Look around you and you will find that most American companies hire lots of Indians as programmers. Do you think that the guys who ended up coming to America suddenly transmogrified in to competent programmers during their flight across the ocean? Do you think that those Indian engineers who decided to stay back and work in India are any less competent than the ones who took the flight?
Having worked in both India and the US for over a decade, my experience tells me that the distributions for programming skills are almost identical in the two populations. The top percentile of programmers in India (those who work for Google, MS, Amazon) are as good as their counterparts in the US. The $12 crowd is about as good as the craigslist freelancers who charge a similar rate.
While you may not have to worry about being replaced as a programmer, what you should worry about is an India startup like Zoho or Freshdesk competing with your company. Unlike China where startups can focus on the largely internal Mandarin speaking market, Indian startups are going to come after all the English speaking markets.
The suck in outsourcing doesn't come from the location you outsource to. It comes from hiring bottom of the barrel programmers embedded within a large bureaucracy.
The problem is the outsourcing model, not nationality. You could outsource to a company of great programmers in Romania or France and still have the same problems of being overbilled for hours and lacking clarity of product vision. You could hire those same programmers directly and move them into your office and have a better chance of overcoming those problems. Heck, you face similar problems with law and PR firms in your own city. The problem is in thinking the hourly savings are worth dealing with overbilling and poor vision sync.. The more complex and dynamic the project, the more worth it to go with in house development.
I'd like to think that the guys getting H1-Bs t come over to the US are a cut above average. Also since software engineering is one of the go-to occupations that people push their kids into in India, I imagine the low-end is a bit fatter there. So I would expect that the quality of Indian programmers in the US is better on average than it is in India, but that says nothing about the outliers.
Population numbers play apart in this question, but any thoughts on the proportion of strong programmers that either come to the states or work for a large company in india versus those hired by the body shops?
My suspicion is, if they can, an individual will opt to go where he/she can earn more/get better experience than put up with the tasks typically handed over to the job shops (WiPro, etc)...Furthermore, given these firms are the ones that most US employers deal with, the view for outsourced labor will be clouded by this "narrow" exposure...
I am with you here. You will be hard pressed to find really good programmers in Wipro, Infosys of the world, but there are some small boutique shops who charge significantly more, but are pretty good at what they do.
I myself work from my home in Bangalore, while my company is in UK, and I get paid well. I have had offers from US before, but I am staying - because I am trying to bootstrap a product as well on the sides, which won't be possible/easy when I am in US.
I imagine the top-shelf Indian programmers are in greater quantities abroad than at home. From my experience, the ones that choose to stay back are already in or on course to manage bigger and better things with the salary to match. The ones working abroad are building up experience and war chest or possibly looking to migrate. But the ones that never make it out probably aren't that great.
I think his point was that Chinese startups have the advantage of serving a large internal market of Mandarin speakers, while Indian startups need to compete in the English speaking world.
On that note I have a question for smg. I have not been able to figure out why there are so few Indian tech startups serving the Indian market. I can only think of naukri and makemytrip. Do you know why? I read somewhere that there are 120M Internet users in India now, up from 80M two years ago. Do you think it now makes sense for Indian web startups?
I'm not familiar with mobile startups in India though, so maybe there are a lot of those.
A few years ago there were a large number of Indian startup trying to become the youtube or facebook of India. Because almost all the internet users in India are also English savy, they found that the youtube of India is youtube unlike say youku in China. Doing a consumer web startup in India is very difficult as you end up competing with far more mature SV startups who have almost limitless resources. Companies with a uniquely local twist like Flipkart or Burrp have had more success.
Also, the great firewall of China, and their Internet Content Provider license (which can only be obtained by Chinese companies) make it nearly impossible for foreign companies to compete in the Chinese market. Even foreign sites which aren't blocked in China are frequently a lot flakier due to the firewall, and they can't put servers inside the firewall without an ICP license. The usual way around this is to partner with a Chinese company, but frequently the Chinese company will wind up cloning your service and becoming a competitor.
The Chinese market is stacked against foreign competition; I don't think that the Indian market is likewise restricted.
1. The total number of startups is going to be lesser due to redtape although I believe that is becoming less of an issue as time goes on.
2. It is probably perceived to be more lucrative to target the American market. I would think that a larger proportion of the ~ 120M internet users in India would be similar (young urban professional) and therefore easier to release products compared to the general public (cultural variations and interests make it harder to disrupt outside the cities).
OK. If you look at the growth amongst Internet users in India between, say 2009 and estimates for 2011, it resembles the growth amongst Internet users in US in the late 90s. US had 120M Internet users around the time of the Web 1.0 boom.
Mobile usage is even higher as you know so it seems like mobile app startups could do really well. If the growth is happening in small towns/rural areas even better, no SV company is going to want to spend time in Gummmidipoondi to understand their target customer. I don't know if cultural variation is really an issue: look at iPad for instance, even a non-English speaker has a finger with which they can tap on the screen.
I've heard horror stories about red-tape, corrupt officials and so on from friends. But every time I've dealt with GOI officials they've been extremely helpful. Maybe I just got lucky.
Reg: redtape: I have personal experience with trading stocks in both india and U.S. I have found that the real problem has simply been in finding the tax agreements btw the countries and finding bankers who understand and fix the issue. Not sure that's relevant to startup company space.
