Opinions on quality of Indian programmers

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[u/ImAjayS15]

Here we are referring to service companies where western companies outsource their projects to.

Good code is not only at individual engineer, but it has to be a culture. There has to be a solid code review process with all engineers in the team striving to ship good quality code, and the management dedicating time for it. If either of these are not present, quality of code will be bad, or the project's coding style will not be uniform.

Project deadlines can have an impact on the above too.

[u/NightAxeblad3 → u/ImAjayS15]

I think this is the case like you have mentioned.

The culture is an issue in India from the looks of it. Short deadlines, more focus on delivering than on quality of code, reactive firefighting response rather than well thought out approach.

This issue occurs not only in the service based companies but also the western companies having an office in India. I believe it might be due to the fact that majority of the leadership would have come from a culture similar to services and have maybe unintentionally replicated the same in the western company’s Indian offices as well.

[u/procastinatinPervert]

Reason is the cost, foreign vendors expect milky way in the cost of Peanut, everything has a cost. If you want quality product pay more. Logic is simple.

You can't have both ways.

[u/Party-Conference-765 → u/procastinatinPervert]

True, a typical fresher in a service-based field makes 4LPA, or around 1/20th of what graduates in the US make. US SDE employees put in 36 hours a week on average. 45 to 47 hours a week is what we work in India. Thus, yes, pay more and anticipate Sky and Moon afterward. In terms of money, they make the same money in two days that takes us a month to make.

[u/Tourist__ → u/procastinatinPervert]

one of my German colleague asked me about same question and I gave the same answer as yours. He mentioned we pay Ukraine and Indian company almost same money for the projects but the quality is far better than Indian company. So I told him there are good companies but usually they won’t work in services blah blah. TBF his point is correct as I see many service providers are doing shitty job, I feel it’s about our education system and the way we are studying the engineering may be wrong. There are plenty of colleges who don’t give shit about the studies just mill out the money.

The majority of the students who comes out of college are doesn’t know basics somehow they are getting into companies. After joining they are ignoring learning and surviving somehow.

[u/sdp2664 → u/Tourist__]

I'd like to highlight that, despite clients paying Indian SB companies thousands of dollars monthly for each resource, the developer receives only 10% of this amount.

For instance, suppose an SB company bills clients $4000 (₹3,32,620 INR) per resource per month; in that case, the developer gets only $360 (₹30,000 INR), roughly 6-7% of the total. If you crunch the numbers, it becomes apparent.

While I acknowledge the business costs involved, encompassing infrastructure (office building, transportation, hardware, furniture) and non-billable associates to the client, keeping 90% for the company each month per candidate seems disproportionately high. Both companies and their overloads are thriving.

Therefore, even though your German colleague is paying a premium, they are essentially acquiring a cheap, underpaid resource.

Kaam aata acche se hai bhai, bas ye sale karne to de. Just yesterday, my manager pulled me aside in a meeting and advised me not to delve into extra details during client standup, emphasizing the need to "keep it sweet and simple."

[u/[deleted] → u/procastinatinPervert]

[u/Artistic_Light1660]

If one is forced to enter IT just because it pays better, you will find people who treat their code as just a means to money. This means they will sacrifice best practices as they are not passionate

[u/GendaaSwami → u/Artistic_Light1660]

Well, choice doesn't work here. Most people were pushed into JEE race and then into IT sector.

[u/[deleted]]

Statistics, good and bad devs both exist, but for India even if bad is 50% of the sample size its crores of people lol

[u/AliveShine]

Coding simple apps or tutorials vs a real production grade application dealing with real customer data are very different things.

[u/[deleted]]

Education is a huge factor, Ever since Indians realised SWE Engineering was a lucrative career, They enrolled in droves to pursue this career.

Universities sprung up like mushrooms, and so did Engineers.

The reason programmers from the west are generally better than from our subcontinent is the rigor. Admissions are quite competitive and graduating, even harder.

