Indian Programmers: Let’s prove this guy wrong

by Abhishek

I came across a very interesting article few days back. It talks about why the author who is a US based programmer is not afraid of Indian programmers.

I don’t agree with him over all but he does have couple of points worth mentioning.

1) “Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but I think the Indian firm is, as the saying goes, making up for it in volume.  And that’s to say nothing of the time our heroes have spent proctoring the whole process: in his words, they’ve got to be constantly super explicit in their instructions, or it comes back wrong–then then have to spend more hours getting it fixed…”

Since I started my career as a programmer and I am an Indian working with Indian programmers for more than 7 years now, I can have my say here.

I have seen lot of projects going over board like this including some in my company. Most of the time there are more than one issues causing that but yes sometimes not asking the right questions is a root cause. 

You have to see the whole problem from client’s perspective. You can’t depend on explicit instructions all the time. Start a project for client as if it is your own. 

Read books, blogs, use twitter, pariticipate in stackoverflow, have broader perspective of the world. Be a complete programmer.

2) “…and text like “Link will be sent to your mail for to update your Password.” sprinkled throughout public facing parts of the website, which just doesn’t give your customers the best impression of you and your business.”

I fully agree with the above. We are simply bad in copywriting. We don’t care what our users are going to read when they are using our application. 

Our applications might have a solid back end programming but it will look like a crappy software because of bad copywriting and design. It simply shows how much you care for your users. This is simply not acceptable. 

I am proud to say in my company we don’t play the volume game as explained in point 1. As a matter of fact, we have finished projects earlier than the estimation given at the start. But we do have issues mentioned in point 2 sometimes. I am working on that and it is improving.

So if you are an Indian programmer, you have to read following article and further discussion on Hacker News.

He is partially wrong today, let’s prove him completely wrong now.