Behind the 'Bad Indian Coder' -An ongoing debate about the quality of outsourced code prompts a look at the country’s
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/280636/ Is this still valid ? An ongoing debate about the quality of outsourced code prompts a look at the country’s precarious economic and educational picture. It started, as many deep philosophical Reddit debates do, with a one-line statement, “Got a contract to fix some outsourced Indian PHP code,” accompanied by an image macro of Toy Story characters Woody and Buzz Lightyear gazing off into the distance. “Security flaws,” the overlain, blocky white text reads. “Security flaws everywhere.” Code from India can be truly awful if you work with most companies,” another Redditor said. “A lot of them treat programming as a task to be completed with numbers and fire those that can't work fast enough, rather than a task requiring quality where people are educated to avoid mistakes and fired only as a last resort.”
The Atlantic
When people don't have to take ownership of code, you get shitty code. It doesn't matter what country they are from.
Business people don't understand what coding is, they think an outsourced Indian programmer is as same shit as a L5 Googler, that's why it never makes sense for a business man to run a software company.
Any company that thinks it can save money on cheap outsourcers in long term will end up paying double money on neverending maintenance costs and eventually redoing the work properly. There is an ancient saying about this effect: “Frugal pays twice”
The problem is it depends on where you outsource. Companies do just fine with Indian offices (Google, Microsoft etc.) where they hire developers who are actually good and pay them enough money. But then there’s companies like TCS, Infosys, Capgemini and many more who are just body shops. They try to hire the lowest talent in the market (sometimes people who have never coded before in their life) so that they can pay less. The code you’ll get there is obviously going to be shitty. And this is not a country specific problem. I’ve worked with contractors from south east Asia (Singapore, Philippines, China), Europe, Israel, Canada and South America. Usually how much you pay for a job dictates how good of a work you get in return.
I don’t know of any US large companies that hire people completely unrelated to the field and try to sell their work to a third party without disclosing this information. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen (well , it has happened ) “hey Boeing, your software will be written by Bob and jenny. Jenny is a part time librarian and Bob’s previous experience includes shoveling snow and setting up rat traps. They have never seen a computer until last month and will do a great job“. It sounds like it’s time to have licensing requirements for software engineers.
You’d actually be surprised how many “engineers” exist in the Bay Area that are “ohh I did that boot camp and now I am an expert”. And many companies do end up hiring them because they either are desperate or because their interview process is “solve these 5 LC hard”. There’s also the fact that some people just get in companies either by accident or because someone did you a favor ( a lot of boot campers end up hiring other boot campers) and now because you’re at so and so company, when you change jobs, the other company doesn’t do it’s due diligence. So yeah it’s not that uncommon. But yeah I think I agree on having some kind of a quality control process everywhere.
Some engineers in India might write bad code because of the culture there but I also think some engineers in the US complicate things way too much to the extent that their projects are never delivered.
There’s another problem with outsourcing in general: people write code that they won’t have to maintain for years to come. And it shows.
I believe issue is with the quality not with the country, Bootcamping coders are also of the same quality as witch companies
I see this example in Chase everyday where bad Indian consultants are brought up as engineers and then they just crank horrible code without much knowledge with no test cases or sometimes very little test cases which never fails and then defending what they are doing is great. They just know enough to put the glue together without asking any questions. It's not just the mindset in India, You can easily find this mentality in middle tier or lower tier software houses, banks and hospitals where there is a need of someone developers. The pay isn't that bad but the consultants hired and lobbied, are told not to question their boss, they write bad code, then defend it and then be hired full-time. The pay isn't ofcourse Google or Amazon level pay but still a great start yearly income of atleast 120K or even more. Bad culture. Have seen this in atleast 4 to 5 different companies.
You get what you pay for. Body shops in India neither train nor pay handsomely for software development. Developers from top tier companies in India are no different from those in US though. If you start hiring programmers at minimum wage jn US, result isn't going to be any better.
If you pay peanuts you’re going to get monkeys.
Peanuts and bananas. Really makes you think doesn't it @Amazon