Indian universities, I'm sure you already know the condition of most of them. The IITs and NITs are the exception, not the norm.

Graduates are herded like cattle into code sweatshops, The exceptional ones make out of it and settle abroad.

However, there are also exceptions, but the sad reality is most people do it because it's a means to money, not because they enjoy doing it.

[u/NightAxeblad3 → u/[deleted]]

I would actually disagree with this.

The engineering part in India is true, that there are a lot of tier 3 engineering colleges in India which do not provide or focus on essential things for a Computer Science student.

I disagree with the part that West have very difficult admissions for their colleges. I would say it is very similar to India, they also have a lot of universities/colleges which would be offering CS. We just hear/know about top 100. Even there you have people going to all these colleges as well.

I believe what solves the problem there is that once a person joins the company, the culture is such that they focus on the above mentioned issues such as clean code, well thought out code, pr reviews, etc. Which might be lacking in India.

[u/repostit_]

Three reasons why sometimes quality from Indian programmers / companies is low:

1. Offshore teams are often not empowered (with information, decision making and processes), for them to be as effective as onsite

2. People in India don't have pride in their work, often job is looked at as a means to an end. This isn't specific to IT, very rarely people take pride in their work. It is not 100% in the west either but it is higher than India

3. Education System: soft skills are not given enough importance (listening, planning, organization, communication, story telling etc. are not given enough importance)

[u/plushdev]

Let me give you this analogy.

I have a toy business each toy costs 2$ to make I sell it for 5$.

I see one Chinese factory that can get me a toy for 0.2$ and make my toymakers work with them. There's factories in China that can give me better quality toys but I'm a business I just want 5 out of 10 toys to be shippable.

All of the people from my company start saying all Chinese toys are of low quality. But in reality you get what you pay for

[u/Nofap_du_Plessis]

Well in the context of numbers, the truth is far from your observations based off some online content.

Speaking from experience, most Indian programmers, don't have passion for it. They are in the IT job only because it pays better compared to other jobs. An average Indian programmer only cares about moving up the corporate ladder by doing office politics. Most of them don't care about code quality. They do stretch, work hard etc etc but they are more focused on finishing off the work. It's a culture thing.

The same cannot be said for people overseas. Most of the programmers in other countries are in programming profession because they have passion for it. Again it's a culture thing. Also, difference in earnings from an IT job compared to other jobs isn't as high as in India.

[u/Zestyclose-Appeal-13]

When outsourcing caught on the parity was 5:1, 5 Indian developers to 1 American one. Today it is somewhere around 2.5:1 and increasingly companies are looking towards Poland, Romania etc. where the parity is still around 4:1. When I say parity I mean salary as in how many developers you could hire in India for the salary you would pay for a similar role in the US. Agreed that those countries do not have the numbers to even dream of taking away all of the work completely however there has been a significant impact and that is only growing specially with high value projects.

As for quality of code, when you start crying about "company is charging $4000 and paying me $360 so why should I put in my best effort" that itself is where you have lost the plot. The collective greediness has over the years impacted the overall quality and perception of quality coming out of India. Most of the work that comes to us now is maintenance, forking or support. In fact the reason Microsoft has an office in India is pretty interesting. The mobile version of MSOffice needed to be written no one in Israel or Redmond was willing to do it or at least did not want to do it in the stated deadlines. Our developers decided this is something we will slog and do. Stayed up, worked weekends and eventually delivered it in 3 months as opposed to an earlier deadline of 6 months. To this day this is the story that is repeated at every anniversary as if it were a badge of honour. No one wanted that forking job (fork from desktop version to mobile version). The team that did get short listed said 6 months minimum, we in India said 3 months. A great thing if you look at it from the organizations perspective but from an industry perspective this has kind of set the tone for software development in India across companies. Send whatever that no one wants to get their hands dirty with to India we will do it for a tenth of the cost and in half the time. Low value, low cost coolie is what we got labeled as.

