Ask HN: What has your experience been like with Indian developers?
I hear a lot of negative opinions on Indian developers in general on reddit and other forums, not sure what percentage of it is the vocal minority and what is reality. So asking the most sane group of people I know, what has your experience been with Indian developers ?
14 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadTo answer your question, however, in my experience, I have met some software developers of Indian origin who are incredibly talented, and others who aren't so gifted. Just like every other nationality or race.
The reason they get a bit more negative publicity than others is because of the number of developers who are in the mediocre and horrid category.
The reason for that is a lot of young Indians getting into tech just because that is the easiest ticket to a decent income in a country like India where there are tons of young unemployed people striving for good jobs. Due to the population size, this number of young Indians is much larger than other countries.
So what I am saying that if you compare the excellent developers from India, they are on par with any other country. But most of the negativity comes from the excess availability of the bad ones which exist in other countries but much less due to the population differences and reasons for getting into tech.
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They are heavy on titles, and light on experience. The team has people with titles of architects, leads, and consultants, and a few engineer and senior engineer titles. But they're all in the code. They have experience with this particular company and this stack, but lack broad experience. For example configuring connection pools was something they struggled with.
From a technical perspective, they're good. I see them figure out some tough issues related to the tech they've been working with for a while. But when it comes to the real detailed level stuff (ie protocol level and framework internals) they don't have the depth I'd like to see. They frequently toss things to me that I feel like senior/arhcitects should be able to work through.
The business unit (US) that works with this team has a lot of trouble getting results from them. They've built themselves a lot of technical debt due to poor choice of frameworks architecture. Their system architecture is very complex, and instead of focusing on simplifying that, they muddle through, delivering little.
On a personal level, all the people I work with are great; friendly and professional. Overall I have a very favorable opinion of the southwest asians I've worked with now and in the past, great people, it's just a lot of times the senior developers lack the technical depth I'd expect to see.
On a personal note, living on the US east coast, I try to outsource work to eastern Europe or south America in order to keep time zones relatively in sync
I worked for a web development agency. I guess you can call it a typical outsourcing shop. The headcount of the US office is something like, two managers/C-levels for one local designer or one programmer. The majority of the programming gets done by Indians. Communication is very delayed. The management doesn't seem to care about follow-up with their clients after the website is done. A client even gave a bad review of the company saying that their SEO traffic dropped by 40% after the new launch and had to go with another agency to undo the damage.