers.
You move to west your standard of living by default sees an upgrade at 0 cost. Roads, infrastructure, schooling, economic opportunity etc etc.
This is an important point. As a westerner living in Asia now, I'm always amused by the maid-mongering that goes on here: "Oh, do you have a maid, a driver, and servants?" These are widespread status symbols in Asia.
Now, of course these household servants perform valuable labour here. But where I'm from, a technologically advanced country- we've largely obviated household help. We have central HVAC, automatic dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, Amazon Echo, Nest, etc etc. There is no need for full-time maids, you see.
I'm sorry if this sounds smug, but it's true. Indians reminding westerners that they have maids is something that makes us smile knowingly. Residual colonialism in the 21st century doesn't impress us.
I am not talking about enslaving or forcing someone. I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.
Excuse me - we have gadgets here and at an affordable cost too. Some people do make conscious decision to avoid automation so we can employ and help others. We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by. Western lifestyle is not a definite one as an ideal one. Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job. We got some positives too - that is what i stated.
>>I am employing and uplifting someones family who doesn't have other means of income.
You are making a virtue out of this. This is really like the British saying they ruling over us was good for us because of english, railways and parks. So they were screwing us for our own good.
Most of these maids, work on hourly basis on slave wages. And are generally treated badly. There are even spaces in Restaurants where they have to sit outside while their masters indulge in fine dining. And other times most people give away old throw worthy food to them. There is no 'help' going on here.
>>We have a thought process here to buy from shops near by(albeit little costlier) instead of amazon'g the whole requirement so we can help people near by.
Kirana shops near my home are shutting down like no tomorrow after GST, and a DMart opened near by. Indians are known to think through their wallets.
>>Please understand that we can enjoy our lifestyle without any gripe. Why is it so hard to swallow?.
There is a big difference between getting seasoned or at best indifferent to problems, than having no problems.
>>In my case - my mom is a cancer patient. I don't know whether i could afford a house nurse and cook in the west from a decent paying job.
I hope she recovers soon. Yours is a different situation and I understand, most of us(Including me) have many reasons(in my case, old parents) to not move to the west. But I imagine if I was there my life would be way better.
From an economic standpoint, this doesn't sound very uplifting. Any full time servant you hire is probably going to have less social mobility than you, and less education. And they are necessarily going to earn a fraction of your wages.
Employing someone full time to clean and maintain house isn't really uplifting anyone in a societal sense. Option 1: 30 families eschew automation and hire a full-time maid. Option 2: 30 families own a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher and hire a cleaner once every other week for 3 hours to maintain their house. The latter is what happens in western communities and it results in 29 more productive workers looking for gainful employment in the workforce. If you don't see why that is an uplifting thing for society, you should take a good hard look at your understanding of economics.
As for your anecdote of the family member with cancer, house nurses are indeed common and affordable in western societies, we generally call this service "hospice." And while I may not employ a cook, there are 150 restaurants in my city that will deliver meals to my doorstep within 30 minutes.
fjsolwmv: Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.
Of course they do, but not nearly to the same extent. And the point here is that in the context of this thread, using maids as a mark on the Indian lifestyle-superiority index in the shadow of IT layoffs is not a good look.
In general not though. They have maids because they need them, not as a status symbol. And it is largely for the fairly wealthy and not something generally aspired to (in and of itself).
In fact, a lot of people will instantly regard those with maids as "probably assholes" in the US.
Maybe 100 years ago. I don't know anyone or even heard of anyone with a maid. The closet thing is paying someone to come clean your house once or twice a month for an hour or two and that's pretty inexpensive.
Engineering can certainly be done outside. However, there is a real risk in having the core business competency and value be outsourced rather than something built up with employees at the company with an interest in the company's success rather than looking at it as just the next project.
The distinction here is between captive development centers vs outsourced IT services. The latter has previously had more jobs and is experienced more layoffs now. The former is likely still a growth industry.
I've had amazing outside outsourced engineering done both in India and Eastern Europe. In the case of India, it was with a specialty firm. The big job shops, be they in India, Philippines, etc. have a limited life cycle as outsourcing for basically "crud" apps goes by the wayside.
There was no "serious engineering" going on at any of the large Indian firms I dealt with. Boutique, for sure serious work.
I am not contesting that you do serious engineering, but just stating your beliefs is moot.
>> There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside.
I guess this is just anecdotal and to counter with some more anecdotal experience, I (and a few I know) have been reached out from the west, seeking our engineering skills in the niche we operate. So what do we do know? Start believing the other way round, that serious engineering can't be done in the west!!!
>> we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.
Don't you think you are believing just like the western engineers you were blaming?
I've found the quality of the "real engineering" in this scenario is much more variable than when using local talent (of any nationality, including Indian). I've worked with very high quality India-based "real engineering" groups and very low quality ones. It seems to me the latter dominate. I haven't seen the same variance in skill hiring from local talent originally from India.
Serious engineering can be done outside, sure. But after years of competing with Indian outsourcing, US engineers have really upped their own skills. Sourcing that talent from India isn't cheaper because it's so rare those engineers can demand similar prices to US engineers and still get a job and an H1-B. Without Infosys. Or Tata.
Overall, I've seen more full stack skills, polyglots, and a willingness to tailor design and stacks to the problem. Companies want an FTE or two that replaces an entire off shore team and we accommodate to avoid off shoring.
