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.
અભિષેક,લાગે છે આ ભાઈ નું work કોઈ ઇન્ડિયન company માં redirect થઇ ગયું હશે, ને quality ને લાગે વળગે છે ત્યાં સુધી ૧૦૦% work માં ૨૦% quality ને ૮૦% quantity હોઈ છે, તો જો આ ૮૦% quantity cheaper rates માં (સાદી ને સરળ ભાષા માં sale) માં મળતી હોઈ તો કોઈ શુકામ વધારે ભાવ આપે ?સમજાવ પેલા ગાંડા ને કે ભાઈ જો quality ને વસ્તુ સારી ના હોઈ તો outsourcing આટલું બધું આગળ વધત જ નહિ, તમે લોકો ઓછી મેહનત કરો, મહેનતાણું વધુ માંગો, ને quality ના બણગા બોલાવો તો તમારી દેશ ના લોકો તમને જ કેમ કામ નથી આપવતા ?આ મેં તમને એટલે કહયું કારણ કે આટલું બધું અંગ્રેજી માં સરસ રીતે સમજાવી શકું તેમ નથી 🙂 Have a great day aheadvijay
Hello Sir,Nice article worth reading. I am completely agree with you that We are bad in copy writing. But I can say that “પાંચેય આંગળી સરખી નથી હોતી”..
Vijay, Hardik – thanks for reading the post. The thing which you could explain me in Gujarati, you should had explained in English. That's the difference I am talking about. If you are in this field you can't ignore English any more. So rather than being defensive about our weaknesses let's work on them to challenge US developers in every aspect.
Abhishek, Nicely written and forwarded your points. Agreed.The problem with companies working with Indian team/developers is that, they have mind set of “Lower Rates” or everything comes “Cheap” when you work with people in India. Hence when every they try to get in touch/approached by an Indian co, they compare it with their perception. Rather than focusing on quality, deliverable and deadlines, they bother about a dollar or two per hour. Now once you focus on cost rather than quality, things will get messed up. They don’t realize their mistake, rather they try to blame their developer for quality and work. But they should try to analyze what went wrong. If person had not focused on cost and tried to understand capabilities and technical expertise of developer/company; things would have been different.To summarize, I would like to put in simple words. There are Good and Bad developers/programmers in every corner of the world. Its upon you/project manager/stake holders that how they evaluate their vendor and work with them. There could be ‘n’ number of reasons to blame offshore people; but until unless you do your homework properly, you can’t succeed with outsourcing. High time, people look outsourcing beyond “cheap labor”.Thanks,Harshalhttp://twitter.com/ConnectHarshalhttp://harshalkharod.blog.com