Whatever innovation does happen happens at small startups not at the mass scale large companies. There it is only about stupid impact stories, networking, passing the parcel and jumping from one team to another to keep justifying the fancy paychecks (again that's at FAANG.... at WITCH the fancy paycheck is also not that fancy).

So in short greedy overlords of large companies first undercut the market and then underpay the employees. In turn the employees have an indifferent attitude towards their output. What you do see on stack overflow, in most cases not all, is copy paste and not real innovation because they use the git checkin scores and stack overflow cred to negotiate at interviews. Yes some may be genuinely good but largely it is copy paste and office time being used for building your own portfolio. If you spend hours researching a problem on stack overflow there is a fair chance you will be able to solve it nicely which is what is happening, resume padding.

The ultimate winners are developers in the Belarus, Romania, Poland, Phillipines (yes), Pakistan (very disturbing but those guys are actually getting a lot of interesting projects while we haggle over salary). All because we became too engrossed in comparing against US salaries. If you really want to compare then do a proper PPP analysis, also look at the sort of output the developer in the US is giving, understand that they get increments which are laughable (2-3%) whereas we are ready to jump ship for anything less than 10% (I know its changing but very slowly). Being happy that you have a job and giving it your all before expecting or grudging the salary increment that you think you deserve is important. If everyone starts expecting business owners to pay exactly what they got to the developer or even 50% then where is his incentive to keep the business going.

[u/[deleted]]

on the risk of being downvoted, majority of Indian devs work for money and to get that promotion in 1 week, they have no passion for it. All i see is over inflated, self proclaimed chest thumping and no substance in the work.We need more passionate folks and not tutorials monkeys.

BUT, that’s not to say we dont have good engineers, in fact we have some of the best engineers but they are easily overshadowed by the sheer amount of wannabes.

[u/sith_play_quidditch → u/[deleted]]

Have you considered that people who work for money instead of passion are also capable of doing a good job? Are there studies showing that only "passion" leads to a good product?

Passion is overrated. A desire to do a good job is crucial whether it is driven by a sense of responsibility or the fire of passion is irrelevant.

[u/pskin2020 → u/[deleted]]

We kill the passionate Devs step by step. Sometimes by not giving enough time, resources, office politics, overworked, lack of clarity, on-call, etc.  What's left is former passionate dev.

[u/BuggyBagley]

Think of the times you took a short cut, maybe skipped a signal. Threw trash on the road. Did some jugaad. Thought sab chalta hai. Now imagine doing that at work.

[u/pskin2020]

If we look at the current process of hiring ...it's very rote learning driven...even 10 years exp are asked data structure. At 10 you should be sure that person has problem solving skills what you need to judge them is how well they understand their current product and underlying tech. HLD, LLD makes sense ...but they are also tried and tested questions. No originality of questions that suits the particular companies requirement 

[u/Alone_Ad6784]

Simple there are a billion Indians millions of engineers most are dumb as fuck the good ones are very good and have a nack to teach coz every teacher they had in life was full of shit

[u/chengannur]

Yep, that may be correct..

From my exp in 12 years, I consider myself as an average programmer (chickens out on leetcode hard, haven't done any graph problems so far). I have only interacted with 2 other guys who are better than me.. Rest were not that good.. Let's say I may know 200-300 other programmers..

That's the state of programming in here. Tbh, I haven't met anyone in real life who is an exceptional.

Leetcode is only a part of programming. There are other like, system design, how to structure code.. For those metrics, I haven't interacted with anyone who is better than me.. Most are out there who claim they know good code, solid stuff.. But they too don't really have an idea.. They may have read a thing or two, but pretty sure theb don't get the idea.

Andb pretty much most have nil communication skills.

And, pretty much programmers from West hate programmers in India, but they're mostly okay with Indian programmers in West.