We've adapted as a community to have a skillset and evangelize stacks that at minimum compliments off shore if not replaces them.
Simply put, after all the basic Dev and ops jobs left, we moved up the value chain.
It's a cycle and the off shoring firms will move up the value chain and US devs will further specialize in to ML, AI, speech, Big Data/Data Science, etc. Those areas are quickly being commoditized by the cloud providers, so they're within reach of most US developers. Furthermore, off shoring firms will likely be content to provide the cheaper, lower level rungs of the value chain.
For the first two, that's probably a better way to put it. Breadth and T-shaped skill sets are all the rage.
For the last bit, I tried to hint at that in my original comment. People who achieve that breadth outside the US can normally negotiate directly with employers in the US. This can give them more money and gives the company a more stable resource. The bulk hires from Infosys, Tata, etc. don't have this luxury.
For US employees, there's both the drive to keep ahead of offshoring and the fact that so many US employers will invest in their employees. This class of offshoring companies that are suffering don't do that.
Which is another point: These are not intended to be generalizations of all offshore teams and offshoring companies. The more breadth and automation an offshore company leverages, the more resilient they are.
I don't doubt that Infosys and Tata will survive, but the sheer scale of their employment numbers is going to take a permanent hit and stateside devs are again going to need to become even more jack-of-all-trades with more than one specialization to stay ahead.
I would contend that engineering FIRMS have upped their skills with more emphasis on soft skills and management feel goods (having people on site tomorrow if asked, training and such. They’re offering a larger value proposition at a higher cost when management has realized that lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean best value.
Very fair argument. Let's dissect the argument, engineering firms have improved their soft skills and value proposition. Assuming these firms are US based and all american, then by going popular wisdom here, how can american firms possibly have poor soft skills than Indian firms! I'm sure there were many instances when quality received from Indian firms were abysmal. However, imo, it's sort of online propaganda-ish that Indian firms are terrible choice, compared to american vendors. Pick and choose your best anecdote. I recall, months back, there was some incident at BA(british airways, I suppose) and whole incident was spinned as Indian contractors in India messed up. Later, VP of the company, clarified that mistakes were made locally(read UK). I feel hatred rather than facts, largely dominate HN, Reddit opinion.
There are many bargain basement contracting shops in the US too. Find half a dozen just graduated students who decide they're going to go freelance rather than going corporate - and you've got a contracting shop that is making web pages for the local stores or an access ERP-ish for the local business or someone who thinks that they can do the account management for their doctor's office.
And yes, the code that one finds after the eventual disaster when something goes wrong is staggering.
My anecdote for this is... I worked at a retail company implementing a new point of sales system. For a year before and the first year I was there (different team) there was an Indian "sales engineer" team that the vendor brought in. They weren't able to get the system working and integrated with the existing devices (it has to work with this receipt printer, this mag strip reader, this magnetic ink reader... these are the types of sales that we offer that aren't part of the core system, all rounding of pennies must be in the favor of the customer (1000 pennies in the favor of 1000 customers costs less than one complaint), etc...).
When milestones were missed, rather than revising the estimates, for it, the sales engineering team brought in more people. Aside from this courting Brooks's law, it again increased billable hours.
Aside from not getting it working, when management canned that approach all of the institutional knowledge of how it did work up to that point was lost. The documentation that was provided was worthless (but they billed their time to create it).
Several months later, the project was started up again - this time with a fully in house team. About two months in to the year long deadline (and for us it was a deadline - not just a milestone), we commented to management that we were going to need help getting this running - there was too much to do and not enough time. Within a month we got some consultants from intertech ( https://www.intertech.com ). And while there was some ramp up time with that code base, they were helping and contributing within two weeks.
Once the system was on track for the rollout, a large phase 2 project was given to them - returns. The business logic behind returns wasn't simple (do you credit the money back to a card? what if the card is a visa gift card? cash? store credit? restocking fees (none if the item is in stock, some if the item has been discontinued), taxes (purchased in state A, returned at another store in state B), etc...). The backend system chosen to handle this was drools.
Now, a outsourcing company here has two choices they can make. They can either try to make something that only they know how to modify and keep milking the project with billable hours until its replaced by another company... or they can try to transfer that information to the client (with training sessions (billable hours) and good documentation (billable hours)).
For the in house people who were going to be maintaining the system, we got excellent training and documentation. If they got up and left the next day, we'd be able to maintain it with only a minor hiccup. The cost to maintain it with a few in house developers was going to be less than keeping consultants on all the time.
The moral here is that it wasn't so much the "we can provide a solution" that won over the project but also the "we have demonstrated our competence in the first phase and can furthermore provide training to you that will decrease the maintenance costs over the lifetime of the project." Even with the increase of initial billable time - it was going to be cheaper.
The value was not only in the demonstrated competence working with the in house team (rather than trying to do it all), but in providing all of the associated support structures and soft things that management can see as improving the value of the service beyond lines of code written.
I head an engineering team from India and our team is local talent for a firm which is outside India. We believe we do some serious engineering.
There is this west fixation that serious engineering can't be done outside. I am not saying it isn't true on most cases but assuming they only can do is so demeaning. I get asked a lot - so who does the heavy lifting?. Nothing gives more satisfaction than to say - we do the engineering and it gets maintained by westerners in our organization.